Free Republic

Four people died in a fire at an e-bike repair shop in lower Manhattan on Tuesday, with another two people reportedly in critical condition under hospital care. Lithium-ion battery storage has been blamed for the tragedy. The fire broke out overnight in a maintenance shop for electric bicycles and scooters, on the ground floor of a building in Chinatown. “It’s very clear that this was caused by lithium-ion batteries e-bikes,” Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanaugh told a press conference Tuesday, UPI reports.

PLEASE BE AWARE: if partially or totally submerged in water, the lithium-ion battery pack used to power many electric devices and vehicles will suffer damage that will compromise its safety and stability. This damage can be even more severe if your battery pack was submerged in salt water. Please check your eBike as soon as possible. Unfortunately, if your eBike has been submerged in water during the storm, it’s very likely that its electrical system has been damaged and the eBike is unsafe to use. If the battery pack was partially or totally submerged, we advise that you carefully remove...

One day after officials touted the passage of the Connecticut Clean Air Act, including plans for thousands of electric vehicles to hit the road, one of the state-run electric buses caught on fire over the weekend. The blaze engulfed a CTtransit bus in a Hamden parking lot Saturday morning, sending two workers and a firefighter to the hospital, officials said. “Lithium ion battery fires are difficult to extinguish due to the thermal chemical process that produces great heat and continually reignites,” Hamden fire officials said. Two transit workers were hospitalized as a precaution after being exposed to the smoke. A...

A fire at a bus depot in Hanover caused millions of euros in damage. According to fire fighters, the fire broke out on Saturday afternoon at the Üstra transport company where electric buses were parked, According to Üstra spokesman Udo Iwannek, the fire caused damage running in the millions. Five e-buses, two hybrids and two combustion engines were destroyed, as were also the building and the charging station. According to the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), Hanover’s administration wants to run only e-buses in the city center area by 2023 and is purchasing 50 new vehicles in a...

A Nissan Leaf owner has received a $33,000 bill to replace the battery in his electric car - even though it's now only worth $12,000.Canberra engineer Phillip Carlson bought his fully-electric hatchback brand new for $53,500 in August 2012. Just seven years later, he can't drive his environmentally-friendly car because he isn't prepared to stump up $33,385 to replace the lithium ion battery. The tab included $750 for labour and $29,600 for the battery plus the 10 per cent GST. Mr Carlson, a married father with a daughter, believed his new car had a range of 175km but even as a...

Ten gigabattery scale battery factory projects in China, Europe and USA brian wang | August 8, 2017 |    A report published by Bloomberg Intelligence in June said factories planned by Chinese companies could have the battery capacity to produce more than 120 GWh by 2021 – enough to supply 1.5 million Tesla Model S vehicles. This will be over three times initial the battery cell capacity of the Tesla Gigafactory at 35 GWh.As of 2014, the projected capacity of Gigafactory for 2020 was to have been 35 gigawatt-hours per year of cells as well as 50 gigawatt-hours per year (5.7 MW) of battery...

Miniature lithium-ion device could power medical devices or miniature robots. A new lithium-ion battery is one of the smallest ever made and the first battery to be created with a three-dimensional printer. Measuring less than a millimetre on each side, it fits comfortably on the head of pin and could potentially power tiny medical devices or miniature robots. 3D printers make objects from the ground up by depositing successive layers of material on top of each other. Most 3D printers manipulate plastic, which is useful for prototyping or crafting toys and knickknacks. Making a working battery required a custom machine...

A graphene inspired electrode material that could help batteries hold more power has been developed by Chinese scientists. The large surface area of these cobalt oxide nanosheets is key to their electrochemical performance.Batteries are a cornerstone of modern life with most smartphones and laptops using rechargeable lithium ion batteries. As technology advances, the search is on for batteries that can pack more energy into the same space. Graphitic electrodes are commonly used in lithium ion batteries but suffer from low theoretical capacity. A viable alternative is to use metal oxides which have significantly higher theoretical capacities but in practice are...

The crisis that has enveloped Boeing over the grounded Dreamliner, at a cost of billions of dollars in losses in addition to what has already been “invested” in it -- voluntarily by its owner/investors and coercively from taxpayers – exemplifies perhaps more than any other redistributionist corporatism scheme why government intervention is more headache than help. Pass the industrial-strength Excedrin. Of immediate concern to the Chicago-based jet-manufacturer is the lithium-ion battery that powers so many of the 787’s critical functions. Two instances of “thermal runaway” on Dreamliners’ owned by Japan-based airlines caused that country, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration,to...

Just as the Department of Energy gave A123 Systems a vote of confidence by extending a deadline until 2014 to spend down its $249 million stimulus grant, the deeply troubled electric vehicle supplier experienced another setback. One of their batteries caused an explosion. The blast occurred yesterday morning in Warren, Mich. at General Motors’ Alternative Energy Center – a research facility – while performing on an A123 battery “intensive tests designed to make it fail,” the Detroit News reported. GM confirmed to Crain’s Detroit Business that chemical gases released by the battery caused the explosion. One employee was sent...

Energy-harvesting windows are a step closer with the development of a transparent lithium ion battery, created by US researchers at Stanford University. The electrodes are confined to a grid 35µm wide, making them too narrow to be perceived by the naked eye.The electrodes pose the biggest challenge to transparent lithium ion batteries, as both anode and cathode materials are typically opaque. Yi Cui's team solved this problem by making them very thin. They set the electrode materials into a grid of trenches in clear polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). By stacking and aligning the grids with additional layers of electrodes, it is possible...

Enlarge ImageHybrid power. Carbon nanofibers (left) are coated with silicon (right) using a process known as chemical vapor deposition, making for light electrodes that store more energy. Credit: Li-Feng Cul et al., Nano Letters (2009) With $27 billion a year in sales, lithium-ion batteries already dominate the market for rechargeables. But there's always pressure to do better. Now researchers report that they've come up with a way to use nanotechnology to either significantly increase the energy storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries or reduce their weight while maintaining their current energy content. The new work could lead to everything from...