When you fill up a gas car, you stand by the pump as it gets filled. Say it takes 5min, that's 5min of being right there holding the pump (or babysitting it), with your attention mostly budgeted to this (minus dumb browsing).
When you do sub-2h trips on a Tesla, you don't need to fuel at all. The car charges at home, you spend no time whatsoever on the act of fueling. On longer trips spanning 3+ hours, when you plug a Tesla, you might be charging for 15-20min but the attention budget you dedicate to the act is on the order of 20s. You stop, plug the car, walk away and go eat a taco or buy some groceries or empty your bladder, or watch a video in the car. You'll physically arrive maybe 10-15min later than a gas/flow car (assuming no resting), but you'll have mentally dedicated much less time to the act of replenishing the spent energy.
To me, this is more than worth it. Over a year of driving and commuting and road tripping, I spent a tiny fraction of what I would have on the act of starring at or thinking about an energy replenishment device.
The idea of frequently babysitting the refilling of a liquid in my car is obnoxious.
I think the parent comment mentioned 5 minutes because this is how long the article says these new batteries will take to refuel. Although it's quite likely the article made this figure up.
In any case, it's a redundant point because it's unlikely a battery fluid system would be designed in the same way as old fashioned gas pumps. More likely, it would clamp on and you can sit in the car or take a small walk while it does it's work. Gas pumps are designed to be handheld because they are fast. If it took 5 minutes to pump gas, we would probably have redesigned these by now too.
A fully fueled F-350 can easily travel 700+ miles before it needs to refuel, too. Assuming it's just being driven around town, you'll probably go months between stopping at the pump.
2021 Ford F-350 XLT, long bed + crew cab, diesel engine (do F-350s even come in gas...?).
Family and I used it for moving across state, and with no load (or very light load, no trailer) and a full tank it could make a 700 mile journey in one go with fuel to spare. That included going up a couple mountain passes.
Fully loaded (20ft enclosed trailer and truck bed), it still made about 500 miles of the way before we needed to refuel.
Worth noting, we found the mileage wasn't actually affected in any significant way by any cargo we hauled. It was pulling that trailer, regardless empty or loaded, that reduced mileage (aerodynamic drag!).
Street driving is less efficient than freeway driving, obviously, but with a ~40 gallon fuel tank it should still make stopping at the pump a very infrequent event.
Doesn't change much to your argument. But fuel doesn't last for months sitting in a tank. Gas will absorbs moisture from the mandatory ethanol mix and become quasi useless, and diesel will develop algae, clogging the piping and filters.
Pay at the pump is nearly universal in the US. The last time I encountered a station that didn't have it was ca. 2001 in rural Arkansas.
Pull up, insert card, insert filling handle, start, lock on, step to the side to avoid fumes, when it clicks off you put up handle, put gas cap on, drive away.
Electric cars have a lot of pluses, but refilling the tank as quickly as gasoline or diesel isn't one of them. I can drive at highway speeds for over thirteen hours on two refills of the tank, each of which takes less time than walking in and using the restroom.
For whatever it's worth, some places currently disallow pay at the pump if you're refuelling late at night, at least for diesel (I didn't check for gasoline). I've encountered it before while driving across the US even just 1-2 years ago.
At least around here you open an app on your phone, select which pump you are on, and the total is charged from your debit card. The total time is just the time it takes to pump fuel to the car.
I am truly not a fan of gas stations, but fueling a car doesn't take 5 minutes. In the most cases it doesn't even take one-a-half minute and then I am allowed to continue my journey.
So maybe some people need forced breaks, but I don't, I can decide myself where I want to do my break and it is not at a gas station, with gas station food, has station atmosphere and gas station prices.
I’ve been all between Seattle and Portland enough and stopped at enough Tesla stations that I know it is complete fantasy to charge for 20 minutes on a road trip. It also doesn’t take anyone 5 min to fill with gas. Most cars are like 90 seconds / 16 gallons.
Maybe life is meant to enjoy these 5 minutes breaks and have a relaxed schedule instead of trying to cram every single minute by what you perceive “productive” like watching a movie..
People are having mental health issues is because they see their lives as a race not a journey, people used to spend hours to prepare their horses, I can spend few minutes filling my car tank :)
Doesn't it usually go the other way? Bladder capacity goes down with age, so as you get older you find yourself needing to pee more times a day, but the time needed for a given pee break is less.
Except that it does not take 5 minutes to fill up, you can ask the gas station attendant to do it for you, or you can simply let the pump run and do whatever you would do in that 20 minutes an electric charges. There is no attention needed on the pump while it is running.
But I guess the long time that electric charging takes is usefull. You can spend it on mental gymnastics that being forced to stop more often and for longer is somehow better.
At least Japan and significant parts of the US, speaking from what I personally know.
