Green Options

Editor’s Note: This topic was also covered on Gas 2.0: Hawaii to Get Electric Car Battery-Sharing Program

Perhaps nothing has been perceived as a greater weakness for electric vehicles than charge times — spending 6 hours recharging every hundred or two miles is enough to readily ruin the idea of taking a cross-country trip.

To work around this, some groups such as Project Better Place propose to standardize battery packs and pack-replacing infrastructure. On one hand, it seems an easy solution to the problem; yet battery technology is an ever-moving target, as anyone who has witnessed the dramatic shrinking of cell phone and laptop batteries in the past decade can attest. But, as the stereotypes go, batteries can’t really take a charge as fast as you’d need, and you couldn’t deliver it that fast if you wanted to.

Or could you?

A while back, Toshiba unveiled their first foray into advanced lithium ion batteries — the Super-Charge ion Battery, or SCiB. Over the past few days, new information about their cells has emerged. With a 5-minute, 90% charge time and 5000-6000 charge cycles with minimal loss of capacity, it seems a solid competitor to AltairNano’s much vaunted nano-titanate cells.

Toshiba has already demonstrated a laptop that does just that, charging to 90% capacity in 5 minutes. This compares favorably to lithium iron phosphate technology, which should not be charged faster than 15-20 minutes. A partnership with Schwinn is to ship an electric bicycle (”Tailwind”) early next year using an SCiB pack to give a 30 minute recharge time (assumedly slower to avoid the need for a cooling system on the larger pack).