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I work with (among other things) batteries. As I've gotten a bunch of emails about it, I suppose I am "the battery guy" here. Li-ion battery energy density gro

I work with (among other things) batteries. As I've gotten a bunch of emails about it, I suppose I am "the battery guy" here. Li-ion battery energy density grows in spurts. Realistically, there have been a few major improvements, with very small incremental improvements in between. For example, in 2001 we were at 180 Wh/kg. In just a handful of months we jumped to 260 Wh/kg, then to 280 Wh/kg as manufacturing processes improved. In the last 11 years, however, improvements have been maybe a few Wh/kg per year, and there have been literally zero improvements whatsoever in the past four years, by anyone. Eleven years is a very long time, especially for something that everybody just assumes is constantly silently improving. And it's not like the battery industry stopped investing in growth: there are absolutely insane amounts of money invested in battery R&D, since whoever figures out how to make a cheap, energy-dense battery will become absolutely infathomably rich and make Madoff-level growth look like US savings bonds. Bonus fact: nobody really understands lithium-ion batteries. One production run might have substantially higher or lower capacity. Some batteries might explode. Some batteries are high discharge and some are low discharge. The "explanation" for all of these things is 'heat'. Imagine that happening to any other industry (for example the auto industry.) - "Why did my car just explode!?" "Heat" - "Why does this car last a tenth the lifetime of this car?" "Heat" - "Why does this car go a thousand times faster than any others?" "Heat" - "Why is this entire production run of cars not working?" "Heat" People say "heat" for two reasons: 1) because nobody understands li-ion batteries and 2) because yes, the real answer does have something to do with heat. Batteries are one of the most important industries and critical to every company on HN. But the state of the art of batteries is putting together random metals with a bunch of random chemicals and watching which ones don't explode. Imagine talking to the CEO of Boeing: "We just did our millionth test, engines made of cheese and wings made of coconut shells. It crashed during takeoff, of course. We haven't had any improvements in over a decade, but we're sure we'll get there eventually - we've spent billions on research so far."

dsacco 10y ago
Could you speak to the reasons why successful startups are not really being founded to develop more advanced batteries? Is the issue primarily 1) widespread lack of knowledge across the entire battery "stack", even within the industry, 2) widespread mismanagement and inefficiency of processes within manufacturing or R&D or 3) the fundamental R&D for battery improvements is just outrageously hard? I get that it's probably all 3, but I feel as if the main problem being 1) or 2) would lend itself well to startups with extremely knowledgable battery industry veterans.
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  A lot of it is because the battery world isn't very startup-y. You can hack together a prototype for an app or a website with a handful of developers, sleepless nights and some caffeine, and push that out to the real world, and show that to VCs and raise money. The battery world doesn't work like that. The scientists and engineers you hire will want to work stable 9-5 jobs with decent salaries, you won't have anything to show for years, and success is binary. 99.99% of hypothetical battery startups would have nothing to show for their research except a handful of useless patents for design processes that will never be practical. One would have the breakthrough that brings them to unlimited riches. Another problem is that there are two categories of success: you find a simple way to make amazing batteries, or you find a massively complicated way. If you find a simple way, that's great, but it can be copied by anyone who wants money, and you'll end up like the Hoverboard - a very successful _idea_ but the company only captured a fraction of the market. If you find a complex way, it's very likely to require an expensive material or process. For example, say you need a rare metal or something that's not currently produced in large quantities. The capital you'd need to raise in order to extract or create this material could be absolutely massive. For example, let's say you got a 10,000 Wh/kg battery but it needed a substantial quantity of rhenium. Well, worldwide production of rhenium is about 40 tons/year. You'd have create a worldwide industry for extracting rhenium, perhaps rivaling the oil industry in size. Imagine that conversation with VCs. "You want to raise $1.5 trillion? With a T?" "Yep, and we want to do it to create a battery that could either enable our world to look like Star Trek. Oh yeah, and it might become obsolete in months if someone has a better idea." Another thing is that there's not much to "disrupt". If someone gave me $XXX million for a battery startup, it'd basically be set up in a very similar way to the research arm of Panasonic or Samsung SDI. If some genius comes up with a way to improve the efficiency of the core research - sure, that's obviously worth funding. But the problem is that everybody is trying to get to the breakthrough directly, not invent tools to get to the breakthrough faster. Imagine if you were in a room with 1000 people, and an authoritative source announced that there's a pot of gold buried in the hill behind the room, and it'll probably be found in a few hours. Do you spend two hours driving home, getting your shovel, and driving back? Or do you run out there and rabidly start digging? Sure, you might answer "get a shovel" now, but in the real world 999 of those 1000 people will be digging with their hands. The last problem is that the risk, and the return, is absolutely ridiculous. With startups, say 1 in 1000 makes you a billion dollars, 600 return your money and 399 go bankrupt. Great, that's acceptable. Even worst-case scenario, you take a big loss but you don't lose _everything_. With moonshot battery research startups, every single one will lose all your money except for one - and that one will make you fabulously wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. If the breakthrough is big enough, it would revolutionize literally every field from space exploration to aerospace to power generation to electronics to vehicles. There are so many variables you can't even start to calculate the odds.

