Posts Tagged ‘electric cars’
Video: Japanese Researchers Build an EV Engine That Contains No Rare Earths
Theirs is the first so-called switched reluctance motor with this kind of torque density, they say, though the researchers admit that it’s still not equivalent to the torque and efficiency produced by motors with permanent magnets. Simply, switched reluctance motors tap magnetic reluctance--it’s like electrical resistance, but for magnetism--in an electromagnetic coil. By turning the electricity on and off within the coil, a rotor inside is induced to spin, creating rotary motion/force (this is explained visually in the video below).
Switched reluctance motors have their drawbacks, particularly because they can be difficult to control. But better onboard, real-time computing is making them more reliable and less prone to vibration and noise. Moreover, the Tokyo team’s motor is about the size of the engine that goes in a Prius, meaning that it’s been scaled to a form that will fit in a standard small-sized production car.
But most importantly, it means Japan may be a few design tweaks away from having an electric engine that doesn’t hinge on trade relations with the Chinese, who have been accused (not least by the Japanese) of (China controls 95-97 percent of global supply, depending on who you ask). And as far as what it means to you, the development of a dependable switched rotor engine with decent power and torque could lower the cost of EVs.
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At Least for the Next Ten Years, “Peak Lithium” is Nonsense
At the Lithium Supply and Markets conference in Toronto, analysts make clear that until 2020 there will literally be more than enough of the element to go around
The noise about “Peak Lithium”—the idea that not enough economically extractable lithium exists in the world to support a large-scale switch to cars powered by lithium-based batteries—has quieted significantly in the past year, but I still sometimes get asked: Are we going to run out of this stuff?
Not any time soon. In fact, as a noted market analyst made clear this morning, so many companies are developing so many lithium deposits around the world that many of them will probably go out of business, because they’re on track to dramatically oversupply the world with lithium.
Currently, most of the world’s lithium comes from a handful of companies, most notably SQM, Chemetall, and FMC; they extract lithium from high-altitude salt flats in northern Chile and Argentina. Those companies have long insisted that they have access to so much lithium, and that they could expand supply so easily and quickly, that the dozens of independent lithium prospectors who hope to capitalize on arrival of the lithium-ion-powered electrified automobile are doomed.
This morning, Edward R. Anderson, president of the independent consulting firm TRU Group, told the assembled group of international lithium prospectors much the same thing. According to TRU’s latest study of the lithium market—an update of an earlier study TRU conducted for Mitsubishi, which the group presented at the first Lithium Supply and Markets Conference in Santiago, Chile in January 2009—the world will soon be overloaded with lithium producers. Together, these producers will end up flooding the market; there will be too much lithium to go around, and all but the strongest companies will probably fail.
We at PopSci are not concerned with lithium as an investment, of course: We’re interested in what news like this means for the people who buy raw lithium, make it into batteries, and then put those batteries into electrified vehicles. For the junior mining companies in the audience, Anderson's presentation might have been bracing. For battery companies and carmakers, however, it means that there is no reason to be concerned about the availability or price of lithium, even as batteries—particularly electric-vehicle batteries—quickly come to consume the bulk of the world’s lithium supply.
To be sure, Anderson didn't even mention the words "Peak Lithium"—his was a business presentation focused on the next ten years. He's also far from the first person to argue that lithium is plentiful. (See .) But Anderson’s presentation this morning was a current and forceful argument that one vastly overhyped barrier to the near- and mid-term adoption of electrified vehicles simply doesn’t exist.
All this said, it’s worth keeping in mind that the majority of all this abundant lithium is extracted by three companies from a relatively tiny section of South American desert. There’s still a case to be made that diversifying the lithium supply is a good thing. Later in the conference we’ll hear Western Lithium, a company that controls a potentially massive lithium mine in northern Nevada, make that case.
Bottled Lightning is a blog series by Seth Fletcher, Senior Associate Editor at PopSci and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy, to be published in May 2011 by Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book is about lithium, the rechargeable lithium battery, and the technological transformations it has helped (or will help) make possible—the wireless revolution; the burgeoning electric-car revival; the coming spread of clean energy. Seth also posts off-the-cuff observations on these and other subjects on .
