From Steven Chu, SecEnergy, whose worse nightmare is coal, notwithstanding the nuclear debacle in Japan:
And what would it take to be competitive? It will take a battery, first that can last for 15 years of deep discharges. You need about five as a minimum, but really six- or seven-times higher storage capacity and you need to bring the price down by about a factor of three. And then all of a sudden you have a comparably performing car; let's say a mid-sized car which has a comparable acceleration and a comparable range.John Petersen:
In the simplest of terms, electric drive can't be competitive with internal combustion until somebody invents and commercializes an entirely new class of battery. In the meantime, the market will remain profoundly confused by snake oil suggestions that the cleantech revolution will mirror the progress that information and communications technology made over the last four decades. It's just not going to happen!
Perhaps the ultimate answer will be an advancement in ultra capacitor technology. Maybe we see tribryds(gasoline/conventional battery/ultra capacitor.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.technologyreview.com/energy/37519/?p1=MstCom
Possibly.
ReplyDeleteMy hunch is we are not too far off from a new battery (can't say more than this, for now) and smarter, more efficient electronics (just as Apple did with the iPad).