Lithium Air batteries - the answer for electric vehicles?

The "pig car" sounds like a Mad Max movie.

I guess I could use my cow manure for fuel and fertilzer.

But thats alway been my point all along on Nat gas...the technology is there...and come to think of it we could reduce the methane from farm animals by using it as a source of fuel.

I say a show a while back (years) where people in India were using the methane fro cattle to heat, light, and cook in their homes.
The man had a big concrete tank in his yard (sealed of course) and he pumped the gas out of it.

Off topic...I loaded an especially cantankerous pig today...it took me three hours with help...and it was bleedin hot!

 

Oh! I don't know! We have been running the World Solar challenge for a while now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Solar_Challenge



Thing is - those cars are not exactly comfortable and that is a long way to be scraping your bum on the bitumen

 

I think batteries are more fuel effecient, even if still run by fossil fuels. And nuclear is a lot better than solar or wind. There is no way wind and solar are going to replace baseload electricity AND replace oil.

 

Not for the big stuff no.

But at the moment there are a lot of country towns in both America and Australia that are connected to the national grid with enormous power losses because of distance. Putting in a system that takes them "off grid" is feasible and in the long run cheap.

What we need is some sort of storage capacity in our system for this to be commercially viable - because at the moment it makes no sense we have no storage capacity in the electrical system.

Vanadium redox batteries are already fulfilling that role in a couple of places (mostly in Bass straight)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

There are issues with these early versions of the vanadium batteries and the one on King Island ran into problems,though, it is certainly not interfering with the cheese production there (King Island has the BEST blue vein - crawls off the plate by itself and puts up a battle) But the Tasmanian Government is committed to solving King Islands problems and will be putting more money into it - which means they will be doing the experimentation that we will reap the rewards for