Replies

The bottleneck would become the electrical service to the stations. To recharge 500 vehicles per day would require 50kwh x 500 = 25mwh per day. 25mwh / 24 hour per day means an average draw from the grid at 480V of 2000A. That one service station would be drawing as much power as 1000 homes.

____________________________________________________________

Actually, While your numbers are the best I have seen so far there are a couple of other realities to consider. Most electricity at the neighborhood level is either at 5000V or 13000V. If you go to the next step it is at 69000V. We have transformers in various locations to get it down to 480V, but it would be easy to supply 5000V. Large facilities like large buildings often use 5000V motors to operate airconditioning equipment. This makes the cable quite small and the insulation around it quite large.

If the energy supply station had it’s own bank of capacitors it could be charging continuously then they could do an instant transfer at very high voltage to cars that came in for a refill. 50000W @ 5000V is only 10 amps, at 13000V it is only 3.8A and at 69000V is only .72A.

There is nothing impossible here once the right materials have been found. Some day all our cell phones, PDA’s Ipod’s etc will be charged with a coil that will charge a supercapacitor as we walk around near charging stations.

As far as charging overnight, I suspect that we will have a supercapacitor at home charging while we are away and when we get home it will dump a full charge to our car in a matter of seconds.

If this works there will be many type of alterternative energy that will be practical especially photovoltaics, windpower and wave power.

Thanks for the good info ! I didn’t realize 5000V was prevalent in neighborhoods unless it was an industrial area or a substation.

I was thinking about retrofitting existing neighborhood gas stations rather than building from scratch, so I wasn’t considering how easy it would be to get high voltages to them. 480V is easy. High amps though. And you are right about charging the vehicle — the EESTOR caps can be charged at (I think) 30,000V. Meaning a low amp, small cable at the “pump”.

Home charging doesn’t really seem like a problem to me. Yes, without a cap bank it might take 5 hours to fully recharge your 50kwh pack. But not many people are going to deplete a whole 50kwh every day. Most days you’d be topping up only 10kwh and be done in an hour. The inconvenience of an hour might not justify spending money on a separate cap bank in the garage. Unless the cap bank in your garage was dual-purpose and actually storing electricity to run your house while buying electricity at off-peak rates.