Power trip

MIT has come up with a battery that can fully recharge in seconds.

Wow.

Talk to anybody in the power industry and they'll tell you that the problem is storage, not generation.  Wind power is great.  Solar cells are great.  Solar furnaces are great.  Unfortunately they're all undependable because the wind and the Sun aren't necessarily there when you need them.

Response to this sad fact has resulted in bizarre plans like huge Solar Power Satellites orbiting the planet to beam down uninterrupted streams of microwave energy and relatively low tech solutions like the Luddington Pumped Storage Power Plant using a huge water reservoirs and gravity to store power.  Solutions like these are impressive, but they just don't work for cars.

Cars need portable power... and today that portable power is stored in gasoline.  Burning gas to liberate its power isn't that efficient - so folks are looking for substitutes.  The most common substitute that I have heard pitched is the Hydrogen Fuel Cell.  Hydrogen was kind of scary to the Coal and Gas Industries, but then someone got the great idea of making Hydrogen from Gas and Coal. Amazing how the same folks keep making money... isn't it?

MIT's new batteries kind of throw a wrench in those plans.  If you can fully recharge your car's batteries in a couple of seconds, then why lug around that Gas and Coal to Hydrogen Powered Fuel Cell?  Fortunately, you can still charge that battery from the local Gas and Coal burning Power Plant :-)

But I digress... a battery that charges in seconds is an incredible development.  Bill Joy identified batteries as the key stumbling block to practical electric cars:

"There's a range of new chemistries coming so that you can imagine, say five to ten years from now, instead of 100 watt-hours per liter we're at today, that a break-out company will have a 500 or thousand watt-hours--a five to 10 times (increase in) the energy density,"

Bill and the rest of us were thinking about batteries that held more power... not batteries that charge faster.  Our thought was that a Chevy Volt isn't practical because you have to charge it every 40 miles (or use the gas engine).  Give it a 400 mile range and folks will stand in line to buy one (and you can ditch the gas engine).

In retrospect - What were we thinking?

Would you rather have a large (400 mile) gas tank that takes 8 hours to fill or a small (40 mile) gas tank that takes 8 seconds to fill?  

There are lots of factors to consider before answering that question... but I suspect that fast beats slow most of the time.  If the MIT batteries really work and you can recharge your car in a few seconds, then I think that most folks will accept a battery powered car as practical even if they still have to charge it every 40 miles.

What do you think?