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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) * writes:
1,000 miles of range, it said, and requires refills of distilled water about every 200 miles.
My car has a range of 6000 miles. That is how often I have to stop to change the motor oil. Of course, I also have to stop every 300 miles to get some gas.
byjandrese ( 485 ) writes:
I think it is 1000 miles of range until you have to replace the batteries entirely, which really isn't very far. It's not quite enough range to get you from Boston to Atlanta.
byAndy Dodd ( 701 ) writes:
Yeah. It looks like these are nonrechargeable cells.
In short, a car that consumes aluminum instead of gasoline to run.
There's a brief reference to rechargeable zinc-air cells - but the aluminum-air cells seem to be nonrechargeable.
byh4rr4r ( 612664 ) writes:
Aluminum is simple to refine again and can be done without fossil fuels. It uses quite of bit of electricity, but so does recharging a car battery.
byaurizon ( 122550 ) writes:
We need to assess the overall efficiency of the process that uses aluminum in the battery and then electro-refines it via the Hall process.
bycrunchygranola ( 1954152 ) writes:
According to Alcoa, the world's largest producer of aluminium, the best smelters use about 13 kilowatt hours (46.8 megajoules) of electrical energy to produce one kilogram of aluminium; the worldwide average is closer to 15 kWh/kg (54 MJ/kg) [mrreid.org]. Each kilogram of aluminum in the battery produces about 8 KWH of energy, so the efficiency from plant to engine is around 60%, maybe a bit lower than charging a battery from house-delivered electricity (10% transmission loss, 80% charging efficiency, 0.9*0.8 = 0.72).
byWGFCrafty ( 1062506 ) writes:
According to Alcoa, the world's largest producer of aluminium, the best smelters use about 13 kilowatt hours (46.8 megajoules) of electrical energy to produce one kilogram of aluminium; the worldwide average is closer to 15 kWh/kg (54 MJ/kg) [mrreid.org]. Each kilogram of aluminum in the battery produces about 8 KWH of energy, so the efficiency from plant to engine is around 60%, maybe a bit lower than charging a battery from house-delivered electricity (10% transmission loss, 80% charging efficiency, 0.9*0.8 = 0.72).
The cost of that electricity though will be the wholesale grid cost, about 3.5 cents/KWH. What do you pay for your electricity (probably three times that and up)?
Aluminum is a good way to export electricity. Iceland does this with its hydropower.
And not only is it wholesale pricing but they could even focus production on off-peak hours, at least while there aren't huge quantities in demand.
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