Oregon just this year finally changed its state-wide mandate that all pumps at a station be Full Service to half Full Service and half Self Serve. Yes, it's mandatory for stations to have Full Service pumps in Oregon.
It's mandatory in Oregon and New Jersey. Which are not exactly Wyoming, in terms of population, but they are just two states.
Outside of that, there's a full-service station down the street from me, but it's about 30 cents per gallon more to get full service (though it is full service and they will check your oil, tire pressure, coolant, windshield washer fluid, etc., and refill the washer fluid and air up tires). It's the only one I know of at all outside of those two states (though of course there must be others still out there).
Oregon gas stations may reduce their Full Service pumps down to half of all pumps and leave the rest as Self Serve, this is not a requirement. Maintaining at least half of all pumps as Full Service is a requirement.
This is absolutely false unless you have a long-haul truck. Additionally most pumps have a price button or gallon/litre button where you set the thing you want and it shuts off automatically.
If you want to fill up all the way, there is a little switch which locks the pistol so you don't have to hold it and it will shut off automatically. It's that easy.
If you can't do it at home safely with about 5 seconds of effort, you will never beat conventionally charged batteries.
98% of EV charging happens this way. Trying to emulate traditional fuel stations is actually chasing a 2% use case... Like trying to out-perform cloud storage with a better jazz drive it's just an anachronistically bad interpretation of the fundamental problem.
At the moment, many people who live in a terrace or flat, may find it easy to keep a fossil fuel car but hard to be able to rely on charging an EV at home. In a terrace, you can't guarantee that you can park outside your house necessarily.
Eventually, the local authority or landlord may install charging on every parking slot, but until then lots of people don't want to deal with the anxiety of not knowing if they can charge today.
What percentage of vehicle owners use non-dedicated street parking? As you say, eventually this situation will be addressed by municipalities. So if we’re talking about the last 20-30% of customers it seems right to treat this as an edge case and deal with it last.
It will be a bit lower due to higher use of public transport and lower average income. But it represents a large fraction of car ownership (about 30% of total cars; not sure about new)
I live in NL and I challenge your assertion about home charging. What do you base it on? Most people on my street with an EV have a home charger, even the apartment blocks have them outside.
You can still plug in your car and charge up this fluid at home just as you would with a lithium battery. And the stations where you change fluid can charge it too and put it back into circulation for the next customer. And if demand is larger than that station can charge then a tanker truck can pull up and replenish the underground tanks.
If you find yourself stranded on the side of the road, you simply drain some depleted fluid into a red gas can, hike down the road to the nearest station and exchange it for a gallon of energized fluid.
All the benefits of conventional EVs without the downsides.
> 98% of EV charging happens this way. Trying to emulate traditional fuel stations is actually chasing a 2% use case...
98% of EV charging probably happens that way now because only 1.2% of cars in the US are EVs. Most people who cannot charge at home avoid EVs. Do you think it will remain a 2% use case when EVs are the majority of cars?
I‘d like to challenge that. Having a vehicle anchored to a certain location just so it can charge is not ideal. It prevents use by many people living in apartments, and it’s a problem when driving a lot within one day. It means you have to have a lot more infrastructure (charging points) than ICE vehicles (petrol stations).
But this is not the tradeoff here. The tradeoff is convenient charging at home vs fast charging on the road.
So trying to emulate traditional fueling procedures isn't just pure anachronism, it is about not having to wait for ages on a charging station in the middle of nowhere to get another go at maximum range.
If what they say in the web page is right, it will be very useful. From big trucks to electrical grid load balancing, energy storage in companies or homes, shipping industry.
your argument, if it were correct, would entail that gasoline cars could never have become popular, since it in no way depends on the 2x specific energy advantage li-ion has over victorian-era lead-acid batteries
this suggests that some crucial aspects of the situation have escaped your notice, so perhaps your dismissal is too hasty
Flow batteries biggest issue has been density. If they have solved it at better cost effectiveness than current EV batteries then it may take off. I doubt the complexity of the electrolyte water solution, pumps, and membranes would really win out against an equivalent electrolyte in a rechargeable battery for car sized volumes.
Where this could be a major use case is large scale grid batteries. That would allow for an effective baseline power store for solar and wind power.
I don’t know about the other practical considerations of putting this into a car, but certainly the article suggests the density problem to be solved
> With the basic science problem resolved, Katsoudas adds, Influit is now developing a battery with an energy density rated at 550 to 850 watt-hours per kilogram or higher, as compared to 200 to 350 Wh/kg for a standard EV lithium-ion battery. The company expects larger versions would also beat old-style flow batteries at backing up the grid because the nanoelectrofuel can be reused at least as many times as a flow battery—10,000 or more cycles—and it will probably be cheaper.
