Who wins the market? Lead-Acid or Lithium-ion?

Lead acid (LA) battery is slowing running out of the energy storage race compared with nickel-metal hydrides and lithium-ions that entered the market with all the energy to win. Nickel-metal hydride (NmH) batteries are used in the current generation of hybrid cars and lithium-ion (LI) batteries are used in mobile devices. Many visualize LI to be the future of electric cars.

Even with all this, what the automakers intend is to create proper energy storage for startups and a light weight vehicle. For this, automakers need a lightweight battery that won’t interfere with a car’s all-electric range or design and at the same time is light in weight. Lead can be blamed to be one of the heaviest elements known to science with all its environmental hazards.

Ultra capacitors blended with the LA batteries have become the answer to this. They are called PbCs. Though ultra capacitors give low energy density and cannot measure up to the LAs in storing the power per kilogram, they excel in charge time and lifespan. Ultra capacitors can handle far more charge cycles than LI or LA batteries and they recharge quickly. This technology is brought in by Pennsylvania-based Axion Power International funded by Quercus Trust. Axion’s PbC batteries weigh half as much as traditional lead-acid batteries, while offering just slightly less storage capacity.

Axion’s PbC looks like a normal LA. What Axion has done is that it has replaced a stack of lead electrodes with a stack of activated carbon electrodes. “Axion replaces the lead-based negative electrodes found in conventional lead-acid batteries with carbon assemblies. The only [noticeable] difference is the feel”, says CEO Thomas Granville.

Like the conversion companies that have sprouted up to turn hybrids into plug-ins with battery packs, Axion says it can retrofit conventional trucks and SUVs to have an all-electric range of 40 miles-plus for less than $10,000.

Granville says, “Obama keeps talking about having a million hybrids on the road by 2012”, “Even with federal incentives to jumpstart the transition, switching 100 percent of the fleet over to clean, new vehicles would take decades”. PbC batteries offer a way to clean up vehicle emissions without trading out the entire national fleet. Axion favours a three-year, 50 percent tax credit for retrofits.

This year, Axion plans to ship-out a new mobile energy storage system for grid buffering, starting with a delayed New York State Energy Research and Development Authority project in upstate New York. Next to lithium of course, PbCs are still heavy.

When Axion pitched its technology to members of Freedom CAR earlier, the automakers wanted batteries at a maximum $87 per kilowatt-hour where Axion’s technology costed $240-$260 per kilowatt-hour (Lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries can cost upwards of $300 per kilowatt-hour). The deal thus, did not work out. Toyota seized the opportunity and proceeded with more expensive technology. This helped Toyota to capture a significant share in the hybrid battery market.

The battery industry is sure to take some time to learn the new technology but automakers can play a vital role in providing this technology at the door step of the end-user. Nevertheless, with ever better technology, one would need to shell out something more from one’s pocket at least in the initial stages.

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