How to make your battery last longer - BBC Click

[Music] this week explosions big taps and goats on the loose [Music] the beautiful Welsh countryside home to valleys lakes the odd feral goat and electric Mountain hidden inside this mountain is the de noak pumped-storage power station and it is basically a monster battery it stores energy by pumping water from this lake to a lake at the top of the mountain and then letting it flow back downhill releasing that energy at times of pink demands see when you pop the kettle on during breaks in championship matches of that sport they call football this bad boy springs into action to supplement on National Grid delivering power to our homes in under 12 seconds it's incredible view it's one of the fastest responding power stations on the planet and we'll have a nosy inside the thing later in the program de noir wig offers a semi renewable energy solution at a time when our natural resources are being used up as solar wind and tidal power alternatives advance we're craving a method of using their generated energy 24/7 despite the weather or time of day and this is where batteries come in now this is a stereotypical battery admittedly when I say battery you probably think of the ones in these these are rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and we really can't live without these lithium-ion batteries have truly revolutionized electronics they power the mobile miracles that we use every day they have a high density meaning they can store a lot of electricity relative to their small size so we can easily carry them around and we can recharge them hundreds of times inside cells are layers of sheets stacked together a positive cathode negative anode with a separator in between filled with a liquid electrolyte when a cell is discharged the movement of ions from one side to the other facilitates the flow of electrons which then generates current to power devices during charging this process is reversed whoever came up with this must have been a real genius and when I was at Oxford what we developed the cathode that enabled the lithium-ion battery that you use in your cell telephones and laptop computers I didn't really think about whether the battery that we were developing would be a world-famous invention and I've been very pleased to see how it's been developed in the hands of the engineers it has stood the test of time with electric vehicles today relying on thousands of lift nine cells for that battery pack modules the dependence of modern society fossil fuel energy is not sustainable and so one of the things we need to do we have to find the storage of electric power generated by alternative energy sources and also storage batteries that can power an electric vehicle and the competitive price and performance it certainly sounds like dr. Goodenough sin vention has proved good enough for 37 years but lithium mine isn't without its problems and that's led some people to look for alternate battery technologies and this summer the UK government pledged a quarter of a billion pounds into the research and development of battery tech at the forefront of this research is warwick manufacturing group at the university of warwick lithium-ion batteries do have potential hazards and if you map you mistreat some of the higher energy chemistries and yes you'll see a battery fire and potentially a rupture and so on so there are titanate chemistry is what's called iron phosphate chemistry's which are a safe option for you since of public transport and so on so as a research center as of cell manufacturer you can play tunes with the chemistry to basically decide whether safety is your prime goal or your prime criteria or whether performance and energy is so if you look at your periodic table that all the transition metals that you see on there generally somewhere in the world there's a scientists want to make a battery out of one of those so calcium batteries aluminium batteries lithium sulfur batteries sodium ion batteries and so on there's a whole range of different chemistries being worked on so although we're working on lithium-ion at the moment and we're persevering with lithium ion there will probably be more developments in the future as we move into different types of chemistry's as the UK's leading automotive battery R&D centre wmg works at the intersection between scientific research and industry with the likes of Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover has close collaborators here is a module that we've developed and it represents about a 70 to 80 percent improvement on the Tesla battery now that improvement has come about not through changes in the chemistry but changes in the way that the module has been constructed so packing the cells tighter together whilst maintaining safety improved cooling systems etc at the moment cost and range of new EVs and the number of charging points available to us is an issue manufacturers like Nissan even offer up a replacement diesel or petrol car for customers who need to drive longer distances as part of their promise scheme as well as making batteries wmg is also looking at how our charging behavior can affect battery life to surprising results it's made a smart algorithm which shows that degradation of a car battery can be reduced by up to 10 percent over a year if energy is transferred back to the grid synonymous with v's is Tesla owner of the world's biggest battery factory dude hit peak production in 2020 the gigafactory aims to produce enough batteries to power half a million new electric cars every year Tesla boss Elon Musk's ambitions go further than revolutionising our cars though he wants to rewire our homes to enter the powerwall the 6,000 pound home battery stores energy gathered from solar panels during the day and when the Sun Goes Down sustainably powers your pad it's pretty straightforward really [Music] from Tesla to I care there seems to be a growing trend in companies creating home batteries to harness solar power so how exactly does this work tech enthusiast Terrance has had solar panels for several years more recently connecting them to a home battery meaning he can use the power he generates and send excess back to the grid the battery charged off 1.4 kilowatt hours which it then used throughout the day so that saved about 15% on energy bills he's also using it to power his electric vehicle and thanks to the way that feed-in tariffs currently work in the UK he's being paid for the power he generates even when he uses it but of course it is early days for the technology I think one of the things that we're going to see over time is these batteries will become cheaper they'll become smaller and they'll also become higher capacity at the moment this battery is 2 kilowatt hours which is is great but it's not quite enough for everything