A potential bottleneck will be the peak power consumption and peak charge rate. If you need to store energy year-round, charged and discharged at relatively a trickle, then this tech might be a solution.
I wonder how big and expensive a 5kW ion exchanger would be. That would be able to power my household in the winter. Charging at 5kW during the ~5 hours of sun during the ~5 summer months. Discharging at .5kW average in winter, 5kW peak?
If a 5kW unit would be prohibitively expensive or large for my example scenario, then different materials and configuration for the ion exchange unit would be needed.
Note: I am not worried about the size of the pumps and tanks. These could be stored underground, in the case of a suburban house. For apartments, this would be harder to retrofit. Above paragraphs in this comment are all about the ion exchange unit, which would determine the maximum charge/discharge rate.
Not as an individual thing, as grid-scale storage. Buffers for solar and wind farms.
I've suggested before that some site such as Electrek have a monthly column, "1, 5 and 10 years ago in battery announcements", so we can look back at the hype. There are so many of these "sort of maybe works in the lab, trillion dollar industry next year" announcements. Usually with videos full of stock photos and talking heads.
Where I live, consumers sometimes end up with solar installations, whose economic feasability relies on the compensation paid by energy companies in the case of overproduction. Which happens in the summer during daylight hours. In the winter, you buy energy at whatever rate the energy company sets. Where I live, these prices are regulated.
You can imagine that there is appeal to being able to store energy year-round, not having to deal with price regulation and energy companies.
My point is, a situation can arise where people want nothing to do with the grid unless there is no other way. Back in the day, running a steam turbine with coal in your backyard was not practical. So was dedicating an entire room for a mainframe computer. When things get miniaturized, running them in your home becomes possible.
If these flow cells, which have been around for a very long time, would somehow be practical in a scaled down form, I can see it work in a one-per-building configuration, assuming those buildings have solar panels.
However it may be preferred to either run the flow cells on a centralized grid as you suggest, or to provide it a more local level, e.g. one installation per residential block. Because people in apartments also need power.
A 5kW unit, if installed everywhere might also not be feasible because the conductors burried in the ground are not thick enough to carry 5kW times all the cars in all the houses on a street. That means they will need to remotly regulate charging power/when stuff charges OR every street needs new electrical infrastructure which isn't the cheapest option.
Depends on the diversity/simultanity factor used in the planning. I am not sure if this is the same everywhere, but typically the copper in the ground is not calculated to 100% load of all attached houses and the farther you get away from the house the lower that number will get for economic reasons.
There's not that many variables to keep track of, yet articles on energy storage tech consistently disappoint by always missing the most relevant ones.
Right. Cost/KWh, KWh / Kg, KWh/m^2, charge time, discharge time, and product development stage (0=design scribbled on paper, 10=on sale at WalMart) gives you the basics.
I frequently see ICE owners putting down EVs. And I think they will not get the picture until one of the family members buys one and they get to experience for themselves. My family owns two EVs and we will never go back to ICE cars. We've been driving around in EVs for over 5 years.
Sure there are cases where EVs are an ill-fit. For example, if you are an apartment dweller and do not have a way to charge the car at home. But many other concerns are way overblown.
I don't agree. It's way way better than charging an electric battery. For those who can't charge at home this is a real pain in the ass right now and a big time waster (which driving already is compared to public transport where you can at least do something with that time, like read, study, watch something)
Charging at home is a time waster? You just plug it in right? Idk where the waste is there.
In the US driving isn't really a time waster compared to public trans because pub trans is usually slow, doesn't take you to your destination so you gotta walk, doesn't come frequently and you put yourself in more physical danger. Hard to read when there is a guy tweaking next to you.
The costs of doing this plan mean that it will absolutely never happen. The grid is there, super chargers are easy to use, no fluid storage or machines to manage fluids. No fluid leaks, no extra infra.
Plus battery tech and ability to recharge is always changing.
No, I mean it wastes time if you can't charge at home because you have to regularly wait while it charges elsewhere.
You can sometimes combine it with a shopping spree or something but if you don't happen to need to do that (which for me is most of the time) you're stuck waiting.
I mean when I still had a car I used to hate going out just for a tank run (like before a night trip to the airport) and the station was within half a mile. I couldn't do that every few days plus have to wait around for that thing to charge. My car was to make my life easier, not harder (and even then it failed at that because I hate driving so much). Glad I live in a city now with amazing public transport.
Well made electric vehicles are A) getting faster to charge B) already have the infrastructure in place C) Way cheaper to install. No fluids to exchange, no facility to create/store/handle fluids.
Standard Model 3 has 272 miles of range. That 4.5 hours of driving, which is way more than most people are doing in a day. I drive 30k miles (~3x the average) a year but average about 80 miles a day.
