Instantly Rechargeable Electric and Hybrid Cars

Many among you have gone ahead and bought a hybrid vehicle in the past or are planning to either purchase one in the future... that or a completely electric motor vehicle.  Perhaps, like me, you are excited about using quiet electrical self-driven cars that are meant to be deployed in the market around the year 2020 by most large car manufacturers.

It's great, but right now I'm also thinking about how that would change my travel habits.  I mean, with self-driven cars and Uber, perhaps I don't need to worry so much about recharging the vehicle since whenever Uber sends me one, I would assume, they send me a car that has enough charge to get me to my pre-organized destination.

However, perhaps myself and others would go for an option of buying one such car, or sharing them with a few friends or family members in such a way that the car would need to recharge on occasion.  And currently, electric cars take a few hours to fully recharge, meaning, on a long trip, we can't just stop by a recharging station for some snacks and a bio break, and just moving along straight away.

Thankfully, because of the huge amount of buzz, investment and work done on electric vehicles and renewable energy sources in the past number of years, companies like Ifbatteries, have figured out an innovative way to resolve the issue by going about the problem of recharging batteries in a different way.

Instead of plugging your car in to recharge your polluting to produce traditional electric car batteries for a few hours, you would be draining your batteries' spent electrolyte solutions while simultaneously filling up with fresh charged up electrolyte solutions.  All done within the time you would normally "gas up".

Bonus to this is we'd be able to reuse generally the same type of refueling stations that are already dotting our road networks and reusing liquid transporting trucks that were previously used for gasoline (though modified to handle 2 different liquids in the tank since these flow battery systems need an anolyte and a catholyte to work in equal measure.

More on this and socio-economical impacts of such things in the video below:

Now here's what I find particularly interesting.  These spent electrolytes could easily be filtered and cleaned and then introduced into a power generation plant that would "recharge" the liquids by going the opposite direction in the redox reaction, thus rejuvenating the spent liquids and then sending that liquid back out to service stations.

This makes those liquids recyclable materials.  The concept of a flow battery that could be used to produce the energy to recharge spent electrolytes has already been designed in large scale in Germany.  The Ewe Gasspeicher GmbH flow battery in Germany is the largest battery concept in the world right now, and is capable of providing energy to 75,000 homes.  It produces 120 MW of power at 700 MWh.  Of course, it is a battery, which means it needs to keep charging the electrolytes and pumping it out.

In a cyclical concept using such a flow battery concept to charge electrolytes, which is transported to refueling stations for electric cars, and that takes in spent electrolytes, there would be a need for some new electrolytes to be reintroduced into the cycle, but essentially you have an environmentally friendly concept that is also cheap for the drivers and practical.

We could very easily hook it up with either solar, wind or geothermal energy capture structures for the recharging portion of the process, something that has become so much cheaper over the last few years that in some countries, like India, the cost for Solar is rivaling the cost of coal power plants.

Given these trends, I do believe we're on the verge of quiet neighborhoods filled with electric cars that are conveniently recharged with electrolytes that are themselves charged using totally renewable power plants.