that we want to do with it Terrance is actually taking part in a community trial taking place in the Rose Hill area of Oxford whilst the usual cost for the installation of solar powers and umekes a battery would be 5,000 pounds here the cost of factories is subsidised and a network has been created meaning power can be economically shared between the 82 homes a school and a community center that are taking part my house generates more power than I can use so why not store it why not sell it back to the grid why not give it to my neighbours when we've got surplus in this area where many are living in fuel poverty the community element of the project seems to be appreciated too and here at this school they're also treating it as a learning experience here in this year six classroom you can see the solar panels out of the window and here is the battery that's harnessing the power now this power is actually being used for the lighting in this room but the whole setup also teaches the kids how this works Swedish giant IKEA are now selling home batteries to using the same premise of harnessing solar power and that providing electricity consumable by the homeowner claiming the average UK home could cut up to five hundred and sixty pound a year from their electricity bills meanwhile British company power volts are working on giving old electric vehicle batteries a second life as home batteries whilst after 8 to 10 years of road use a battery may have started to deteriorate it seems that it could still be used in the home where demands are less strenuous giving in an extra decade of use after being taken from the vehicles they're checked electrically graded reformatted and stacked together to create energy storage systems for the home of course as battery costs come down and capability increases the appeal should - so whether this idea goes mainstream most likely depends on whether the Sun shines over those figures welcome to the week in tech maintaining the battery feed it was a weekly panic was called on the London Underground when a mobile battery pack exploded the station had to be evacuated and Mark Zuckerberg rejected claims by President Donald Trump that Facebook is biased and anti Trump Bill Gates admitted he's ditched his Microsoft phone for an Android handset the United Nations has declared robots could destabilize the world it's opened a center in the hague to monitor developments in artificial intelligence the skies are about to get busier as autonomous passenger drones move one step closer to reality in Dubai a test flight took place of a proposed autonomous flying taxi designed by German outfit valo copter 18 blades how the drone passengers selecting a destination via a touchscreen meanwhile a company called passenger drone released video of itself flying drone testing in Europe a human can also take the stick and take control at its 60 electric motors Amazon's announced a host of new hardware this week including new versions of his digital assistant the echo the echo spot features a screen and can make video calls and act as a nursery camera when the echo plus can act as a smart home hub connecting to and controlling other devices and finally James Dyson of colorful expensive vacuum cleaner Fame announced plans to launch an electric car here's hoping it doesn't suck back at DeNooyer wig I'm heading deeper underground [Music] the water comes from the lake which is about 600 meters above us down this pipe hits this valve and stops this is the biggest tap you will ever see and there are actually six of them all in a row down there when they need the power this yellow arm swings up the valve opens and we get some maximum flow of water through the turbines through there in about six seconds when all six are open that's ninety-two thousand gallons per second or as it says here one and a half million cups of tea sure that's all great for English breakfast we have Flo and there it is turbine number two spinning at about 500 rpm and when all six of these turbines are all spinning this place produces enough electricity to power the whole of Wales for five and a half hours now de noir week runs at about 75 percent efficiency because it pumps its water uphill at night using cheap electricity it buys from the National Grid and charges a premium for the energy it generates during the day if we were to move completely away from fossil fuel power stations would that mean that this sort of power station wouldn't be rough in reality you know if we need to pump that water up the hill we've gotta go on and buy the electricity from the market somewhere whether that is a thermal power station of set windmills and gas power station whatever it might be why are they not more of these round suppose the greatest challenge is finding a suitable place in the UK to build them you've seen yourself that you've got to have them in a specific area it's got to have two legs the two lakes or ideally it reasonably close together good vertical separation you know they're not the kind of things that you can easily sort of build on the back of a wagon and we live in somewhere if those lakes need to exist all you need to create them so it comes with cost so I think it's just a limited amount of options for such places whilst this is powering our homes Kath Hawkins has got some top tips to help power our phones for a lot of us we feel like we can't live without our smartphones and so when the battery dies and we don't have access to power it can be a massive inconvenience now there are a number of easy things you can do to help save your battery dim your brightness turn off Wi-Fi GPS and any background apps that you don't need to use but there are a number of apps out there that are actually claiming to save your battery do they actually wear greenify battery doctor and do you battery saver a three of the most popular battery saving Android apps they've got millions of five-star reviews on Google Play suggesting people think they work so we thought they made a good testing ground they claimed to do a number of things from dimming your brightness to hibernating or optimizing app or reducing the data being news so to start off the team here took a brand spanking new Samsung Galaxy j-3 and hot-wired it we have the voltage the current and the power so if we turn the phone on from idle we can see that the current to the phone the power to the phone increases and then if we do something it's quite power-hungry so for example taking a photo with the flash on see that the power spikes massively then they tested the phone base line with no battery saver app installed and using a small amount of apps over a 10-minute period and then they did the same with the battery savers installed as well as the inbuilt Android power saver which comes installed on the phone so what we can actually see is that the