Cold Weather Battery Use

Batteries don’t tend to work as well at cold temperatures. Their performance drops off significantly below certain temperature thresholds. So here’s a question.

I wonder if there have been studies done for determining when a battery would actually be more efficient at cold temperature by powering a small heating element to help warm itself, as well as improve durability?

Mobile Battery Charging

Some thoughts on the issue of charging batteries quickly. It seems to be the second biggest stumbling block with electric vehicles, the first being range. Right now, as far as I know, there are two main ways of storing electrical energy.

One is with batteries, the other is with capacitors. Capacitors charge and discharge very quickly but aren’t suited for slow discharges. Also, they have lower energy density than batteries. It takes multiple capacitor charges to equal the energy in a battery of comparable size.

What if there was a way to increase the energy of a capacitor to match that of a battery, and then find a way to charge batteries on-board a vehicle while it is in motion with a capacitor that’s quickly charged while stationary?

Hydrogen Falling Out of Favor

Policy needs to be set now for a long time to come. Yet if you look at all the rhetoric and proposals on the Federal and state levels, we’ve got a hodgepodge of all sorts of special interests clamoring for their piece of the action. With all these contenders jostling for position, someone’s going to fall off the wagon. And while I wouldn’t count it out, hydrogen looks like it’s been teetering a bit lately.

A headline this week from Automotive News (subscription required): “Hydrogen slips as a solution for the greening of autos”

The article contains a chart from the GAO (Government Accountability Office) which shows the current fuel production cost of hydrogen from renewable liquids as $4.40 per kilowatt-hour versus the US Department of Energy’s goal of less than $3 per kWh by the year 2017.

Does anyone see a problem with this? If it’s going to cost $3/kWh to make how much is it going to sell for? More right? And hydrogen is going to be used to do what in fuel cells? Make electricity. And for every 1 unit of hydrogen you put into a fuel cell, the theoretical maximum output you’ll get is 1 unit of electricity, but the reality will be somewhat less.

So how does this make sense when electricity is already less than $3 per kWh, the infrastructure to charge vehicles is further along than hydrogen refueling stations, and battery development will surely increase range to at least as good as hydrogen can get? Plus how is the infrastructure for hydrogen refueling going to come about?

All I’m saying is the sooner we start focusing efforts on programs that have the best chance of success because they are fundamentally sound and leverage existing technology and resources, the sooner we will come to a viable solution.