Automakers Raise Questions About Better Place's Battery Swap Model
About halfway into this video I show a battery swap on Zero Motorcycle's X model bike: http://www.7gen.com/blog/20090411/25537-podcast ... it demonstrates that when designed right you really can quickly change the battery pack and it doesn't have to be complicated.
For Project Better Place rapid battery swapping is a key part of their plan. I watched this video recently which is Shai Agassi giving a presentation to an highly technical audience at MIT about the plan. While watching my jaw was dropping with the brilliance of the plan.. but ...
The edmunds.com article raises some very good questions, and misses one I had.
My question is - It seems the PBB battery swap plan is relying on two assumptions: a) Battery packs are expensive, and sticker shock will keep people from buying them, b) Battery packs take a long time to recharge
Battery packs aren't necessarily going to remain expensive forever. Supposedly the lithium isn't all that expensive or rare, it's the other materials in the batteries that raise the expense. But for the quick recharge issue .. well, he walks through the numbers on the power required to quickly recharge a vehicle sized battery pack, similar to a blog posting I made a couple months ago. e.g. "To provide 20 kilowatt-hours in 5 minutes requires 240 kilowatts of power delivered to the car." Shai tosses out bigger numbers but the effect is the same, that the power level required for fast recharge is more than is likely to be handed to regular consumers.
The edmunds.com article asks whether the contentious competitive car industry would ever agree on the battery pack and vehicle shape standardization required to make quick battery exchange a reality.
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/642
A couple brilliant things about the plan are:-
Battery swap stations are inexpensive to build.. it's just a building with a power supply, some equipment to assist with exchanging packs, and battery pack recharging bays. The electricity is already widely available (in the U.S.) so you just have to arrange a high power feed from the power company.
The likely place for battery swap stations are along the highways between major cities. That's where most of the long distance travel is most likely to occur. Meaning that battery swap stations don't have to be as widely spread as gasoline stations.
