New research shows candle soot can power the lithium batteries in electric cars

Collecting candle soot from the (a) tip of the flame and (b) middle of the flame. SS current collector (c) before and (d) after deposition of carbon soot. Credit: Electrochimica Acta, Volume 180 (October 2015), doi:10.1016/j.electacta.2015.08.124

Burning a candle could be all it takes to make an inexpensive but powerful electric car battery, according to new research published in Electrochimica Acta. The research reveals that candle soot could be used to power the kind of lithium ion battery used in plug-in hybrid electric cars.

The authors of the study, from the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, India, say their discovery opens up the possibilities to use carbon in more powerful batteries, driving down the costs of portable power.

Lithium ion batteries power many devices, from smartphones and digital cameras all the way up to cars and even aircraft. The batteries work by having two electrically charged materials suspended in a liquid to produce a current. Carbon is used as one of those materials in smaller batteries, but for bigger, more powerful batteries – such as those used in electric cars – carbon is not suitable because of its structure, which cannot produce the required current density.

In the new study, Dr. Chandra Sharma and Dr. Manohar Kakunuri found that because of the shape and configuration of the tiny carbon nanoparticles, the carbon in candle soot is suitable for use in bigger batteries. What's more, because the soot could be produced quickly and easily, it is a scalable approach to making batteries.

"If you put a water droplet on candle soot it rolls off – that's an observation that's been made in the last few years. The material candle soot is made of, carbon, also has electric potential. So why not use it as an electrode?" asked Dr. Sharma, author of the study from the Indian Institute of Technology. "We looked into it and saw it also shows some exceptional electrochemical properties, so we decided to test it further."

When a candle burns, it gives off clouds of black soot made of carbon. The researchers looked at the soot collected from the tip of a candle flame and from the middle of the flame and compared the size, shape and structure of the carbon. The results showed that the burning process forms nanoparticles of carbon that are 30-40 nanometers across and are joined together in an interconnected network. They also found that the soot recovered from the tip of a candle flame, which burns at 1400˚C, has fewer impurities like wax, making it perform better as an electrical conductor.

The researchers then analyzed the effectiveness of the soot as a conducting material to use in a battery. The effectiveness of batteries and materials used in batteries can be tested through a technique called cyclic charge-discharge (CCD). The rate of charge/discharge reflects how powerful the battery is; the higher the rate, the more powerful the battery; the results showed that the candle soot carbon performed best at higher rates.

The shape and size of the carbon nanoparticles, and the way they are joined together, means candle soot is a suitable material to use in electric car batteries. Not only is the technology efficient and cost-effective, it is also scalable. Dr. Sharma estimates that one hybrid car would need ten kilograms of carbon soot, which would be deposited in about an hour using candles.

"Generally we overlook the simpler things; candle soot is not new but we're only now looking at it as a potential source of carbon," said Dr. Sharma. "We're very excited about the results. This new approach is very easy and the costs involved are minimal – it would make battery production cheaper."

The researchers now plan to develop a candle soot battery to test the technology further. They are also planning to test hybrid materials that contain candle soot to see if they can make it an even better material for batteries.

Explore further: Power Japan Plus announces dual carbon battery that charges 20 times faster than current lithium ion batteries

More information: "Candle Soot derived Fractal-like Carbon Nanoparticles Network as High-Rate Lithium Ion Battery Anode Material." Electrochimica Acta, Volume 180 (October 2015), DOI: 10.1016/j.electacta.2015.08.124

Source: New research shows candle soot can power the lithium batteries in electric cars

DEWA deploys eight electric cars

Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, CEO and MD of DEWA

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has added eight electric cars to its fleet, becoming the first government organisation in Dubai to use electric cars.

The move is in support of the Dubai Plan 2021 to make Dubai a smart, integrated and connected city that uses its resources sustainably.

DEWA aims to implement the Dubai Green Transport initiative and encourage the use of sustainable transportation with hybrid and electric vehicles, which will cut total carbon emissions in Dubai by up to 19%.

"We take pride in being the first government organisation to add high-performance electric cars to its fleet. This move supports Dubai's ambition to achieve a 10% increase in the total number hybrid and electric cars by 2030," said Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO, DEWA.

"DEWA is making history with the beginning of a new phase of adopting green transportation solutions in Dubai. We are confident that the infrastructure of charging stations will encourage the public and sectors in Dubai to deploy electric vehicles in its operations, and we hope individuals will also join the initiative gradually."

The move represents the implementation of the Green Charger initiative launched by DEWA to establish the infrastructure to build 100 electric vehicle charging stations this year.

DEWA has already completed its first phase with the opening of the first charging station in February and building 12 Green Charger stations that can charge 24 cars at once at DEWA offices. Four charging stations have been installed at the Dubai Silicon Oasis and Dubai Design District, D3.

