Charge in 5 minutes, Drive 500 miles? 319
ctroutwi writes "In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering Ultra-Capacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultra-capacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately 9$ (~$.45 a gallon) of electricity and then drive 500 miles."
paid editors, for what, exactly? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I expect there are a bunch of comments to this effect about the dupe.
What I'm wondering is why these guys call themselves editors. I'm frustrated that ad revenue and subscription fees go to these people who totally disregard all semblance of professionalism. I wish I had a cushy job like that, where I could sit back, press 'Accept' once in a while without even reading the blurb or the front page, and get paid for it.
Re:How Much Does the Capacitor Cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like the "electrical energy stations" mentioned in TFA, from which a 5 minute charge may be obtained?
Re:Echo (Score:1, Insightful)
The math isnt very promising on this ! (Score:2, Insightful)
A capacitor bank to store that much charge (100 to 200 KwH) is going to cost, retail, at today's prices, oh, about $220,000 to $440,000 AND take up most of the space inside a minivan. . It's unlikely these folks have made that much of an improvement in cost and density.
That much energy stored in a capacitor bank will make Jerry Brukheimer really envious-- every such car out there will explode on impact.
Most houses are only wired for 100 to 200 amps at 120VAC, which scientists tell us, is only 24KwH per hour. Every house would have to be rewired from the power pole with wire two to five times as thick. And a fusebox and timer able to schedule your time sucking up the amps.
If EVERYBODY tried to do this, we'd need three to five times the available electic power. No way this can happen, there isnt that much available capital in the whole world to build that many power plants. And oh, those power plats would have to use nuclear or coal, not exactly "clean energy" in the broad view.
Re:stupid editors... (Score:1, Insightful)
In the words of one of my friends, "Slashdot is dead to me." Personally, I am loyal to things long after they start sucking, so I'll probably be here a while longer.
But still! Think of how much current it would draw (Score:0, Insightful)
Energy content of gasoline is 45 MJ/Kg. That means you are storing 1.35e09 Joules of energy. You are charging it in 5 minutes? So dividing by 300 seconds, the Power rating for the charger is 4500000 Watts or 4.5 MW. If you try to charge it from your friendly neighbourhood 110V line, the amp rating for the plug is drum roll please, 40909 Amps
Now think when you are pumping 25 gallons of gas into that Hummer in 3 minutes, you have a 8 MW device in your hands!
But to be fair... (Score:3, Insightful)
I know it's more fun to bitch about people, but you ought to hand out some kudos every once in a while too. We could do with a bit more of that on the Intarweb.
Re:But to be fair... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you emit nothing but negative feedback, if even improvement is met with negative feedback because the improvement doesn't make it to "perfection" or some other standard, the psychological result is as predictable as the sun rising tomorrow: Lack of interest in continuing to try and ever diminishing performance. It's a bit odd that anybody thinks relentless negativity can have any other effect. (But there are entire major ideologies currently built around this very idea, that a tarnished but pretty good product is so, so very bad that letting blackest evil win is preferable; identifying which is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Extra double bonus points for continually raising the putative bar every time someone comes close, and continuing to emit nothing but negative feedback. Triple bonus points for being even more critical as improvements are made and the remaining imperfections stand out that much more clearly.
Re:He Should Resign. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot Editors are Assholes (Score:3, Insightful)
Editors used to have recursive macro's to apply -1 moderation to controversial posts, so even if 50 users moderated something up the post would tank.
Today I think it's more benign editor abuse -- they simply MISUSE the "friend or foe" system so they can sometimes publish their friend's postings first. Sometimes they publish a sensational headline from someone who registered for Slashdot THAT SAME DAY.
There's no weighting for how long you've been registered, and how much you have participated. I must have a black mark on my account "never allow to moderate", so I stopped participating here. No metamoderation anymore. There's no need to fork
I happen to like the Digg site (although they are going the way of "big self-hype like Slashdot" so some foolish dot-com investor can buy Digg for one MILLION dollars).
It's a capacitor (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, if you RTFP (Read The F***ing Patent), it _is_ a fancy capacitor, plus circuitry to get a constant voltage out of it. In fact, it's downright the most classical kind of a capacitor, with two surfaces separated by a thin dielectric material. Only they use a fine powder to achieve lots of surface.
So, yes, it _is_ a capacitor.
At any rate, if it "acts like a capacitor" then it's fair to compare it to the best ultra-capacitors available. And if what they're proposing ends up having to be 80 times better than the best existing ultra-capacitors, then I'm getting a tad suspicious. Sure, it could be that they're geniuses, but I'll hold the celebrations until I hear something about a working prototype.
Re:900KW (Score:3, Insightful)
That leaves the two complaints: It will be bad in a crash, and it can't charge as fast as theroretically possible. You are on knee-jerk #2. The answer to that is, the grid *will* be improved to handle the load, as it always has been in the past for all other loads. Yes, California has enough power, they just don't have the agreements in place necessary to get the power where it needs to be sometimes. And, I can think of at least one way to charge this thing in 5 minutes off house power, with no modifications to the power line coming into the house. If you can't, the statement out of your mouth shouldn't be "It's impossible" it should be "I'm glad they took this step forward, I hope to see a implimentation that's house-wiring friendly." Just because you can't think of it does not mean it is impossible or even difficult.