Traders Watch A123 Systems (AONE) on Valence Technology (VLNC) Halt
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Considered a penny-stock, Valence shares were halted after moving 46 percent lower.
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Nonsense, George...
Your commentary, above, merely goes to show that you have no real understanding of the science behind this subject.
Solar can never be as useful as some people like to suppose, for the very simple reason that there's a set "maximum delivery" (in energy per unit area) due to the SUN NOT BEING ADJUSTABLE... and this is a max value, meaning that it's at "sun directly overhead, no haze, no dust" and only happens at a peak of once per day. Add in clouds, rain, the day/night cycle, and so forth, and the real "continuous reliably delivery" rate from solar becomes far, far lower than you'd assume if you just pretend that it's high noon in the California desert perpetually.
Solar just can't do the job. It's a nice supplement, but that's all it is, and all it ever will be. You'll need to cover every square inch of the greater Chicago metro area just to provide enough power to supply the larger skyscrapers in downtown Chicago.
So, drop solar (and wind, for that matter) off the table. You really need a rapid, efficient production of electricity... meaning steam-driven generators, with the heat generating the steam coming from combustion, or nuclear decay, or (potentially, MANY YEARS IN THE FUTURE, from underground magma flows. We certainly can't do effective geothermal generation today!)
In order for electrical vehicles to be practical, you need to dramatically increase the energy supply available in the form of electricity... you'd need to more than double the current electrical production capacity of the US to support a full conversion to electrical vehicles from fuel-consuming vehicles. And you'd also need to commensurately increase the capacity of the distribution grid... and essentially redesign it as well (you'd need much higher voltage than we current use to make this practical, and that means all-new infrastructure)
But... let's pretend all that happens. What then? Well, you need to be able to rapidly charge the electrochemical storage devices (what we euphamistically refer to as "batteries"), which means a real CHEMICAL STORAGE PROCESS is being cycled, discharged, repeated, ad-infinitum. Every cycle (charge or discharge) produces a significant amount of waste heat, and the chemical structure of the batteries degrades each time as well... they aren't "magical infinite devices" after all.
Further, as we've all seen, most battery chemistries out there which are practical for high-density energy storage are pretty volatile. Lithium-ion type chemistry, for example, produces its own oxygen when decaying or combusting (this is why you're not supposed to just toss them in the trash, and you should never use a swelling battery pack... this is a MASSIVE fire hazard). They don't actually "explode" per-se, but they burn very, very hot, and cannot be doused... they'll burn even in a vacuum. The only option to put them out is to hit them with liquid nitrogen or the like, to supercool them.
Now, one US-based battery company did come up with a relatively safe Li-Ion chemistry, but this technology was transferred to China where it's now in (non-USA-targeted) mass production, largely supporting Chinese military expansion, while the company which created this is gasping its last breaths, it seems (and no, I won't say who this is - nondisclosure and all that).
Do I expect to someday see wholly electrically-driven vehicles dominate the market? Yes. Do I expect this to happen within my own lifetime? Not a chance. Do I expect this to be done with lithium-ion electrochemical storage cells as the power delivery system? Not likely, at least not as the primary source (they may be used to "level" the power delivery... think of them like a buffer... but not as the main source).
Look to fuel cells (which have been "deprecated" over the past several years, due to the "payoffs" paid by companies like the one mentioned in this article) to be the first practical electromotive vehicle power system.
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Vested Interests
George Baggett on Jul 12, 2012 11:35 AMMark as Spam | Reply to this comment
I own A123 stock, believing the future will require electric vehicles and at some point these vehicles will be able to be charged by solar panels off the grid. Such a thought is at odds with big oil, centralized energy, and traditional partners in using up our global oil and coal supply without delay. Aside from the assaults on A123, and the mixed signal of GE owning some and also buying into a competitor, use of these batteries for vehicles is just a portion of the potential use. Going off the grid is certainly not the mission of A123, but solar charging devices that flow back to the grid when the charge is complete should be a mission of nearly any thinking person.