Hybrids are the baby steps that will get us to fully electric vehicles.
How we generate the electricity needed for our billions of electric vehicles is another matter. It would great to see every square cm of the exterior of our buildings become a type of photo voltaic. Add to this a flow battery or hydrogen storage in every basement to store the excess power we would make in the summer for winter use. Flow batteries are particularly good for home installations as they are cheap, easy to maintain, and besides, hydrogen is a pesky gas to try to store.
I’ve recently written about a possible breakthrough in supercapacitors. If these capacious supercapacitors actually deliver their promised performance, it could be the on-board storage solution that will make electric cars viable. You need at least 500KM of range with an infrastructure to re-fuel, and I’d say 1500KM range for vehicles with no network re-fueling.
Another great thing about supercapacitors is their temperature range. Most batteries stop working at low temperatures, and a car needs to perform well at -30C, and at least start at -40C. Supercapacitors are not batteries, they’re dense gaps of space that hold charge.
Gasoline and diesel contain a lot of energy and are pretty safe to work with. They contain about 12,000 Watt hours per KG. To compare, your laptop battery holds at BEST holds 200 Watt hours per KG. And that’s only in a narrow temperature range. Gas holds the same at -60C and +60C.
Hydrogen holds a lot more, at about 33,000 Watt hours per KG. But it’s really really hard to store even 1KG of Hydrogen. It’s much, much easier and safer to store 3KG of gasoline.
So for the near term, I think a supercapacitor on-board storage that’s given extended range from a on-board gas/diesel generator is our best bet in the short term.
Take a look at GM’s vision of the hybrid: the Volt. While it does not use supercapacitors, it does offer the driver about 60KM of all electric driving before it starts to use gas to charge the battery. Too bad GM makes it look bad in this clip:
