Electric Cars and the Range Anxiety Problem

Picture this: you're cruising along in your electric car and the juice runs out. If you make it to a outlet, you'd better hope it's in a motel parking lot, because you're not going anywhere fast - a full charge on a standard outlet can easily take 8 hours.

This is the so-called range anxiety problem. Electric Vehicle (EV) enthusiasts call it the single biggest barrier to the mass adoption of EVs. According to the Department of Transportation, 80 percent of Americans drive less than 50 miles a day, a distance that several models can easily handle. But what about those rare longer trips?

The are three possible solutions to the problem - make the car go further, make the battery easy to swap out, or make it charge faster.

Tesla, the only company currently mass producing EVs for the U.S. market, is banking on the first approach: their flagship sportscar, the Roadster, boasts a range of 244 miles on a single charge. In the pipeline is the Model S, which will cost half as much and top 300 miles. The Nissan Leaf, the next closest competitor — which comes out this fall — has only a hundred mile range.

Better Place, an Israeli start-up, pioneered the battery swap. Here's how it works:

Drive up, swap in, get out. All under one minute.

EV batteries cost around $16,000, which gets tacked on to the car's price tag. Removing the battery from the equation brings the price way down, making EVs more affordable and speeding up their adoption.

This approach, unfortunately, has its limits. It is only viable for transportation islands - places where the vast majority of trips are within predictable boundaries, whether political or geographic: places like Israel and Denmark, where Better Place is planning massive roll-outs. The company is also eyeing the Bay Area.

However, battery swapping creates environmental costs that the company has been loathe to publicize: a quick swap, which is critical for the model to work, requires using a robot to extract the thing and heavy-duty refrigeration to cool it before it can be recharged. These steps are likely to be pretty energy-intensive.

This doesn't mean the approach is environmentally bankrupt; it is undoubtedly cleaner to drive a battery-swapable EV than even the most fuel-efficient gas-powered car. This is true even when looking at emissions across the entire lifecycle - from resource extraction to manufacturing to transportation to use and disposal. It's true even though producing EV batteries is a notoriously dirty process and the emissions generated when driving an EV depend on how dirty the electricity source is. As always, the question should be how much less dirty one option is versus another, and whether that's enough.

The third approach, faster battery charging, had until very recently been a non-starter. Last March, researchers at MIT announced a major breakthrough - the Beltway Battery, a new species of battery design that could make it possible to recharge an electric car in the time it takes to fill a tank of gas. They estimate that it will be market ready within a mere two years.

Some are calling the innovation a game-changer for EVs, but its implications extend far beyond that: Battery technology is a key bottleneck in the transition to a smarter grid and a clean, electrified energy economy.

Of course, the beltways have their own problems. The jolt of power needed by quick-charge stations could demand beefy new power lines - bigger pipes, basically. Environmentally speaking, nobody knows what the carbon footprint of beltway batteries will be. It could be more than regular batteries, since they are complicated devices and could produce more emissions during manufacturing. On the other hand, they would also increase the life of the battery, so fewer batteries would be produced.

Only time will tell which approach wins out, and how they will affect the fortunes of the electric car.

Photo credit: Jonathan Azrielant