On Wed, 04 Mar 2020 18:46:18 +0000, Dave Walsh wrote:

Really? You think "progress being made on electric cars and their
batteries"? Sure there are a lot of them out there but the battery
technology they use has been around for years. Lots of fancy batteries
in development labs and in Universities but none in any commercially
available vehicle.


A new technology has just been announced, which uses sodium anodes and a
lithium-glass electrolyte. It claims greater durability, much less
flammability, and a considerably longer life than Lithium-ion.

Normally I'd go off muttering abouyt pipe-dreams except that the lead
researcher is John Goodenough. He has an excellent track record in this
field since he was in the team that developed the lithium-ion battery,
and shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for that. Says this tech could
be commercially successful in 5 - 10 years. The story is he

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/02/
canadian_firm_to_develop_goodenoughs_new_glass_bat tery/


=====

But, back to electric winches.

Here's the website for what looks to be the most successful German
electric winch maker:

http://www.startwinde.de/

The main site is in German, so if you don't read German, start here
instead:

https://onkelmaggus.beepworld.de/index.htm

This winch is basically a purpose-designed trailer containing a couple of
cable drums, a 200 kW electric motor and a big pile of lead-acid truck
batteries to act as a buffer between it and a 12-20 kW mains connection.

We looked at this system a few years back and decided that running cables
to the various places where we park our winch depending on the wind
direction was too expensive to justify going electric, so now we have a
Skylaunch and a Tost they refurbished, both running on LPG.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org