‘Instantly rechargeable’ battery could change the future of electric automobiles

In Germany, over 65% of people rent. So, the supermajority would be affected by this.

EDIT: I meant "live in rented apartments". "Miete" implies renting an apartment here, usually.

What about people who only have street parking without a driveway or garage?

If I understand correctly, this technology is a (perhaps better/more robust) flow battery into which one pumps fresh electrolyte after removing "discharged" electrolyte.

We now pump and convey by ship, rail and truck, liquid fossil fuels. Fresh electrolyte would be handled likewise.

The return loop for used electrolyte is already there. Gas trucks now return empty for refill. In many cases, an empty ship or train returns to a fuel source for refill. These could bring electrolyte back to recharging facilities. Whether these are powered by renewable or nuclear or other energy wouldn't impact the distribution system much.

Repurposing the existing fuel distribution to handle electrolytes doesn't seem prohibitive. It's something I hadn't considered, as I'm not used to thinking of electrical energy as a liquid I could deliver in a truck.

Having stations built in convenient locations means that you can greatly extend your effective range. If I have a car that can drive for 80 miles, then I can only go 40 miles away before reaching bingo 'fuel'. Often, one will leave some buffer.

Doesn't matter if you are picking up someone at the airport, grocery shopping or working. If charging stations are everywhere, then you would only need to worry about how far you can go.

If said stations were also wireless, then one might not have to stop to charge at all.

If I could drive down the street and replace my electrolyte, neither changing jobs nor moving would suddenly make an electric vehicle unusable.

I often drive more than the range of a Tesla and certainly more than the range of something like a Leaf, which is why I have not considered buying one.

There are plenty of houses out there that use on-street parking.

Simple. The grid - electricity transmission and especially distribution networks (depends on how they are classified at your location) are most likely not designed to sustain the load. There are multiple problems here.

First, not sure about US, though, distribution networks are usually overcommited by some factor (sometimes hundreds of percent). It works only because urban end users in a community do not utilise their line to the max all at once. Plug in whole suburban neighbourhood full of EVs for a night and quite likely will see power outages. Oops.

Second, the problem is not as simple as "more copper = more load". Mainly the grid must have some level of redundancy - single home unit is reached from power plant via multiple paths, so fault of a single line disrupts minimal portion of the grid. Next, there is balancing (or whatever that is called. Balancing is having redundant coal/nuclear reactor to balance quick and unpredictable output variations from e.g. solar/wind, variations in demand quicker than output increase rate of a plant, etc.) - grid designers/operators must ensure that energy flows more or less equally through out the grid. Similar problem to wireless mesh networking - one needs smart routing to avoid bottlenecking at single link.

Some of electric grid and computer network problems are almost the same. While users can say, well 10 years ago we had single desktop at each home unit and were happy. Now we have the problem that each home member has laptop, smartphone, tablet. We will install wireless routers and ISP can "ADD MOAR FIBER!!1". Not that simple, right?

My impression is that the difference between flow batteries and fuel cells is that flow batteries are closed systems whereas fuel cells are open systems. Since this can be refueled, it sounds like an open system.

Edit: Your linked Wikipedia article answers my question. "A flow battery is a rechargeable fuel cell." I guess the distinction is not closed vs open, but rechargeable vs unspecified.

The whole "Breakthrough! Just add money!" thing is really tiresome not because it would be wonderful if it was as simple as just adding money, but because so very many people have abused it when they really had no idea at all about what the issues were with their technology.

I like the concept of flow batteries, and have read a number of interesting papers over the years on them. They solve a number of problems if you can get them to work and the instant recharge is perhaps the best one.

That said, a very good flow battery demonstrator project would be a set of solar panels (cheap these days), continually pumping electrolyte from a reservoir and 'charging' it (inverting its oxidation reaction). Coupled to a flow battery and a constant load.

If you can't build that, and show that by putting 'nX' load of solar cells in the loop, and continually run the base load 24x7, then you've got the basis for an actual breakthrough. Even doing it for a small "meaningless" load like 50 watts (1.2kWh / day), you will have demonstrated not only that your battery works but that it can be combined in a system that currently requires "previous generation" batteries.

