Followup - How EESTOR Can Be Disruptive
My innocuous little post on EESTOR has become the most popular/infamous article I’ve written yet. So I thought I would follow it up with a more positive outlook on how I think EESTOR could be more disruptive.
Sphere: Related ContentA Cheaper Electric Car By 2009???
No matter what I write about regarding innovation, it seems that everyone is most interested in reading about electric cars. So without further ado:
Does EESTOR Have What It Takes To Be Disruptive?
One of the great myths of innovation is that the best products win out. Nothing could be further from the truth - tons of great products fail. Let’s take a look at an potentially great new product and see what might be in store for it.
Sphere: Related ContentMessage from the ICE: “I’m Not Dead Yet! I’m Feeling Happy!”
In my two-parter on the need for electric cars I discuss the internal combustion engine (ICE) as being the biggest reason we need to go electric. So imagine my surprise when I found out about a rogue manufacturer who has rethunk some of the fundamental workings of the ICE and created a potential winner. So although this isn’t an electric car, it warrants mention here.
Big Bacterial Biology Breakthrough
Craig Venter has done it again. His team replaced the DNA of one bacterium with the DNA from another of a different species - and transformed the host into the donor.
The transplanted DNA took over its single-cell host in about three days. The resulting bacterium was indistinguishable from the donor species, the researchers reported in the online edition of the journal Science.
“This is the equivalent of changing a Macintosh computer to a PC by inserting a new piece of software,” said Craig Venter, a maverick geneticist and senior author of the study.
This is the first step in designing new synthetic lifeforms. As stated before, Venter’s goal is to build an organism that bioprocesses organic material and produces biofuel.
Sphere: Related ContentMore On That Air-Powered Car
Here’s a cool video on the air-powered car coming out of India:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFbKINlXzRk]
With all our efforts focused on electric cars, it’s sad that ideas like this are overlooked. If widely available, air driven cars would immediately fill a huge niche for local commuting. All you need to refuel is an air compressor, which you can get anywhere. Plenty of range for work/school/shopping, plenty of top speed for brief hops on the interstate. Cheap to operate. Low first cost. Zero emissions. Free air conditioning.
Two liabilities: 1) needs some work on the crash safety aspect, and, almost as important, 2) needs someone like IDEO to come up with a body design that looks a lot less…dorkish. The last one in the video is OK, the rest look meh.
Sphere: Related ContentWhy We Need Electric Cars, Part II
In the first installment I discussed the three main paths we are taking to rid ourselves of the need for oil, concluding that the electron economy holds more promise than either the biofuel or hydrogen economy. I also talked about some innovations on the supply side that will make electricity more renewable. This installment discusses advances in battery tech that make various forms of electric cars more practical.
The past two years have brought a quiet revolution in high performance battery technology. The basic problem is: how do we make 1) high energy-density batteries that 2) recharge quick enough to make you want to give up your gasoline powered car? And the solutions have been developed largely due to nanotechnology, and rethinking the fundamental assumptions of how batteries are built and recharged.
Two approaches are gaining steam. The first the development of high performance, safe lithium batteries. Two companies are targeting their new battery technologies for the hybrid/full electric car markets - A123 and Altairnano. A123 got off the starting blocks faster with their nanophosphate lithium ion cells, because they are better geared for mass production. The new cells set new performance standards in nearly every important category. They’ve nearly eliminated cycle degradation - new cells are testing out at 300,000 cycles successfully. This means you don’t have to replace the battery pack during the life cycle of the car, avoiding a major maintenance expense. They are also targeting the widest possible market, offering separate products for full electric cars, plug-in hybrid electric cars, and plug-in hybrid CONVERSION KITS. You’ll be able to take a three year old Prius and upgrade it to 150+ MPG.
Altairnano, as I discussed earlier, is partnering with others to market a full electric vehicle, but they are mainly involved in the development of the lithium battery it uses. Their innovation is to apply nanotech-engineered materials to the battery terminals, eliminating impedements to fast recharge cycles. You can recharge a 50 kWh Nanosafe battery pack in as little as 10 minutes, given adequate charging capacity. This potentially eliminates another barrier to electric car development - inconvenience. If you can eventually recharge your battery in the same, or a bit more, time as it takes to refuel your gas tank, you’re more likely to consider buying an all-electric car - which one of the things I believe that ‘Who Killed The Electric Car’ got totally wrong.
In both cases, nanotech has been used to make lithium batteries more powerful, cheaper to manufacture, and charge faster. But what about the venerable old lead acid battery? Is it becoming the Edsel of the battery world? Not according to Firefly, who has developed a way to make lead-acid batteries that compete with lithium, performance wise, at a fifth of the cost. They did so by replacing the lead with a carbon-graphite foam. This dropped the weight substantially and increased the surface area to enhance material utilization. The result is a battery that is superior to its lead based counterpart in every way - and can slip directly into the existing automotive and high performance battery distribution network.
And then there’s EESTOR, the darkhorse that promises a totally new technology that makes batteries obsolete. They claim proprietary improvements in materials have made possible a super-powerful, super-cheap ultracapacitor. They are being extremely secretive, evoking shouts of ‘VAPOR!’ from the masses, but if they are for real they’ve got a disruptive innovation that will change the way we think about electric vehicles.
