This is exciting news.
Electric passenger cars would solve so many large problems. However, range has been an issue. The best only last for about 150 – 200 miles between charges. A charge on a home charger can take up to 8 hours.
Enter JFE Engineering with an industrial strength charger that can give a small EV an 50% charge in just three minutes. You read that right, five minutes. About the time it takes to get gas.
If that news wasn’t good enough, hold on. MIT has just licensed battery technology to a private firm. The technology uses carbon nanotubes which can make the batteries store 5 times as much energy as a conventional ultracapacitor.
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Mitch (the author of the first comment on the MIT group’s work) is correct – the author of that blog post is confusing energy and power. Power is energy per unit time – basically, it’s how fast you can deliver a certain amount of energy. Batteries can store a lot of energy (relatively speaking) but can’t deliver a lot of power; ultracapacitors can deliver a lot of power, but can’t store very much energy.
This new MIT gadget stores more energy than an ultracapacitor and delivers more power than a regular battery. Which is neat. And it may be important for making heavy-duty electric vehicles (that need a lot of energy *and* a lot of power). But since it doesn’t store any more energy than a regular battery, it doesn’t mean all that much for ordinary electric vehicles.
(I edited an article on this stuff not too long ago. It’s not free to the public, but if you want to see it, send me an email. Most of it is pretty accessible, I think.)
Still good news. The increased power may make electric trucking, electric construction equipment, etc more of a reasonable possibility.