Altairnano Batteries - 25,000 Cycles
Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 13 May 2008 01:45:00 GMT
The electricity to power an electric vehicle costs very little – usually around 3c per mile. A bigger cost is the wear-and-tear on the batteries, which will cost 8c a mile or more.
For instance, if an electric car has a range of 75 miles with a 25kWh lithium-ion battery pack that has a life of 2,000 cycles, then the car could go 150,000 miles on the battery pack. If the batteries cost $25,000, this adds about 17c per mile to the cost of operating the car in addition to the electricity.
But what if the batteries lasted longer – much longer? Then the total cost per mile would be a lot lower.
For instance, lets say that instead of 2,000 cycles you could get 25,000 cycles out of the batteries. Maybe these batteries cost twice as much, but this would still bring the cost per mile down to about 3c per mile.
Well it appears that Altairnano might have done this. In their recently released 2007 annual report, it states that in January 2007 they completed 25,000 deep charge/discharge cycles of their batteries and they still retained over 80% of their original charge capacity.
The batteries are not cheap – it appears they are selling them for about $2,000 per kWh, about twice what other lithium-ion batteries sell for. But if they can really go 25,000 cycles in the field, it will be an exciting breakthrough!