Battery Blog

Simple, build an SUV that runs on batteries and electric motors, then burn that same gasoline at more than double the efficiency of an ICE in a thermal power generating station to generate electricity to charge the batteries.

Internal combustion engines, or ICE powered vehicles, roll down the road plowing through the atmosphere by way of energy extracted from liquid fuels. Energy contained in liquid fuels is converted to mechanical energy by expansion of hot gases in an engine’s cylinders. The start of the power stroke converts the vaporized air-fuel mixture into extremely hot, high pressure carbon dioxide and water gases. The fuels’ state is transformed from a dense hydro-carbon chained liquid into individual species of hot CO2 and H2O gases via combustion with atmospheric oxygen.

Thermal efficiency of an ICE to deliver mechanical work from heat energy is roughly 20%, meaning that 80% of the heat energy contained in the fuel is wasted, blown out the tail pipe and radiator system. The problem with piston powered ICE vehicles is one of thermal dynamic inefficiency. Hot gases expanding in the cylinders during the power stroke, cool, and work is done as per Boyle’s law of gases. The expansion and cooling of hot combustion gases is how heat energy is physically converted to mechanical energy and waste heat, but because the temperature of the exhaust gases are still very high, with them goes a lot of unharnessed energy.

The solution to ICE inefficiency is simple, burn the fuel in a better method in order to extract more bang for your buck, and that better method is a thermal power generating station. A modern thermal electric power station can burn any type of fuel with a thermal efficiency as high as 48%, and when combined in a co-generating facility that uses an electric generator’s waste heat to supply nearby heating and absorptive cooling requirements, the overall efficiency of the fuel burned can be as high as 89%.

Consider also the additional energy expended during the extraction, refining, production, and delivery of gasoline and diesel fuels; a steam boiler system even when powered by coal starts to look pretty good. Large amounts of electrical energy are used by refineries during the refining processes to run pumps and provide heating. Fuel products are treated with hydrogen injection during cracking to produce lighter fuels from heavier oils. These extra energy inputs could be eliminated if the raw crude oil were simply burned directly in a co-gen facility producing combined electricity, heating, and cooling services.

When one drills down to the nuts and bolts of conventional gasoline and diesel fuels used for transportation, one finds that coal powered thermal generating stations are not really the devil they’re made out to be, and in fact, the real devil is in the extremely inefficient way our society uses oil products for transportation fuels and internal combustion engines.

It’s a huge deal and it’s about reversible energy storage. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but can only change state. Energy is stored in batteries electro-chemically, as opposed to just chemically, as it is in fuels such as gasoline, oil, coal, natural gas, and even hydrogen. Energy stored in batteries is fundamentally different than traditional energy carriers by the fact that electro-chemical energy stored in secondary rechargeable batteries is a reversible process, whereas energy stored in fossil fuels is a non-reversible process.

Due to the shortcomings of fossil fuels not being able to reversibly store energy, we have labeled them “sources of energy” rather than “storage of energy”, and common parlance considers fossil fuels as energy sources, rather than energy carriers, which is in fact what they are. While batteries are correctly considered energy carriers, they have the added benefit of being extremely efficient and reversible.

Fossil fuels are nothing more than energy carriers that were charged millions of years ago by energy originating from the sun, trapped in plankton and other little creatures and plants for our use today. The drawback of fossil fuel energy systems is that they are not reversible. Energy released by burning hydro-carbon chains of any type is not a reversible process, once a fossil fuel has been burned to chemically extract its heat value through reaction with atmospheric oxygen to form the products of CO2 and H2O gas, the process is in no way reversible.

So, what’s the big deal about batteries? Simply put, they are incredible in their ability to easily, efficiently, and reversibly store energy. No other portable mechanism comes even close to their ability to effectively store and return large amounts of useful energy in a controlled and reversible manor. Battery energy storage and retrieval efficiency is typically between 85-95% for a complete charge-discharge cycle, meaning that for every 1000 Watt-hours of electrical power delivered to the battery of an electric scooter or electric car, that battery will return 850-950 Watt-hours of useful energy to drive the wheels, run the air conditioner, blow the heater, and play the radio… and that is quite a big deal from which future ramifications will be enormous.