Assuming EESTOR doesn’t swoop in to save the day, there are two main challenges with all-electric cars. The first is initial cost. In a purely electric car, the battery is the most expensive single component (unless Firefly carbon foam batteries come about, but they aren’t as energy dense as modern lithium batteries so they take up more room). As you saw from the response to my earlier post, the Phoenix from Altairnano will clock in at $70K, while the Telsa Roadster is now up to $98K. To increase vehicle range you have to add battery capacity, which raises cost - there will be no cost effective way, in the short term, to market an electric vehicle with a 300 mile range. And the only way to take advantage of that range would be to exploit the fast-recharge capabilities of the newer batteries - bringing us to the next challenge…
The issue with fast-recharge batteries is finding a means to exploit their capabilities in a practical manner. To recharge a 25 kWh battery in 10 minutes requires a 150 kW power source. This means your local gas station will have to invest in recharge stations. While you’re waiting on them, you’ll have to settle for a much slower home-based recharge at 240 volts - a 30 amp circuit will recharge a 25 kWh battery in about 3.5 hours. That means effective range will be limited to daily commuting - a need met with a mere 40-50 mile electric range, or about 12 kWh. For longer trips you’ll need to keep that gas minivan.
This means the easier path for early widespread adoption of electric vehicles is via plug-in hybrids (PHEVs). The current series hybrid power plants being designed for the VentureOne and the Chevy Volt use a battery for daily use and a diesel generator for longer trips. The series PHEV satisfies all driving needs, and costs less due to the smaller battery requirement.
Since a whopping 75% of all driving is ‘local’ in nature (work, shopping, school, etc), the impact of shifting that mileage from gasoline to the electric grid would be nothing short of staggering. And because most recharging would be done during off-peak overnight hours we don’t have to worry about power company ‘brown outs’ during peak air conditioning season.
Would biofuels like cellulose ethanol have a place in this? Sure - in the short term, if we had a nation of PHEVs dropping the majority of our gasoline needs, the remaining requirement could be met with ethanol and/or biodiesel. And as batteries get less expensive and high-power recharging stations appear, we can move towards all-electric vehicles with bigger batteries. And one day, if hydrogen or other kinds of fuel cells become practical, you can do away with batteries altogether.
But the first step is the PHEV.
Sphere: Related ContentWhy We Need Electric Cars, Part I
The most important part of the innovative process, arguably, is finding the right problem to solve. The competition between visions for our automotive future indicate that not everyone is trying to solve the same problem, and as a result we seem to be wasting a great deal of effort on low-quality solutions.
If we can all agree that the problem we are trying to solve is ‘How Do We Eliminate Our Dependence on Oil,’ or something similiar, it seems there are three distinct (and often non-complementary) problem restatements:
1. How might we move to a sustainable biofuel-based economy (develop new biofuels that allow us to keep our current internal combustion engine vehicles)?
2. How might we move to a sustainable electron-based economy (develop sustainable energy sources for power generation, and new batteries that allow practical transition from ICEs to full-electric vehicles)?
3. How might we move to a sustainable hydrogen-based economy (develop cost-effective ways to generate and transport hydrogen, and new cost effective hydrogen fuel cells to power our vehicles)?
Each has associated challenges and opportunities. But there are definitely discriminating factors that would, if we all got on the same sheet of music, allow us to prioritize scarce investment.
First off, let’s look at problem 3). The big advantage to hydrogen is that, if we can ever find a way to generate and use it cost effectively, it’s everywhere, it’s good for the environment, and it’s pretty efficient. But the negatives are pretty overwhelming, because right now, calling a spade a spade - hydrogen is a panacea. No path to the hydrogen economy exists that doesn’t include the phrase “…and then something magic happens.” Because right now the technology gaps are DECADES away from being filled. We’re talking order-of-magnitude drops in cost and increases in portability. Some day, hydrogen might be practical, but we can prepare for that by choosing another path today - more on that later.
The biofuel solution is getting a lot of press. Ethanol, biodiesel, and the like are favored by many for one overriding advantage - it allows us to keep our current ICE-based vehicle infrastructure intact. Detroit et al can build the same cars, and we can get our fuel from the same gas stations. But this solution leaves the baseline problem intact. We don’t have a problem because our cars use gasoline - we have a problem because ICEs ARE DAMNED INEFFICIENT. From the oil well to the wheels of your car, the total system efficiency is about 14%. If our ICEs were even 20 percent efficient, we’d use a third less gasoline that we do now. Plus, keeping the ICEs means we keep all the existing maintenance problems which result from a mechanical system with thousands of parts. This is why I regard biofuels as a short-term solution that tides us over to the best of the three - the electron economy.
Electricity is everywhere. It is more ubiquitous than gasoline - there might be a gas station every few miles on American main roads, but there’s an outlet every few FEET in every America neighborhood. We rely on it for everything BUT transportation. And the only reason we do that is because gasoline is energy dense, portable, and, even at today’s prices, cheap. In contrast, even the best batteries have been too expensive and take too long to charge to make electric cars a viable alternative for anything other than short, slow commutes in the city.
