The Green Optimistic

Today, dr. Ross E. Dueber, the CEO of ZPower, a battery producing company, discusses the technology of making the silver-zinc battery for consumer electronics at the Batteries 2008 conference in Nice France. The conference just started today and is of great interest for the alternative energy blogosphere.

Toshiba has developed an advanced type of Lithium-Ion batteries, the SCiB (Super Charge ion Battery). They say it has the capacity of charging within 5 minutes at 90% of its capacity, and it is being able to bear 5000 to 6000 charges until it starts losing capacity. They used the battery to demonstrate these on a laptop.

The Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries are based on Lithium Ion, but they offer many advantages over LiCO2 (Lithium Cobalt), frequently used in laptops, mp3 players and cell phones. They also offer a greater range, power and safety, in an electric vehicle - they will not explode or catch fire if overcharged.

Engineers and scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, led by Rod Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor and physical chemist, have created a one-atom thick layer of carbon, called “graphene”, and they put it to use in electrical storage systems, such as ultracapacitors, a viable way to clean and efficient energy storage.

It’s not breaking news anymore, but some scientists from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and others, led by Stuart Licht, discovered a battery that could kick out fossil fuels at the chapter of energy storage capacity.

Plug-In Supply, Inc has just unveiled the “PbA10″ Conversion System last week at the Plug-in 2008 conference in San Jose. Their system is based on the CalCars’Open Source design, and it turns a standard 2004-2008 Toyota Prius into a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) with an all-electric range of 10-15 miles and improved average mileage of up to 100 miles per gallon (plus 1 cent/mile of electricity).

Here’s a method of producing a battery out of some Cola, salt, aluminum and copper coins. It lights a LED and it can be an interesting source of free energy!

Modern cars need a lot of battery power due to the high electricity consumption by those electronic gadgets people have in them. Often, the car sales personnel confronts with the issue of a dead battery when they are trying to sell a vehicle that has been standing parked for a long time.