Waleed Salman, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at DEWA, said: "Adding eight cars is a great achievement and an encouragement for other government departments to follow, especially in light of our Green Charger initiative. We have made significant progress in installing the charging stations. DEWA's efforts will contribute significantly to the transition towards a green economy."

DEWA is setting up three types of charging stations, fast-charging stations that take 20-40 minutes will be installed at petrol stations, medium-charging stations take 2-4 hours and will be installed in shopping malls, parks, and offices, with home charging stations that take 6-8 hours to charge.

Source: DEWA deploys eight electric cars

General Motors: Fleet Of Self-Driving Electric Chevy Volts For Employees Next Year

The technology behind GM's planned fleet of self-driving cars has been under development since 2012.

By Chris Loterina | Oct 05, 2015 09:33 AM EDT

The predecessor of the 2017 Chevrolet Volt has only been unrolled in select market presently. (Photo : Twitter/Mary Smith)

When news about self-driving cars spreads, Tesla and Google are usually at the forefront, especially Google as of late, as it has been road testing several of its autonomous vehicles as previously reported by HNGN. General Motors, however, made quite a splash when it announced Thursday that it could deploy a fleet of self-driving cars on its Michigan campus next year.

The car manufacturer specifically identified the late fall of 2016 as the date when several of its 2017 Chevrolet Volts will debut as the shuttle service for its employees working at the Warren Technical Center. The cars will be driving themselves using a technology that uses a dedicated app for passengers.

This is surprising for many observers in the auto industry because, unlike Google or Tesla, General Motors has not publicized its self-driving technology initiative.

"The program will serve as a rapid-development laboratory to provide data and lessons to accelerate the company's technical capabilities in autonomous vehicles," General Motors said in a press statement.

General Motors employees will be able to reserve a Chevy Volt and select a destination. The carmaker's autonomous technology, which has been under development since 2012, will power the vehicle to pick-up the passenger, shuttle him/her to the destination, and park the vehicle afterwards.

It is interesting to note that the electric car's predecessor, the 2016 Chevy Volt, is yet to roll out of General Motor's assembly plants. It will hit dealerships soon, but first-drive reviews indicate it is not an electric car, or even a hybrid model.

However, there are traces of high technology that could offer a glimpse of the 2017 electric variant. This includes the system that provides warning alerts for blind spots, rear cross traffic, lane departure, and forward collision, according to Popular Science. It will also include automatic braking and parking assist functionalities.

Another highly autonomous car that could be released for consumers in 2016 is the 2017 Cadillac CT6, according to The Verge. 

Source: General Motors: Fleet Of Self-Driving Electric Chevy Volts For Employees Next Year

Automakers vying for electric car supremacy

While Tesla has been the forefront of electric car technology, some new electric entries from other auto makers are showing that the California company may be in for some competition.

Toyota's Prius has topped the hybrid market, then Tesla upped the ante with its all-electric vehicles. This week at the Frankfurt auto show, most car makers revealed new all-electric cars, with Porsche taking the spotlight for their electric concept car, according to CNN.

Porsche's Mission E is a 4-door, 4-seater sports model that puts out 600 horsepower with its all-electric engine. With a battery range of more than 300 miles, the car competes ably with Tesla's model S. Incredibly, Porsche says the battery can recharge to 80 percent in just 15 minutes.

BMW also released its latest entry with its second-generation i8, a plug-in hybrid that is already on the market. The i8 goes 0 to 60 in under 4.5 seconds and can reach a top speed of 155 miles per hour. The company's design head says that his team is inspired by art, nature, fashion and other sources, which shows through in the car's organic style.

A Tesla spokesman expressed no concern with the coming competition from other auto makers. On the contrary, the company seeks to change the industry, he said, so the movement towards more electric vehicles is vindication of their mission.

Source: Automakers vying for electric car supremacy

Tesla has a strategy car incumbents can beat, but they may be too slow

Tesla Motors is following up its well-reviewed by insanely expensive Model S by releasing the Model X, an all-electric SUV that is … even more expensive, with vehicles starting at a mind-blowing $132,000. This isn't an unprecedentedly high price for a car, but even luxury automakers like BMW and Mercedes offer entry-level products for a quarter the price of a Model X.

Musk is, of course, aware that his vehicles are far too expensive to be mass-market successes. He has signaled that cheaper versions of the Model X will be "coming later," and promises that by 2017 there will be a car — the Model 3 — in the $35,000 range. But Tesla has missed deadlines before, so there is some reason to doubt that they'll be able to deliver on that target.

