The claim is that the battery, a Lithium-ion (Li-ion) type ibm 40Y7003 battery called Nanosafe being developed by a company called Altairnano, is able to provide a useful operating range of 250 miles, a full recharge time of 10 minutes, and a useful life of 12-20 years through 15,000 charge/discharge cycles.
If a battery can produce this kind of performance, and if large-scale production can enable the battery pack to be profitably sold at a few thousand dollars, mass adoption of electric vehicles cannot be far behind. This is because recharging an electric car from an socket produces a ¡°fuel¡± that costs about the equivalent of $0.60 per gallon -- about 1/6th the current cost of gasoline at the Toshiba PA3201U-1ACA ac adapter pump.
That¡¯s a game-changer that could end our addiction to oil. While potentially a big threat to the big petro-companies, such a development would be a huge boon to electric utilities, which all of a sudden would have a major overnight load to soak up off-peak excess capacity.
And, the big long-term winner would be the toshiba PA3399U-1BRS battery environment. Even if the electricity comes from coal, the emissions profile of an all-electric car is much better than even a highly-efficient gasoline or diesel car. If the electricity is produced by renewables such as solar and wind, then we¡¯re talking about virtually a zero-carbon car.
