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Altairnano’s NanoSafe battery. The best battery on the market, in our opinion. Shown is a 12 volt package. 35 of these are used in Phoenix’s car. It is cheaper to purchase with the car than separate.

Batteries

This web page is devoted to providing an overview of batteries, suitable for the electric vehicle market, both available now and future possibilities. The information presented is mostly from manufacturer’s web sites. W/kg is important for PHEVs not purely electric vehicles as large battery packs have plenty of amps available for acceleration. We invite corrections and verification by experts and manufacturers.

Price remains the main obstacle and have to get a lot lower like EEStore targets before electric vehicles are practical. The $/50kWHr column is the approximate size required for about 200 mile range. Divide by 50k to get $/WHr.

Available Now

Future

Everspring Global’s chromium-fluoride-lithium battery is much higher power to weight than Altairnano’s but does not have the long cycle life. Everspring and Electrovaya are the best choices where low weight is important.

Compare Electric Vehicle Batteries

There are other technologies competing for the same market, most notably EEStor’s 31 Farad 3500 volt capacitor and fuel cells powered by hydrogen or natural gas. These come under the Future heading and need to be addressed separately . A prominent ultra-capacitor manufacturer is Maxwell Technologies. Also an encouraging article from MIT research via www.spectrum.ieee.org

A motor is designed to run from a specific voltage and a battery discharge curve is well matched to this requirement as it produces near constant voltage during its discharge cycle. Capacitor voltage drops during the discharge cycle so either an additional variable DC to DC converter has to be designed to convert the changing voltage to a constant voltage like the battery, or the motor controller has to be designed to handle a large voltage range as its input. High voltage, high current devices are very expensive so the converter will not be cheap, but since the capacitors are low cost it still looks like the best value.  Lifetime (Cycles) and peak discharge rate (W/kg) should be near infinite and dependent on associated components. It also has excellent charge retention.

Zebra batteries are a Sodium Nickel Chloride battery. The promise is that the materials are abundant and cheap. The price is high because right now the batteries are hand made and include electronics for charge balancing and temperature control. Oh yea, they have to be maintained at 300°C to operate. Would you like to be caught in an accident with a huge battery filled full of molten Sodium Nickel Chloride? Safety concerns and low power density are the prime reasons car manufacturers have avoided this technology in the past.

There is some interest in Zinc-Air fuel cells from companies like eVionyx and Power Air . They claim 200 wh/kg PA, 500 wh/kg eVionyx and 225 wh/l PA, 2000 wh/l eVionyx with low cost. These sound attractive but are not rechargeable in the normal sense. Their fuel is zinc and when used up becomes zinc oxide. The zinc oxide must be re-cycled back to pure zinc. This requires energy, transportation, and storage which requires a new infrastructure. This is one of the main problems with hydrogen fuel cells. Zinc-Air looks like a better alternative than hydrogen fuel cells but still does not have the efficiency and convenience of batteries.

Most new technology batteries:

Electrovaya, AltairNano, A123Systems, Zebra, etc., do not quote prices on their websites. Everspring Global used to quote prices on their web site. They are currently only interested in big contracts for a large number of vehicles. There is a valid reason for this, and it comes down to warranty. High voltages required for Electric Vehicles means that a large number of batteries be placed in series, and sometimes groups in parallel. The problem is charge balancing, and this is where the fancy electronics comes in. The electronics package also monitors and controls cooling/heating, and shuts the battery down (usually via opening relay contacts) for emergency conditions like  over current and fire. The battery manufacturers do not want to trust the end user, or even car manufacturers, to design adequate control and safety system for their batteries. So they typically charge $65000 to engineer a battery pack for a specific application, and of course all this electronic control adds to the price of the battery. They will not sell non-warranted batteries for fear of a bad reputation beyond their control, and will warranty only batteries with their engineered control. Everspring provides a wealth of engineering data on their batteries so the purchaser can design a control system that best fits their application.

 

Article from ZEVA on LiFePO4 battery tests.