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Zinc-Air batteries


Barry

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We all know the Achilles heel of electric cars is and has always been the batteries. They're heavy and they don't last long enough. 

Scientists in Australia are now working on Zinc-Air batteries as a viable replacement for current Lithium Ion batteries. They are lighter, cheaper and have the potential to store 5 times more power than Lithium Ion. They also claim to be more environmentally friendly. 

The problem with them is that recharging is difficult because of the lack of suitable electrocatalysts to reduce and generate oxygen during the discharging and charging of a battery.

These rather smart Australians have come up with a solution using bifunctional electrocatalysts to enable the discharge/recharge process. 

As it's still early days, the technology is not without its problems. After 60 120 hour cycles, the batteries lose 10% of their efficacy. So while not an immediate solution, this technology is definitely one to watch out for in the future. Like it or not, electric cars are here to stay. 

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Electric cars are definitely the future, but one problem that has not featured strongly is the fact that not many countries have the power generating capacity to accommodate the load that comes with many millions of cars being recharged at the same time. I am doing a bit of research on this issue now, but it seems like the six to eight years it takes to build a power station is going to have a serious effect on France and England's plans to ban the sale of  petrol and diesel cars by 2040.

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Does anyone remember that era when we used to think electric transport will be the slowest due to power supply and now it become faster than petrol and diesel cars. Electric + solar way to charge would be an ideal combination, drive whole day for free in sunny countries like UAE.

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Cars My passion :mrgreen:  :ugeek:

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Building new power stations is an issue but what's more of an issue is what's being used to fuel the power station which is mainly fossil fuels, i.e. coal, oil and gas which have limited supplies and as the supplies dwindle, the cost will go up. Some stations are using semi renewables such as willow but even that isn't a proper solution as growing it takes up a lot of land. We're a long way off nuclear being a safe option, look at Chernobyl, Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, it takes very little for things to go wrong very quickly and when it goes wrong it really goes wrong. I think it was only last year that the sheep on a mountain in Ireland, thousands of miles away from Chernobyl got passed for human consumption due to fallout. The real solution is all around us. It's the wind, water, sun. All completely renewable and all completely free. I still can't understand why the UAE is using gas and working on nuclear plants when there is a vast expanse of desert that could be planted with solar panels. These particular methods, wind, water, solar aren't like building a traditional power plant. You can install the units one by one and hook them up to the grid as you go along and add more to increase capacity as and when required.

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What you say is true, but the problem with solar power is that it only works when the sun shines, and presumably, the millions of electric cars will all, or mostly, be recharged at night. So far, nobody has worked out a way to store large amounts of solar-generated power for any period of time, which means that when the sun goes down, solar power effectively disappears for everyone but those who have small-scale domestic systems.  However, as you say, fueling the power stations is still the overriding factor/problem that prevents large scale electric car production, and at this point, it seems that nuclear power is the only viable option, even though it is inherently dangerous.  

Water and wind can never generate enough power, but what little of it there is, is always welcome. Nonetheless, some years ago it emerged that the Russians had been planning setting up huge mirrors in space to reflect sunlight into agricultural areas at night to extend the growing season in far-northern latitudes, but several international treaties put a stop to that.  If that could be revived and made to work, we could maybe have solar power at night too, even though the astronomer in me will fight this idea tooth and nail, since all the stars will effectively disappear from the night sky.   

 

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With the regards to overnight storage of electricity generated from solar, Tesla are currently building the worlds largest lithium ion battery, 130 MWh iirc, for a wind farm in Australia. Wether this will be used for long term storage or like a giant capacitor  to balance things out, I'm not sure, but it does show that we are moving in the right direction. Obviously though, it will not be possible to build thousands of giant lithium ion batteries due to the limited supply of lithium and the impact on the environment. Maybe Zinc-air will become a viable solution? There is also the option of building huge salt water batteries. Salt water is something we're not short of. 

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