dsacco 10y ago

Could you speak to the reasons why successful startups are not really being founded to develop more advanced batteries? Is the issue primarily 1) widespread lack of knowledge across the entire battery "stack", even within the industry, 2) widespread mismanagement and inefficiency of processes within manufacturing or R&D or 3) the fundamental R&D for battery improvements is just outrageously hard? I get that it's probably all 3, but I feel as if the main problem being 1) or 2) would lend itself well to startups with extremely knowledgable battery industry veterans.

owenversteeg 10y ago
A lot of it is because the battery world isn't very startup-y. You can hack together a prototype for an app or a website with a handful of developers, sleepless nights and some caffeine, and push that out to the real world, and show that to VCs and raise money. The battery world doesn't work like that. The scientists and engineers you hire will want to work stable 9-5 jobs with decent salaries, you won't have anything to show for years, and success is binary. 99.99% of hypothetical battery startups would have nothing to show for their research except a handful of useless patents for design processes that will never be practical. One would have the breakthrough that brings them to unlimited riches. Another problem is that there are two categories of success: you find a simple way to make amazing batteries, or you find a massively complicated way. If you find a simple way, that's great, but it can be copied by anyone who wants money, and you'll end up like the Hoverboard - a very successful _idea_ but the company only captured a fraction of the market. If you find a complex way, it's very likely to require an expensive material or process. For example, say you need a rare metal or something that's not currently produced in large quantities. The capital you'd need to raise in order to extract or create this material could be absolutely massive. For example, let's say you got a 10,000 Wh/kg battery but it needed a substantial quantity of rhenium. Well, worldwide production of rhenium is about 40 tons/year. You'd have create a worldwide industry for extracting rhenium, perhaps rivaling the oil industry in size. Imagine that conversation with VCs. "You want to raise $1.5 trillion? With a T?" "Yep, and we want to do it to create a battery that could either enable our world to look like Star Trek. Oh yeah, and it might become obsolete in months if someone has a better idea." Another thing is that there's not much to "disrupt". If someone gave me $XXX million for a battery startup, it'd basically be set up in a very similar way to the research arm of Panasonic or Samsung SDI. If some genius comes up with a way to improve the efficiency of the core research - sure, that's obviously worth funding. But the problem is that everybody is trying to get to the breakthrough directly, not invent tools to get to the breakthrough faster. Imagine if you were in a room with 1000 people, and an authoritative source announced that there's a pot of gold buried in the hill behind the room, and it'll probably be found in a few hours. Do you spend two hours driving home, getting your shovel, and driving back? Or do you run out there and rabidly start digging? Sure, you might answer "get a shovel" now, but in the real world 999 of those 1000 people will be digging with their hands. The last problem is that the risk, and the return, is absolutely ridiculous. With startups, say 1 in 1000 makes you a billion dollars, 600 return your money and 399 go bankrupt. Great, that's acceptable. Even worst-case scenario, you take a big loss but you don't lose _everything_. With moonshot battery research startups, every single one will lose all your money except for one - and that one will make you fabulously wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. If the breakthrough is big enough, it would revolutionize literally every field from space exploration to aerospace to power generation to electronics to vehicles. There are so many variables you can't even start to calculate the odds.