The Ultimate Battery - a must read

I did some research on this yesterday: Newest Lithium Iron Phosphate battery material promises sea change for electric vehicle usefulness UPDATE: I shoulda read the zoomilife article first. This is a different battery breakthrough than what I'm referring to below. FWIW the zoomilife article links to this article in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature07879.html

UPDATE: This is clearly a good week for battery breakthroughs...

The breakthrough is 5-10 years into the future before we will be able to buy batteries with this feature. The breakthrough is a refinement of LiFePO4 chemistry to drastically improve charge/recharge times. They were tossing around 300C rates and/or a 100-fold increase in charge/recharge rates.

One article I read quoted a GE battery engineer scoffing whether this was needed for vehicle sized battery packs. What's more necessary is increase in kwh/kg (energy density) rather than w/kg (power density). Increasing energy density gives more range and I suppose the GE guy is convinced LiFePO4 by itself has enough power density to adequately power cars. It's the range people need more.

Also I wrote up some back of the envelope estimates of whether fast recharge can feasibly be implemented for cars. e.g. if the car requires a 20 kilowatt-hour recharge, in 5 minutes, that's 240 kilowatts of electricity being zapped into the car. Supposedly this battery breakthrough could absorb that much electricity but would a consumer level charger connection ever be built to handle that much current?

On the other hand faster recharge is clearly desirable.

Well, where I live consumers typically have 2 or 3 times 25 amps at 230 V.
So you really can't draw more than some 15 kW, certainly not with a pizza
in the oven.

With that kind of power and fast fill, maybe full service recharge will become common? At home, you tend to have all night. The folks that can afford that good a battery can afford to pay a mimimum wage lackey to handle the connector.