On May 31, 2015, at 9:18 AM, Lee Hart <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't say this with pride; I'm actually sad to see it work out this way. > It's just that our society creates an overwhelming pressure to keep doing the > Same Old Thing, no matter what, no matter how many better ideas come along, > until absolutely FORCED to change. Many excellent points, and I generally wouldn't dispute them. And I know "But it's different this time!" has been the common refrain...but I really do think it really is different this time, and that difference can be summarized in one word, a proper name: Tesla. Right now, if you're an electric utility in the planning stages of adding peaking capacity...any and all bids for natural gas generators are going to look bad in comparison with Tesla's lithium batteries that they just announced for sale. Lead can't compete with natural gas for that role, but lithium is making natural gas look bad. That's in addition, of course, to all the lithium batteries going into vehicles. And electronics, and power tools, and so on. Right now, the lifetime cost of a lithium battery is less than the lifetime cost of a lead battery. The purchase price of lead is cheaper, yes...but the maintenance (replacement) costs are a real killer. And lead _only_ beats lithium on purchase price. Performance, weight, size, lifetime...lithium wins on all those points. So, once that Gigafactory starts churning out batteries by the shipping container, the purchase price of lithium is going to positively plummet. And when you only pay a marginal premium for lithium over lead, and the lithium lasts so much longer by comparison...the last remaining argument for lead evaporates, the market for lead dries up, lead gets more expensive...and, pretty soon, lead is going to be as unwanted in a battery as it currently is in gasoline. Just look at how much people (including me!) prefer maintenance-free sealed lead batteries for ICE cars. If lithium is available the next time the battery in my Camper dies, I won't hesitate to go for it. And it shouldn't be that big of a deal to manufacture. Considering you need almost nothing in terms of kWh even as you might need lots of "cold cranking amps," you should be able to build a particularly small battery with plenty of room inside for a transparent-to-the-user BMS. Program the BMS to baby the battery to the extreme -- keep it at whatever the ideal SOC is for the current temperature (or even 24-hour average and maximum temperatures), and so on. Just a black box that goes in place of the existing lead battery, and you basically never have to touch it ever again. b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150531/680ae9f3/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
