Yesterday evening Jana, Moritz and I attended an interesting lecture at the Studium Generale in the DHBW Mosbach. This so-called “Studium Generale” is a monthly event of the DHBW Mosbach, where an expert presents his elaborated topic to students as well as to any interested person. In the following discussion round all open questions can be clarified. The topic of the evening was the change of the automotive industry towards electric mobility, presented by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Martin Doppelbauer, Professor for Hybrid Electric Vehicles at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
At the beginning Mr. Doppelbauer addressed the current competition of the future energy storage technologies battery and fuel cell, which in his opinion cannot compete with each other because the fuel cell has a poor efficiency and requires a complex infrastructure. He then went into more detail about battery electric vehicles, what the current charging infrastructure looks like, what options are available for longer distances and what service life can be expected for the vehicle battery. The recycling process and the so-called 2nd life of the batteries are strongly criticized in public, but Mr. Doppelbauer sees this as a billion-dollar business for the resale of these cells as electric home storage devices and the recycling of the lithium for new cells. Further contents of his presentation were the different raw materials and the CO2 emission in production. However, Mr. Doppelbauer was not so keen on fuel cell cars, as transport, storage and efficiency are much worse and overall a much higher demand of primary energy is needed to produce hydrogen for the fuel cells.
In summary, it was a very interesting presentation, which again brought us new information about electric mobility.