power savers do seem to work they make it all difference for battery doctor and d-u battery saver about two or three hours by the looks of things and then greenify and she makes a difference of about four hours so why do you think greenify is doing better than the other two we think that's because of the way the apps work so do you battery saver and battery doctor they offer you an option to optimize the performance for your apps so we suspect what they'll be doing is you know lowering the frequency with your apps contact mobile data making them run less in the background whereas greenify offers a hibernation mode when you put your phone into idle but interestingly the most efficient seems to be the Android power saver the one that actually comes on the phone when you get it from the factory but this is currently a limited test of just ten minutes and all conducted on the Wi-Fi what needs to happen now is a much bigger test of hours at a time and using apps that stream videos play games or use GPS the team here haven't yet determined whether the apps do everything they say they do but do think you can do many of the features yourself if you're organized enough but most of us once use our phones hassle-free so the apps help with that underlying management but there are other things you should do if you want your battery to have a long life if you plug your phone II when you go to beds and it's charged after a couple of hours that time at 100% charged overnight will significantly accelerate the degradation in the battery even better for your phone battery's life Mac says is to keep your phone charged between 20 and 80 percent at all times so remember that's 20 to 80 Thank You cat but wouldn't it be nice to get to that 80% much faster q a very different battery technology that can be charged really quickly see these things can deliver a lot of power very quickly and so they've been much more useful in something that needs to do a lot all at once something like this instead of the electrochemical charging in normal batteries these charges by electrostatic means it's called a super capacitor no chemical reaction means you can charge very quickly this drill battery for example goes from zero to full in 12 seconds you can zap and go which sounds like a pretty good name for a company you ask me we use carbon nano materials which are extremely fine particles at the nano level and a large surface area is created inside one of these pouches that attracts energy very quickly the more surface the more energy you can attract the downside of super capacitors is that they can't store as much as lithium ion so you wouldn't want one in a phone they're best suited for things that need quick charging and big short bursts of power like tools and toys like this scooter now the lead-acid batteries in a normal electric scooter like those ones will give you about half an hour's ride time but they'll take six hours to charge in here we've got a battery which only gives you six minutes of ride time but only takes six minutes to charge and the next generation will give you 12 minutes of ride time and it will still only take six minutes to charge but with that kind of right time it's unlikely your electric car will run purely on this tech alone ultimately of course we're aiming to go into the automotive sector possibly as a hybrid combination with lithium so we do the fast charge bit and the lithium does the long-distance bit we'll take the charging off the road side and then we will transfer from the SAP and go cells to the lithium the power that we've harvested quickly as it's on its journey to that ends zap an NGO is working on a way to power Airport pots like those at Heathrow unfortunately however my six minutes of ride time are up so for the moment I'll have to leave zap and go and zip off by car back over in Texas the father of the lithium-ion battery doctored good enough shows no signs of slowing down he's working on a new type of battery with a surprising chemical makeup an all-glass solid-state battery brought to me a glass which is a remarkable material I think we've come up with a cell which will really do the trick together with his colleague dr. Braga good enough claims the new non flammable battery will last longer and recharge quicker it's a very competitive field and I am a competitor so I'm hoping that the new glass that we've done will enable us to go from a liquid electrolyte to a solid electrolyte it will make things safe as well as cheap lengthening the lifespan of batteries is obviously one of the main aims of researchers worldwide which could be why a team at Bristol University says they've designed a new type that can last thousands of years they've created a man-made diamonds that when placed inside a radioactive field generates a small amount of current whilst the radiation it gives off is less than a banana there are no moving parts involved no emissions generated and no maintenance required just direct electricity generation as well as making use of nuclear waste their invention could theoretically power devices in places that people can't go but whilst this could be years away something hoping to charge onto shelves sooner is the Prieto battery the battery has a different architecture to the standard lithium ion battery it has a 3d sponge-like material which is coated in a cathode slurry it's non-toxic explosion-proof and promises to store more power my ultimate dream was to make a really outstanding battery that ideally would let device designers be more ambitious in terms of new kinds of devices but also ideally to solve some problems in terms of renewable energy being able to store intermittent types of energy like solar and wind there are other concepts out there too such as microbial fuel cells that use anything from saliva to urine to drive electricity production at the end of the day the batteries we're so passionate about using still rely on finite raw materials taken from Mother Nature to work and not enough are considered valuable enough to be recycled which is white wmg is working to not only extend the life of its car batteries but figure out a system to give them a happy retirement to before then I guess the best we can do is try and make sure the fuel we use doesn't have a lasting impact on our environment well that's it from the Donora power station in North Wales what a privilege has been to visit such an unusual place don't forget we live on facebook and on twitter at BBC click feel free to get in touch any time if that is you have enough battery see ya [Music]

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 63,502

Keywords: bbc, bbc click, bbc world, bbc news, zap and go, tesla, batery, mountain, wales, ion, austin, solar power, renewables, energy, mwg

Id: ZIjrT5BT_Ys

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2017