Beyond New York

ONE of the biggest drawbacks with owning an electric vehicle (EV) is range anxiety - a driver's nagging fear that the battery charge will not get them to their destination. Now IBM claims to have solved a fundamental problem that may lead to the creation of a battery with an 800-kilometre (500-mile) range - letting EVs potentially compete with most petrol engines for the first time.

The Obama administration intends to open a new advanced battery research center this year, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu told an audience at the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday.

The 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in March taught Nissan some valuable lessons about its electric vehicle model, the Leaf, The New York Times reports. Japanese carmakers were significantly impacted by the natural disasters, as the majority of the nation's automobile manufacturing plants are located in the hard-hit Northeast. Nissan officials affirmed that its production facilities were walloped by the tsunami and earthquake, but none of the electric vehicles caught fire.

If solar energy is eventually going to matter — that is, generate a significant portion of the nation's electricity — the industry must overcome a major stumbling block, experts say: finding a way to store it for use when the sun isn't shining. That challenge seems to be creating an opening for a different form of power, solar thermal, which makes electricity by using the sun's heat to boil water. The water can be used to heat salt that stores the energy until later, when the sun dips and households power up their appliances and air-conditioning at peak demand hours in the summer.

NEW CASTLE, Pa., Jan. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Axion Power International, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: AXPW), the developer of advanced lead­carbon PbC® batteries and energy storage systems, announced today that it was awarded a purchase order from SilTek Inc. confirming their participation in a Zero Energy Building in the Washington DC Naval Yard. Axion will be providing an array of its PbC batteries, system electronics and battery management system that together will serve as an example of Axion's "mini-Cube" concept based on the scalability, up or down, of its primary PowerCube™.

As I reported in Tuesday's paper, some companies think that one form of renewable energy is going to open a window for another — that solar photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, are going to increase the grid's need for a type of solar energy that can be stored. That would be solar thermal power, which harnesses heat from the sun and converts it to steam to make electricity as the need arises, especially when the sun has disappeared behind a cloud or dropped below the horizon.

BYD Co., which counts Warren Buffett as an investor, has completed the world's largest lithium-ion battery project to bottle wind and solar electricity in China, which will likely see more large energy storage projects as a result of its ambition to add lots of renewable energy. The Chinese electric car and battery maker finished the 36 megawatt-hours storage farm in December for the State Grid Corporation of China, a transmission company with a massive plan to pair storage with wind and solar power plants, said Micheal Austin, vice president of BYD America on Tuesday.

The electric vehicle has to overcome three major hurdles if it is ever going to be a success with consumers. They need to charge fast, be cheap to buy, and have a decent range between charges. At the moment, the range of electric vehicles is around about 100 miles on average, which may be adequate for most journeys, but certainly isn't good enough. The issue is the battery technology in use today that relies on lithium-ion, and whose make-up is rather heavy and energy density not really high enough for use in a vehicle.

All of the technology products we use today--from touchscreens to tablets to social networks--were once the "next big thing in tech." Experts predicted that each of these things would become a part of everyone's tech life, before most of us had even heard of them. Of course, experts also predicted that Apple would go out of business before 1998. No prediction of the future is perfect (not even if you're Tom Cruise in Minority Report), but that isn't going to stop us from making our predictions for the next big thing in tech.

Electric vehicles are still too expensive and have too many limitations to compete with regular cars, except in a few niche markets. Will that ever change? The answer has everything to do with battery technology. Batteries carrying more charge for a lower price could extend the range of electric cars from today's 70 miles to hundreds of miles, effectively challenging the internal-combustion motor.