Nature: Car industry: Charging up the future

[kristopher]

This is an outstanding read.

Car industry: Charging up the future

A new generation of lithium-ion batteries, coupled with rising oil prices and the need to address climate change, has sparked a global race to electrify transportation. Jeff Tollefson investigates.


"We have had a massive shift in one of the biggest industries in the world," says Stephan Dolezalek, who leads the CleanTech group at the venture-capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners in San Bruno, California. Dolezalek has been watching the global automobile sector embrace the idea of plug-in electric cars: "In three years we've gone from thinking 'it can't be done' to not only 'it can be done' but 'we are all going to do it.'"

The shift is partly a story of technological innovation, which has produced rechargeable batteries that pack enough power to propel some of the basic passenger vehicles currently being designed further than 200 kilometres. Billions of dollars have poured into start-up companies that promise new batteries, and billions more have poured into fledgling electric-car manufacturers eager to take on the global automotive giants — every one of which is also developing electric vehicles.

The shift is also a story of oil supplies, national security and global warming. Record-high oil prices have pushed consumers towards fuel-efficient vehicles and prompted many governments to consider electric transport as a way to escape their dependence on imported petroleum and to address climate change. Money currently spent abroad could instead be spent on domestic power generation from wind, solar and other low-carbon energy sources.

“Don't worry about charging electric cars from some perfect grid of the future – just get the cars out there.” - Mark Duvall

And the shift is a story of a shared vision: developing the technology that would entice all drivers to plug in rather than fill up. Millions of battery-powered cars plugged into an increasingly green electric grid would not only save drivers money and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, it would also provide the grid with a distributed, high-capacity storage system for electricity. Such a system would help to accommodate the variable and unpredictable nature of renewable electricity sources. And further out, it could allow power companies to store energy generated during times of low demand, then draw it back again to meet peak demand. The end result could be more a stable and efficient grid that might even lower home electricity bills.

Getting there won't be easy. All these hopes hinge on battery technology that is only just emerging from the lab. A suite of technical challenges remains to be overcome, and it is not yet clear how much further the technology can be pushed. At the same time, the manufacturers who are arguably best able to bring about these changes — the global automotive giants — have been hammered by an energy crisis followed by an epic financial meltdown.

None of them has abandoned the effort yet, in large part because they all believe that, despite the current lull, oil prices have nowhere to go but up. Moreover, batteries have leapt ahead of expensive hydrogen fuel cells as the technology of choice for getting beyond oil, at least for now. But ..."

Full article can be read and downloaded here:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081126/full/456436a.html