Week in review: The top 10 video games of the year
Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
— Game publishers aren’t thrilled that video game sales are down 5 percent year to date. But for gamers, it’s been an awesome year because 2010 saw the debut of some of the best games ever made.
— The Android Market on Google’s Android operating system has been broken for some time. This week, Google said it will fix some of the longstanding problems with an update.
— Just when you thought you’ve seen everything mobile apps have to offer, along comes an entry like Word Lens that makes you feel like you’re in the future. The app instantly translates Spanish into English (and vice versa) whenever you point your iPhone’s camera on text.
— Former WikiLeaks members say they plan to start rival Openleaks as part of an effort to compete for official leaks with WikiLeaks.
— World of Warcraft Cataclysm broke all PC game records, selling more than 3.3 million copies on its first day of sales on Dec. 7.
And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:
— The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act suggests that electric cars and hybrids might be a little too quiet.
— It seems Google is willing to wait a little longer to fulfill CEO Eric Schmidt’s dream of cars that drive themselves.
— I’ve seen a ton of TV check-in apps in the last few months, so I asked founder and chief executive Alex Iskold how GetGlue will stand out.
— Google is taking a cue from desktop speech recognition software, like the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking program, by bringing personalized voice profiles to Android’s mobile Voice Search app.
— Zynga’s CityVille has become the fastest-growing game in history. And based on an interview with a key Zynga executive, that isn’t an accident.
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Week in review: Apple’s daylight saving bug
Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
— If you live in the US, we hope you didn’t rely on your iPhone’s alarm clock to wake you up on Monday morning.
— Just a few days after the launch of Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing game system, hackers broke the security behind it.
— Y Combinator, the increasingly famous Silicon Valley incubator, announced two new general partners Friday — Gmail creator/FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit and Harj Taggar, who was already working at YC as a startup advisor.
— In the late 1990s, it was common for companies to spend $50,000 to $150,000 for a Flash homepage that looked like a beautiful brochure. However, they soon learned that Flash was cumbersome, slow to load, expensive to build, and hard to update, and moved on to HTML. Guest columnist Peter Yared argues that the same trend is replaying itself on the iPhone.
— Jeff Bezos has a loud laugh. But Amazon.com’s founder and CEO is keeping quiet about his expansion efforts, which now include sites as varied as BuyVIP.com, Zappos, and as of Monday, Diapers.com.
And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:
— Are today’s flight-focused travel-search startups like Hipmunk trying to solve the wrong problem?
— Following a flurry of online speculation about the sales of Microsoft’s new mobile platform, VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar said he’s becoming convinced that the actual first day sales don’t matter.
e — GE announced plans this week to make the largest purchase in the history of electric vehicles — 25,000 cars by 2015.
— Concerns about privacy on social networks have increased drastically since a year ago among older users, but not younger ones, a new study shows.
— There’s been a flood of news coverage for RockMelt, a new Web browser that’s just opening to the public. The response isn’t surprising, since the founders have big ambitions and have been validated with funding from Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape. But there’s been some backlash too, in part because RockMelt’s promises sound awfully familiar.
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Week in review: Digg founder admits mistakes
Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
— Digg, the pioneering social-news site that lets users vote on top headlines, began to lose momentum during the recession because it pulled engineers from designing new features to improving revenue, founder Kevin Rose said Wednesday.
— Apple tipped its hand on future iPad designs by filing for patents in China.
— Digg is trying to work its way out of the traffic hole it created with its botched redesign attempt. This week it announced the return of several popular features from its previous version.
— Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience, talked about how she sees Facebook and about whether or not it’s a competitor.
— Research in Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis hit the stage at RIM’s BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, where he unveiled the company’s long-awaited tablet — the BlackBerry Playbook.
And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:
— Jajah, the internet phone company that was snapped up by Spanish telecom giant Telefonica for $207 million, is declaring war on calling cards.
— Vinod Khosla, dynamic founder of Khosla Ventures, said, “You can reduce more carbon by painting your roof white than you can by buying a Prius.”
