Battery Battered Bosch
The German Bosch co. is no longer planning to “re-invent” batteries for the propulsion of cars, according to an article published in the Munich, Germany, daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung ( http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/e-autos-bosch-gibt-forschung-zu-neuen-autobatterien-auf-1.3886227 ).
The article states, inter alia (translated from German):
“It sounded so promising in recent years: Bosch was going to invest a three-digit million sum to turn around the car-battery world market. Newly developed solid-state batteries were to replace the traditional lithium-ion technology at some point, according to the ambitious announcement [of the time]. Double energy density at half the cost was the goal. Such batteries would lead both to the final breakthrough of electro-mobility and end the supremacy of the Asian cell-producers. Now, that dream is gone. Bosch-CEO Rolf Bulander announced the end of the project.”
It must be a sad day for Bosch, erstwhile the largest European provider of all-things-electric for the car industry there, especially the ones wanting to produce all the new electrifying vehicles (better don’t touch their multi-hundred-Volt circuitry – it could be hazardous to your health!)
You may wonder, what has changed from just a few years ago?
Electro-Mobility, etc.
Even now, as the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reports, expectations are that the (car)-battery market alone will reach a volume of EURO250 billion (US$~300 billion) by the year 2025. Isn’t that a tidy sum that any leading manufacturing power house would want to strive to get a slice of?
Could it be that:
- The touted “electro-mobility” is not the promised land of everything on wheels?
- The bureaucrats in Brussels (folks who once prescribed the curvature of bananas and cucumbers) had not given clear instructions on how to make the electro-future arrive?
- The German Court of Administrative Justice [Bundesverwaltungsgericht] did not decide that communities can enact prohibitions of diesel-engine powered cars?
- Many of the NGO’s did not advocate a ban of any fossil fuel driven cars in favor of things electric?
So, what’s the problem, then?
(Hint): Energy Storage Capacity
Perhaps the real answers might be:
- Useful energy cannot be created out of nothing and, moreover,
- the best battery technology is a distant runner-up to good old hydrocarbon (gasoline or diesel) fuel in terms of energy density and storage capacity of different systems. Just look at the following table, copied from my 2010 book Convenient Myths (p. 228).
While some of the numbers may have changed slightly over the last eight years, probably not by much. In any event, the table is to provide information as to the major differences between batteries and other energy storage systems. Clearly, so-called “fossil” fuels, such as gasoline, regardless of their origin, (natural or man-made via the Fischer-Tropsch-Synthesis from coal, or from limestone and water) are way ahead of all other storage systems in energy capacity per mass.
As you can imagine, even if some “smart Alec” were going to invent a new type of battery to store electric energy at double the previous capacity per unit of weight, it still would be way below that of the hydrocarbon type fuels like gasoline and diesel.
One can only surmise that Bosch recognized this and is now acting accordingly by getting out of that game. Perhaps some of the North American electro-mobility thinkers might learn to understand it too.
Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser Scientist and author,
After receiving his doctorate in chemistry from the Technical University Munich, he joined Environment Canada’s National Water Research Institute where he served as research scientist and project manager for several research groups. He represented the institute at a variety of national and international committees, gave numerous presentations at scientific conferences, was editorial board member and peer reviewer for several journals, adjunct professor and external reviewer of university theses, and was the Editor-in- Chief of the the Water Quality Research Journal of Canada for nearly ten years.
Dr. Kaiser is an author of nearly 300 publications in scientific journals, government and national and international agency reports, books, trade magazines, and newspapers. He has been president of the Intl. Association for Great Lakes Research, and is a recipient of the Intl. QSAR Award. He is currently Director of Research of TerraBase Inc., and is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada.
Read more at www.convenientmyths.com
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James Crouch
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Graphene. There exists ALREADY electric car whose body panels and frame component store electric charge. Future electrical storage may not even need “Batteries”. THAT is likely what Bosch has determined. Death of the battery all together.
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Squidly
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Give real meaning to “please don’t touch my car”
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Robert Beatty
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So if we take 1 kg of lead-acid battery and recharge it 100 times we get 50 Mj/kg – better than petrol which I cannot recharge. Guess that is why we use a battery to get the car started.
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Squidly
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And if I refill my gas tank 100 times … and I can refill that same tank many thousands of times more than a lead-acid battery before I have to replace it.
No matter how you slice it, it all comes down to energy density. Electricity is simply a very poor way to power a vehicle, pretty much any vehicle.
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Robert Beatty
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Rigth. So why don’t we start the car using this super high density fuel?
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eugene watson
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Beatty hasn’t a clue about how things work.
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Robert Beatty
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Mmmm. That sems to be a fairly universal condition.
jerry krause
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Hi Robert,
Very well said.
Have a good day, Jerry
Robert Beatty
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There is an accelerating force which keeps the Earth orbiting around the Sun. If we knew “how that thing works” we may be able to power our cars without using petrol or batteries?
jerry krause
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Hi Robert,
Richard Feynman wrote (“What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
“My father taught me to notice things. One day, I was playing with an “express wagon,” a little wagon with a railing around it. It had a ball in it, and when I pulled the wagon, I noticed something about the way the ball moved. I went to my father as said, “Say, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon, the balls rolls to the back of the wagon. And when I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. Why is that?”