Unless you are driving across the country frequently this isn't really going to make any sense. Then on top of that you are going to have to support totally different battery tech, then also the density of these batteries isn't great.
Based upon their example "just about as fast as filling up a gasoline-powered car." Is not exactly accurate for a number of reasons.
On paper, it would be more like filling up and emptying 4 gasoline-powered cars. That's about 8x the process in the ideal case.
Other considerations would be the necessity for 8x as much storage in gas stations, 8x as many refilling trucks to supply and empty those stations, and above all, the development of a nationwide network of such infrastructure as pervasive as the existing fuel network.
That doesn't matter. The infrastructure cost makes it completely infeasible for the rare few times you'd have to fill up on the road and the small amount of time it would cost you.
Ah yes, a convenient 400 liters of fluid, yielding an incredible 4 miles per gallon, saving a remarkable 120 lbs over a typical 1000 lb EV battery, assuming all of the non-fluid components are weightless and the fluid is only as dense as water. What a vision of the future, where fuel transportation costs are not only an order of magnitude larger on paper, they are paid twice as used fluid must also be stored, transported, and processed.
In theory you could transport the fluid like gasoline so you could charge it in some central facility the equivalent of a refinery, but then you'd need it to be transported both there and back.
The better solution is presumably to charge the used fluid directly at the fueling station using a grid connection, though that does have some issues. What happens if the used fluid out of some random car is contaminated with something?
> These are best suited for stationary, long term extendable storage
What advantages does flow provide over non-flow chemistries in stationary contexts? Do you mean remote and stationary, thereby benefiting from refuelling?
The flow batteries separate the energy storage part of the battery from the power producing part of the battery.
Unlike in conventional batteries, you can design a battery with any combination of stored energy and of maximum power.
The stored energy is determined by the volume of fluid stored in a tank, while the maximum power is determined by the surface of the electrodes.
For large amounts of stored energy, a flow battery becomes much cheaper than a conventional battery, where you must increase simultaneously the energy and the power, by making bigger electrodes (or by increasing the number of electrodes, i.e. the number of batteries).
Moreover, because the active substance stays fluid instead of changing phases, it is not degraded after each charge-recharge cycle, so the lifetime of a flow battery may be much greater. There may still be problems with precipitates or changes in chemical composition in old working fluids, but such problems should be easier to solve than making long-lived solid electrodes.
Seasonal energy storage (charge in summer and use in winter) with lithium is not feasible.
If the medium would be cheap and could be pumped into arbitrarily large tanks that don’t need constant energy input to hold the charge then this could be an enabler for seasonal storage.
I don’t know whether either of them are true for flow battery (yet).
They are certainly not true for H2. H2 also has atrocious round trip efficiency, not sure about flow either.
Cost, availability of materials and you can scale the battery by getting bigger tanks. The flip side is that the amount of power they can deliver doesn't scale this way, just the amount of energy storage. Also round trip efficiencies aren't great. For stationary storage size matters less.
The article claims that their tech should be cheaper than li-ion if manufacturing is scaled up.
This is actually plausible, because there are fewer parts. Each li-ion battery consists of a huge number of cells which must each be manufactured with precision, whereas precision parts comprise only a small piece of a flow battery - most of it is just the four tanks
This does seem a relatively promising tech. Cheaper and less flammable. One thing that don't mention is whether it's can charge conventionally as quickly as li-ion. If so then it could be a drop in replacement even without deploying electrolyte replacement stations.
Right, had to scroll a long way to find this but there is a quite outrageous claim that it’ll be cheaper:
> Influit expects that its current generation of nanoelectrofuel, together with the entire ecosystem needed to produce, distribute, and recycle the fuel that the company is building around it, should cost $130/kWh when used in an EV. In comparison, lithium-ion batteries cost around $138/kWh.
No details given of how they arrived at this figure. If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.
I wouldn't expect them to publish those details, cost structure is something most companies keep close. If you are a potential partner or investor and sign an NDA, then you might get details. The rest of us will have to wait and see
When you do sub-2h trips on a Tesla, you don't need to fuel at all. The car charges at home, you spend no time whatsoever on the act of fueling. On longer trips spanning 3+ hours, when you plug a Tesla, you might be charging for 15-20min but the attention budget you dedicate to the act is on the order of 20s. You stop, plug the car, walk away and go eat a taco or buy some groceries or empty your bladder, or watch a video in the car. You'll physically arrive maybe 10-15min later than a gas/flow car (assuming no resting), but you'll have mentally dedicated much less time to the act of replenishing the spent energy.
To me, this is more than worth it. Over a year of driving and commuting and road tripping, I spent a tiny fraction of what I would have on the act of starring at or thinking about an energy replenishment device.
The idea of frequently babysitting the refilling of a liquid in my car is obnoxious.