— How can you tell when a CEO is lying? It turns out that it’s slightly more complicated than monitoring the movement of their lips.
— AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong announced that he has acquired popular tech blog TechCrunch.
— For Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the next step in technology is the same that it has always been — augmenting humanity to handle information that a human brain couldn’t otherwise keep up with, and just make things work.
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On the GreenBeat: China beats U.S. in cleantech investment, BrightSource IPO projected within 3 years
Here’s a list of cleantech news we’re tracking today:
China has become the top country for cleantech investment, outstripping the U.S., . China’s renewable energy investment dollars outdoes the U.S. nearly two to one, Green Chip Stocks reports, and installed wind power capcity in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest in three years. Germany, India, the U.K., Portugal and Spain also topped the list. Read the full report .
Large-scale solar plant builder BrightSource could go public within three years, , citing a report from Next Up research. (The report isn’t available online.) The story notes that an IPO would still be a few years off, thanks to the reluctance of venture capitalists to invest in solar — one example being Solyndra’s axed public offering plans. But BrightSource seems to be headed in the IPO direction: it recently won a federal loan guarantee and .
, with GM reportedly proffering $3.2 million of that total. Sakti3 is working on a smaller, cheaper lithium-ion battery that could extend the range of electric vehicles currently on the market. A GM spokeswoman says it’s years away from commercialization, but the technology could eventually wind up in GM’s trucks and cars.
Come launch time in December, thanks to sweeter state rebate policies – states like California and Tennessee are giving Leaf buyers additional incentives, but shutting out the Volt. We’ve reported before that the from the state of California, which wouldn’t extend single drivers of the Volt access to the HOV lane (though that perk was granted to Prius owners), and also won’t give it the $5,000 rebate it’s giving the Nissan Leaf, since the Volt will have tailpipe emissions (the gas tank kicks in after the electric battery’s 40-mile range runs out), whereas the Leaf is all-electric.
Fire and ice: SunPower and Ice Energy will to build a pilot energy storage project, . The system will use SunPower’s rooftop solar panels to generate power. When the sun wanes, Ice Energy’s ice-based storage system will take over, using power stored from the day to cool the building and cutting peak-time energy costs.
Audi may have blundered in naming its electric cars e-Tron – the French word, étron, essentially means “dung,” . If that’s the case, then it’s even more unfortunate that e-Tron is slated to present at the Paris Motor Show next month.
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GM, Itochu charge up battery-maker Sakti3 with $4.2 million
GM Ventures, the venture-capital arm of General Motors, announced today it has teamed up with Itochu Technology Ventures to invest $4.2 million into Sakti3, a lithium-ion battery developer.
Sakti3, a spin-off from the University of Michigan, is working on battery cells that could be smaller, cheaper and more effective than what’s currently on the market – potentially resulting in batteries that could extend its range of electric cars. The company’s technology uses solids instead of the standard liquid electrolyte and electrodes.
“The technology will eventually make it into GM batteries/vehicles, but it’s years away from commercial applications,” said GM spokeswoman Allison Ackels. “When the technology becomes commercially viable, it could be in future GM cars and trucks.”
GM, which it set to release the Chevrolet Volt electric hybrid later this year, .
The reborn General Motors opened its venture-capital branch . With its backing and that of Japanese conglomerate Itochu (which recently invested in video platform and game startup ), Sakti3 should be able to speed the commercialization of its batteries.
This is the second announcement from GM Ventures, which said last month it would , which makes a hybrid van.
Range and the reliability of batteries are big question marks in the electric car market. While consumers have tax incentives to purchase an electric car – the Nissan , sedan and Volt all debut at the end of this year – questions remain about the range of these cars and the reliability of the batteries, which are expensive to replace. The Leaf, for example, goes about 100 miles on a single charge, but .
It’s also not clear how long the batteries last, though Nissan and Chevrolet both extended an 8-year, 100,000-mile warranty to the Leaf and Volt, respectively.
Sakti3 is led by Ann Marie Sastry (pictured above, with a Volt), a University of Michigan professor in the New York Times. Sakti3’s investors include Khosla and Beringea.
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