“That, nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is called ‘inertia,’ but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now, that’s a deep understanding. He didn’t just give me the name.”
Is this the accelerating force which keeps the Earth orbiting around the Sun?
Have a good day, Jerry
Joseph Olson
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“Green Prince of Darkness” at FauxScienceSlayer.com
Chemical storage batteries have a maximum number of recharge cycles, approximately 400 cycles, as the buildup of DENDRITES shorts out the cells. I have studied every known form of storage and none compares with first time, direct use of Hydrocarbons. Thorium may be the only competitor on this planet.
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Robert Beatty
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Hi Jerry,
You raise some interesting points. The rail car example of momentum/inertia are linear and relatively straight forward. The complication comes when you take that thinking around in a circle – as per a ball tied to a string and swinging around a central pivot. Given no friction loses, it should rotate indefinitely. The string is an example of a fixed link. However, if the link is due to gravitational attraction, then we have an elastic link. I have noted this difference on page 11 of http://www.bosmin.com/PSL/GRAVIMASS.pdf this shows where elastic links use energy as in E=MC2 and leads me to conclude that the Expanding Earth theory should be taken more seriously.
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jerry krause
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Hi Robert,
Perturbation I word I do not read often now. Newton in his preface acknowledged that in the practical real world we can never measure (observe) with absolute accuracy. And everyone knew that the atmosphere influence the motion of matter. And he forgot that he knew that space was not absolutely empty.
I do not know if you know why I claim this. Hooke had proposed a thought problem to Newton and he drew a figure of a body which ideally should have been in a stationary orbit over a given location of the earth’s surface. And in Newton figure he drew the body spirally down to the earth’s surface. But when Hooke convinced everyone that Newton’s figure was silly Newton was terribly upset (embarrassed) because he had forgotten (my opinion) why he had draw his figure so had to agree that Hooke was correct. However, we know the space junk form time to time falls back into the atmosphere and once there quickly spirals to the earth’s surface.
At the time Hooke interrupted Newton was writing the 3rd book in which he extensively considered comet tails.. Comet tails which lead the comet to space and retarded the matter of the tail incoming. I doubt if anyone today doubts that there is a solar wind (a plasma of protons and electrons) from hydrogen atoms. But I wonder how many consider that this solar causes the comet tails to spread out great distance from the comet itself as some it matter evaporates or sublimes.
I read that the moon is going to sometime fall to the earth because work is clearly being done by its gravitation interaction with the matter of the earth. That I can understand and not worry about because this certainly in not going to happen tomorrow or next year. And clearly there are scientific issues which are effecting our lives today which should not be if a scientific idea (hypothesis, theory) is wrong. But we have observed too often in modern science what happens when accept theories are found to be wrong. We cannot understand what actually is occurring.(observed).
And I do not know if you understand how the scientific law is the absolute foundation of modern science. I do not know if you and others consider that no telescope can be made absolutely perfect even if you get it away from the earth’s atmosphere.
I have enough trouble finding the specific observations which I know must exist because of measurements made at, or near, the earth’ surface the past decade or two to be concerned about the systems that are so distant.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Robert Beatty
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Hi Jerry,
I am always impressed by how well you can stick to the road through looking in the rear vision mirror. My preference is to concentrate on the road ahead.
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jerry krause
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Hi Robert,
Thank you for your comments. For I am sure we understand each other even though it seems we have different objectives. However, here is a question for you to ponder.
Do you understand you are observing and trying to understand historical observations far older than the past to which I refer?
Have a good day, Jerry
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Robert Beatty
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Hi Jerry,
“Do you understand you are observing and trying to understand historical observations far older than the past to which I refer?”
Yes, but as I said, I prefer to concentrate on the road ahead.
You can always study yesterday’s weather map while trying to figure out what today’s weather will be. Much better to start with new raw data and interpret that.
If you spend time researching all the possible previous interpretations – you will run out of time before you reach a conclusion.
Worse still, you will have distracted others from their deliberations, and will have wasted precious research time that might have been put to a much better use.
jerry krause
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Hi Robert,
I take what you state very seriously and I agree totally with what you have stated. But I myself am not near as talented as certain others of the past. So, I have had to study their knowledge and wisdom to get up to speed in today’s world. I have to discover what they observed and learned that I haven’t yet observed and learned.
Therefore one of my objectives is to share some of the knowledge and wisdom of past of which I observe that many today seem totally unaware. For I know I was until finally, at the age of maybe 50, I began to read what Galileo and Newton and Boyle and most importantly what a professor of English literature had shared, with any possible reader, how Louis Agassiz, a naturalist, had taught students at Harvard U. to see..
From reading Lane Cooper’s book–Louis Agassiz As A Teacher–claimed to have learned to see so I can ‘can stick to the road through looking in the rear vision mirror’.
And I have almost completed an essay based solely upon data observed about five years ago which is still being observed today by projects funded the the government of the USA.
This is a good discussion so keep it going by responding. Maybe, someone is watching, I hope.
Have a good day, Jerry