The Israeli startup Better Place was launched in 2007, the research project GridSurfer, with an automatic battery change station at the University of Oldenburg started operations in, 2009. The company Nio initiated own change stations in 2017 in the PRC. The concept for removable traction batteries is not new at all. Nor is it a technical failure – on the contrary.
Given the market- and lobbying power of the automobile- and oil industry and its long-term investments, however, it is not surprising, that during the mid-2000s an Israeli startup had no chance, to stand it's ground. Nearly one billion US dollars, collected by Shai Agassi from convinced supporters, are a vanishingly small budget, given a nationwide infrastructure to be set up. Therefore, even today single startups trying, to introduce the removable battery for the car, for buses, or transporters, are most likely to fail.
By the end of the 2000s, the share of renewable electricity in Germany was below 20 percent, as currently still the case in the US. Thus, the energy revolution was limited to quantitative growth. The demand for electricity storage was hardly recognizable. It may be considered praiseworthy all the more , that a University of Applied Sciences in Lower Saxony then engaged in a joint project contributing the removable traction battery – and interesting for future energy markets – for the use of pooled traction batteries for intermediate electricity storage.
Even today, in 2021, only part of the specialist public (especially media and politics) is aware, how dramatic the change of paradigm for an economy will be, when a steady power supply is given up . Because that is the result of exiting nuclear- and coal-fired power. Should quantities and quality of the electricity system then- be insufficiently developed, electricity must be bought from neighboring markets, if capacities are available at the time the own system runs short. Currently, from the German perspective, it is the other way round.
The autonomous alternative is storing electricity from wind- and solar farms in vast numbers of batteries, when produced at the wrong time, maybe at the wrong place, most lilely both will apply. Electricity storage, used stationarily only, currently is so expensive, that markets decide, to cut renewable overproduction at that specific time. Experts then speak of a variant of Redispatch: Wind millers receive compensation for actively stopping their mills during good wind conditions. Fortunately, deferred wind power production remains rare ay yet. But systemic contradiction becomes apparent. Eventually, we want to double the share of wind power in the coming decades at least, in order to eliminate the need for conventional power plants…
Thesis of the E-UNLIMITED concept: The chemical storge of renewable electricity is economically feasable, if the batteries, needed in the transport sector anyway , are managed in a way, that allows to use them for mass storage purposes, without restricting the usability of the BEV increasing the cost of the vehicle in comparison with conventionally powered cars, vans and Buses.. If traction batteries are being bundled on a large scale, they deserve in lucrative segments of the electricity market money: in the Regelenergiemärkten. This increasingly become more important, when conventional power plants off, swaying generating renewable energies are switched.
14 years ago, the discovery of diesel fraud in the distant United States was also not in sight, as the overflush of a Japanese nuclear reactor on the opposite side of the globe. That external events are necessary, the German government to contribute to governance, is alarming.
The more important, that policy now recognizes the opportunities, harbors the electric mobility for the continuation of the energy transition. Entrepreneurship alone does not allow the, required for a transformation of individual, Cooperation formerly uncoupled Industries. The state as a night watchman is passé. The transformation of private transport requires dezidiertes, at the crucial details interested project management by policy. The removable battery is now, 14 years after Better Place, required as a systemic element and technical basis for an economically viable implementation of e-mobility.
Hello Mr. Dunker,
I totally agree with you and think so too, that the future belongs to the exchangeable battery stations. There needs to be a common consensus among all car manufacturers in the EU, who in turn agree on an EU-wide battery standard. Only in this way can we achieve the goal TOGETHER and not INDIVIDUALLY.
Warm greetings
Thomas H.