But even more, the whole idea of starting with an incredibly expensive, incredibly high-end product flies in the face of a lot of emerging conventional wisdom about the process of technological disruption and the desirability of shipping "minimum viable products" that improve iteratively over time.

Yet there's a method to the madness. In some ways, the actual car is the least of the obstacles to creating a mass-market electric car. Under the circumstances, the focus on high-end products as a support system for the infrastructure Tesla needs to make a a mass market product makes perfect sense. And so far, the strategy is working. But it does have one potentially fatal flaw — it's slow, and leaves Tesla potentially vulnerable to having its legs swept by another new entrant.

Electric cars' chicken and egg problem

If electric cars were widely owned and nobody had a gasoline-fueled car, nobody would buy one. Getting regulatory approval to cruise past people's houses with such a noisy and toxic device would be a nightmare, of course, but it would also be insanely inconvenient. Where would you refuel?

In the real world, of course, the shoe is on the other foot: people with conventional cars can easily find a gas station, while electric car charging stations are few and far between.

Regardless of the price of gas, the volume of subsidy, or one's personal commitment to the environment it just makes an awful lot of practical sense to buy a car that uses the same fuel as everyone else's car. Tesla is aware of this and has a solution in the form of a growing network of "Supercharger" stations that, when complete, would make electric cars a reasonable thing for a typical family to consider.

The Model S (and Model X) are priced to appeal to people who don't need to worry too much about the practical aspects of car ownership. And they offer gross margins high enough to subsidize the build-out of the charger network.

Similar logic applies to the costly batteries that are the heart of an electric car. Tesla is building a "Gigafactory" that it says will reduce unit costs on its batteries by 30 percent. This is the kind of breakthrough you need in order to make an affordable electric car. The early expensive cars provide the funds necessary to build the factory, as well as practical experience with integrating batteries into cars that would be necessary to actually take advantage of it.

Disruption from above

Like any good disruptive business strategy, Tesla's has the virtue of being essentially impossible for incumbent automakers to compete with. Companies that are already making money selling internal combustion engines aren't going to invest in a broad infrastructure that would make gasoline obsolete. Nor are they going to attempt to engineer a manufacturing breakthrough that would have the same impact.

The incumbents aren't dumb. They can (and do) make electric cars. But they make EVs that are designed to live in a world dominated by conventional cars — semi-affordable small cars useful for daily local driving by people with an eccentric interest in green living.

By contrast, Tesla, by simply accepting the reality that its early cars will be too expensive for the vast majority of people to even consider, has achieved something really impressive: near-universal acclaim for the quality of its products including a determination from Consumer Reports that the P85 D variant of the Model S is so good that it broke their quality scale.* This is a kind of free marketing campaign for the eventual Model 3 that money can't buy.

Tesla's achilles heel is speed

The strategy of starting from the top and then working down, though alien to the software-heavy business models that dominate the startup sector these days, makes perfect sense for the infrastructure-intense car industry. The real risk for Tesla is that their roadmap may be unfolding too slowly. The Model X was originally supposed to have shipped in 2013, and even with delivery of preordered vehicles beginning this week they don't think new orders will be fulfilled until the back half of 2016. In other words, Tesla is evidently facing significant production bottlenecks that make it difficult for them to make cars in large quantities.

That's another good reason for the company to charge high prices but it adds up to significant reason to doubt that they'll really have a mass-market Model 3 ready in 2017. They would need to develop the car, obviously, which is difficult. But they would also need to develop a process by which the cars can actually roll of assembly lines at mass scale. There's no point in selling a car that normal people would consider buying if you can't actually get them built.

This isn't a huge problem if you view the competitive set as legacy carmakers. A year or three, more or less, doesn't really change anything.

The problem is that other new entrants could attempt a similar strategy, and despite Tesla's years-long lead their slow pace of execution means they're not un-catchable. Companies like Google and Apple that are known to be interested in the car market have much more free cash flow available from their existing businesses than Tesla can obtain by selling high-end cars. If they can manage to build a good car (admittedly a big if) then these companies have the ability to leapfrog Tesla in terms of capital investments in manufacturing and vehicle charging facilities with ease. To stave off that kind of competition, Tesla needs to rely on its actual expertise in building cars. And so far even though the cars they've built have been extremely well-regarded, they haven't actually demonstrated the ability to make them at the kind of scale that a successful car company needs.

* Correction: An earlier version of this article said it was the Model X, rather than the P85D, that broke Consumer Reports' quality ratings scale.