Taken on its own, gasoline coming out of the pump is cheaper, per unit energy, that electricity coming out the socket. But burned in an ICE, gasoline becomes more expensive by a factor of 3 or more. Electricity used in an electric car has a cost equivalent, as compared to gasoline, of about 80 cents per gallon.
Electricity is generated by a more diversified portfolio of energy sources - coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear, hydroelectric and even small amounts of wind and solar. But because the plant-to-wheels efficiency of the electric car is in the neighborhood of 30-35% - inefficiencies are distributed fairly evenly across the process - it takes a lot less energy to make the electric car move than it takes for a gasoline equivalent.
At the same time, solar thermal and solar photovoltaic technologies are maturing and will result in an even further drop in non-renewable energy usage. These technologies have been around for a while but are just now becoming cost effective enough to be competitive. States offer incentives to businesses and homeowners for installing solar electricity. And there is a new technology on the horizon that might make us more of a CARBON-based economy.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore Labs and elsewhere are developing a technology called direct carbon fuel cells. This type of fuel cell uses ash-free carbon from coal, coke, charcoal, or just about any other source of carbon you can think of and generates electricity directly, at a conversion efficiency up to a whopping EIGHTY PERCENT. This is a huge innovation, one that has the potential to change the way we generate and use electricity forever. This is another reason to support the electron economy - the woody biomass that would otherwise be used for cellulose ethanol could go to making charcoal for use in DCFCs. Between coal and biomass, we could provide all of our electrical needs domestically when DCFCs become practical. And the CO2 byproduct can be easily sequestered and used elsewhere.
To summarize: of the three paths, the electron economy has the most potential and the liabilities are the easiest to mitigate. Biofuels can serve as a bridging factor that help us achieve energy independence, but when DCFCs become practical the majority of biofuel feedstocks should be shifted to carbon production.
Part II will discuss improvements at the other end of the plant-to-wheels energy chain - innovations in battery technology.
Sphere: Related ContentPatenting Life
I’ve been deluged with articles about the J. Craig Venter Institute and their desire to, well, patent life itself. Curiously, there is no news release on their website about this but, here is the crux of the matter:
Craig Venter of Synthetic Genomics Inc., says his 500-strong research team has figured out exactly which genes provide the bare essentials for life — and he wants the commercial rights to their use.
Why?
His team plans to cobble together synthetic versions of these 381 essential genes to create the world’s first artificial living being — a bacterium called mycoplasma laboratorium. The custom-made organism could then be programmed to convert sunlight into eco-friendly fuels, such as hydrogen or ethanol, the firm says.
Let me get this straight - the primary use for the genes that ‘provide the bare essentials of life’ is to make…car fuel?
Anyway, the main point here isn’t the end application - it’s the act of patenting use of a gene sequence. What’s the analogy? You can’t copyright individual words but you can assemble words into verse and copyright a song. But you have no rights over the use of the song - anyone can record and profit from it, as long as they pay you a royalty. The patent is different - the owner has exclusive control over that particular technology. But the innovative potential for this particular gene sequence is broad enough to warrant some kind of open source arrangement, as long as the originator gets paid in some way when someone else profits. In other words, no patent please.
But of course the bigger issue is the implication of patenting life forms, and that’s a bit too big a topic for me to tackle today.
Sphere: Related ContentAnother Electric Car - Altairnano Phoenix
Last week, Altairnano unveiled its all-electric SUV, dubbed Phoenix, in Reno, Nevada. Altairnano’s contribution is the development of a fast-recharge lithium battery - they farm out the construction of the vehicle to an unnamed Korean manufacturer. Debuting with an SUV has pros and cons - SUVs are in demand, but a Prius sized vehicle would have been cheaper. Interesting quote:
“I’m definitely buying one,” said John Koehler of Chicago after a test drive. Koehler, a physician, said he traded his Lexus for a hybrid Toyota Prius and “cut my gas cost in half.” He sees the Phoenix as his next step.
“You have to look at the lifetime cost,” he said. The higher price (presumed; specifics haven’t been announced) of an electric car will be canceled, Koehler believes, by lower operating expenses. That it’s easier on the environment is a bonus.
If you don’t know what the “specifics” of the higher price is, how do you know if you’ll save over a gas-powered vehicle? This guy sounds like he’ll make do with less to save gas - he traded in a Lexus for a Prius, after all. Most do a more apples to apples comparison. An electric SUV will have to compare favorably, life-cycle cost-wise, to an identically sized and featured gas SUV (and that includes air conditioning).
Also:
With eventual public sales in mind, though, company officials said Altairnano is already talking with Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s largest utility, about a web of “rapid charge stations.” With conventional 480-volt, three-phase service, they could top off batteries during a coffee stop (recharging at home, with the same 220 volts that runs the clothes dryer or stove, would take about five hours).
For the forseeable future, you’ll have to charge this one at home. How many vehicles would have to be on the road before PG&E invests in these “stations?”
This one is definitely a push in the right direction, but whenever I see the phrase “specifics haven’t been announced” I know that sticker shock awaits.
Sphere: Related Content