And from that demonstrator you can make educated guesses about how much maintenance would be required for a larger scale system, how well the system performs 24x7, how to maintain it while it is operating, Etc.

Then you can say, for $X we estimate we could run a typical house off grid. For $Y we estimate we could provide Z MWhr of base load. If you can't build the 50W system though, it is unlikely you can build any system yet.

A recharge should be pretty cheap. The national average cost for electricity is ~13¢/kWh, so refilling a 100 kWh battery would only be $13 of energy. Other costs - storage, maintenance, labor, land, etc - add to that, but you still aren't out that much. It's possible that you just pay full price regardless, since they are giving you totally fresh solution.

One of the most important things about flow batteries is that they're basically invariant with charge and scale, so almost certainly (until you really hit the dregs - you probably lose voltage at 4%).

I'm probably totally wrong here, but if the whole car was solar panels I would expect 600 watt to be generated. An electric car would need that for 0.8hrs or so to move one mile (0.44 kWh/mile?) plus acceleration.

So for every square meter of roof space covered in panels you can get a max of about 200 watts of power.

This is a lazy, handwavy characterization of the situation, but it paints the picture, it isn't much of a contribution as batteries head north of 50 kw-h.

A 100W solar panel typically generates about 400 Wh per day, and has an area of 0.7 m², weighs about 8 kg, and costs about $100.

Using the range and battery data for the Tesla S:

A 200 km daily commute (i.e. an hour each way) you would require ~35 kWh, and require 90 100W panels, or 60 m², weigh 700 kg, and cost $9000. Possible, but only as a fixed install, not on the car’s roof!

For touring, you could do 500 km per night (about maximum range for the 100 kWh Tesla S) and charge during the day, but would require 250 panels / 175 m² / 2000 kg / $25,000. You would require a trailer to carry them, and the set up & tear down each day would be laborious, but it would be possible and you could then travel indefinitely. A bit like what Mark Watney does in The Martian. If you were willing to spend multiple days charging for each 500 km leg, or only travel a couple of hours per day it would be even easier.

Edit: I just looked up The Martian and Watney had 18 kWh of batteries for his rover, 28 m² of panels (with longer days but less power), travelling a max of 90 km per day for over a month. So yeah.

1. would this be dispensed just gas? Pull up, pay, and pump it in?

2. But in this case you would also pump the old stuff out?

3. Is there any "prep" time needed for the solution? aka charging

Worrying about quality control of the fluids is similar. The global energy industry is up to the challenge of reliably producing batches of chemicals that narrowly match a particular specification.

One company I've been watching closely which at the same time has been secretive to say the least: http://www.amprius.com/ Their product is a li-ion battery with a silicon anode and apparently it works, because they put it into an actual device: http://www.imei.info/phonedatabase/79823-bluboo-x550/ (Note the massive 5Ah battery)

These guys generated quite a buzz back in the day: https://oxisenergy.com/ For now their product is sort of disappointing, but the lone fact that they harnessed this new chemistry is notable.

Last but not least IMO the most promising company among them all: https://www.eosenergystorage.com/ I remember when they were promising 6MWh/1MW stacks and 10k cycles instead of the 4MWh/1MW stacks with a lifespan of 5k cycles they are offering now, but the key thing is they are deploying them as we speak - actually, their total production for 2017 was sold out at the start of this year.

These 1MWh stacks are made from 12kWh modules, which sooner or later will be offered to individual customers.

There's a table of the currently known public chemistries near the bottom.

There are applications with better power density than Lithium based batteries (at the electrodes), but I don't know about how an overall solution would compare to a gasoline setup.

I think the only fair comparison in such a case would be to have a roughly standard car design and compare complete solutions (currently common petrol / diesel depending on vehicle size, hybrid (electric), full electric (batteries / 'flow batteries' of different types)).

There are commercial flow batteries that use membranes.[1] One uses zinc-iron. The energy storage capacity is limited only by tank capacity, so you can fill big tanks using solar power or wind and draw it out later. Typical system is 288 kW/960 kWh, and occupies 6 shipping containers.

[1] https://www.viznenergy.com/product-gs200/