Source: Tesla has a strategy car incumbents can beat, but they may be too slow

To punish Volkswagen for its emissions scandal, make it build electric cars

You can't cheat on the emissions test of a car that doesn't make emissions. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

Once the media storm around Volkswagen's emission cheating scandal calms down, the most likely outcome is a massive recall and a huge fine. Neither will achieve a lasting result, nor would they meaningfully contribute to reducing emissions, the goal of the regulation VW broke and covered up. Instead, we have the chance to impose a punishment that will have lasting impact: make Volkswagen build all-electric cars.

Related: The Guardian view on the VW scandal: punish the guilty | Editorial

A recall would be ineffective at best. Many VW car owners in the US are unlikely to voluntarily surrender cars that function properly and do not present, at the individual car level, a health risk. It is not certain that a fix can even be implemented. The best-case scenario of a recall is that some of the cars are brought in and have the emissions issue fixed at the expense of reduced gas mileage, thereby increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The worst-case scenario is that VW sends millions of cars to the junkyard. Both outcomes are negatives for the environment.

As for a fine, $10bn seems to be the ballpark figure at this point. Some of it might help fund the Environmental Protection Agency but, if past fines to the financial industry are any indication, the money will mostly be used in areas that have little connection to the original issue. And fines, even really big ones, often fail to deter future misdeeds. Look at Wall Street, where fines have increased in both frequency and dollar amounts without ever reshaping the industry's culture.

Here's a better outcome: the EPA should mandate that Volkswagen exclusively produce electric vehicles within five years for the US market. This would remove the emissions from millions of cars, not only health pollutants like nitrous oxide but also more essentially the other greenhouse gases that threaten our whole planet. The company is well on its way to commercializing electric vehicles, and the $10bn fine could be put to better use by building a battery factory in the US to supply those electric models, creating jobs along the way. Add in an obligation for VW to equip US highways with electric charging stations and we'll have changed the transportation landscape of this country for the better.

If you think this is impossible, look at Tesla. In less than a decade, they went from an unlikely startup to the producer of the world's highest-rated car. The company is currently building a battery gigafactory. All this with zero emissions and zero pollutants. No need to cheat on emissions testing – there is no need for emissions testing at all. This was done with a total expenditure of $3bn. Imagine what $10bn could do.

The automobile industry, like most incumbents in other sectors, has too often been reluctant to embrace real innovation and change. The commitment to reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as well as improving safety has been half-hearted at best. The cars we drive today basically run on the same technology and the same fuel that were used a hundred years ago. Mileage, performance, emission levels and safety have improved, mostly because of increased regulation, but it's still about burning fuel in a combustion engine.

It's time for a much bigger shift. Volkswagen should use its know-how and capital to end all emissions from its vehicles. That would be a fitting punishment – and an opportunity to do lasting social and environmental good.

The author is an investor at Tesla.

Source: To punish Volkswagen for its emissions scandal, make it build electric cars

Electric car charger coming to Plainfield

Electric car charger coming to Plainfield

PLAINFIELD — Pretty soon, you'll be able to charge your electric car in Plainfield.

At its regular meeting Monday night, the Select Board heard from Bob Atchinson, the town's energy coordinator, who presented his plan for installing a charger near the kiosk on Mill Street in the village.

To help offset its municipal energy costs, Plainfield recently installed a solar array near the park and ride lot off Main Street with the help of a $9,900 grant from the Renewable Energy Resource Center. According to board member David Strong, that grant came with an incentive: If the town installed a charging station for electric vehicles, it would receive an additional $1,000 to help cover the cost.

Atchinson estimates the charging station will cost $1,780. The difference of $780 would be paid from the energy coordinator's budget

Of the $1,780, about $600 would be for the charger itself and $550 would pay for connecting the charger to the electric grid. Miscellan eous electrical supplies are estimated to cost $264, while $250 would cover excavation.

Board Chairman Bram Towbin said the charger would be a "big boost" for bringing people to town where they would patronize local businesses. Noting there are no charging stations in the Plainfield area, Towbin is hopeful the town could become a preferred destination for drivers of electric vehicles.

According to PlugShare.com, an online database of charging stations across the country, central Vermont has stations in Barre, Montpelier, Middlesex, Waterbury, Waitsfield, Stowe, Hardwick and Danville. But there are no listed charging stations in Cabot, East Montpelier, Calais, Plainfield or Marshfield.

Atchinson told the board that in lieu of charging people to use the station, there would be a cash box with a slot for voluntary payments. He said those who use the station could look at a chart that will show how much electricity they have used, with a suggested amount.

Tow bin acknowledged some people won't pay anything, but said that won't be a big concern. During the hour or two when the vehicle is charging, the car's driver and passengers presumably will spend their time patronizing one or more of the businesses in town.

Board members approved the project. Atchinson said the plan is to break ground sometime in the next couple of weeks with a goal of having the station up and running later this fall.

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Source: Electric car charger coming to Plainfield