Building Ecotopia: Electric Vehicles

by Chuck Hall

There’s no shortage of ideas for alternative fuels. Each of these ideas has its own advantages and drawbacks, but my current favorite (no pun intended) is electric vehicles. There are many reasons for this choice, but chief reason is that electricity can be produced by wind and sunlight, thereby eliminating the need for fossil fuels altogether. Ultimately, wind energy is also solar energy, as winds are produced as the atmosphere heats and cools. If electric vehicles can be built that would rely on batteries recharged from solar energy, we would have found a totally sustainable energy source. Unlike fossil fuels, sunlight offers a limitless supply of energy, for all practical purposes. If humankind is still around when the sun finally burns out, driving electric cars will be the least of our worries! So why not rely on this free, virtually limitless source of energy?
Some of the problems in the past with electric cars have been the limited range due to the storage capacity of the batteries, and the amount of time it takes to recharge between uses. These problems appear to have been solved with Toshiba’s new lithium-ion battery. This battery can charge to ninety-percent capacity in as little as five minutes, and will work in temperatures as low as minus 22 degrees F. This battery is estimated to last for about 5,000 charges, or ten years, before needing to be replaced. Toshiba Vice President Toshiharu Watanabe expects this new battery to be incorporated into hybrid vehicles by 2010.
While hybrid vehicles at present still rely on fossil fuels, the new Toshiba lithium-ion batteries are so efficient that they have resurrected talk of all-electric vehicles. The problems in the past with electric vehicles have been the limited speed and range that could be achieved with older battery packs, and the amount of time it takes to recharge the batteries once their energy is spent. The new lithium-ion batteries may eliminate these problems.
If all-electric vehicles can return to the marketplace in a big way, then each home could have its own charging station, powered by solar or wind energy. If a lithium-ion battery pack can be charged in only five minutes, such charging stations could be common in public locations ten to fifteen years from now. Imagine leaving your home for the market, and plugging in your car for a quick recharge while doing your shopping. Once your shopping’s done, your car is recharged and ready for the trip home. In the average electric, you can travel about 25 miles on 5 kilowatt-hours of electric power. Based on today’s average utility prices, that works out to approximately 1.5 cents per mile! If your gasoline-powered car gets 25 miles per gallon at $4 per gallon, that works out to 16 cents per mile. That means that electric cars cost about one-tenth as much as gasoline-powered cars to operate!
The only drawback to lithium-ion batteries is that they could damage the environment if they wind up in a local landfill, but recycling them easily solves this problem, allowing lithium-ion batteries to be a truly sustainable resource.