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Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion Coming Soon
- chroem- 8y agoThey use the same Li-Ion chemistry, but structural composite batteries are on the near term horizon. You get extra capacity "for free" since they also serve as the physical structure of the car/cellphone/aircraft.
- the8472 8y agoThat doesn't really help with grid storage.
- cimmanom 8y agoThat sounds potentially incredibly scary if you get into a fender-bender.
- chroem- 8y agoThey use LiFePO4 so it's chemically inert, and it's protected from shorting out due to mechanical damage because the entire composite acts as a thermoresettable fuse.
- dharmab 8y agoHow does the structure behave in a fire?
- tim333 8y agoZinc based batteries seem to have promise for grid energy. Enerpoly was mentioned yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19586068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19586068 and NantEnergy have been making them: https://www.altenergymag.com/article/2019/03/zinc-air-battery-technology/30652 https://www.altenergymag.com/article/2019/03/zinc-air-batter... >The raw materials that we use are nearly 17 times lower cost than materials used in lithium-ion which suggests they could end up cheaper than Li Ion when production scales up. Nant who claim $100/kWh say: >We feel that $100/KWh is just the tipping point, as our fundamental raw material cost of zinc is just $2-$3/KWh. Today, commercially available zinc batteries are already below $30/KWh. Long term, we see a clear path to a very low-cost battery option that would be disruptive to the entire energy industry. I guess the 30/KWh are non rechargeable ones. Enerpoly say 40euro/KWh but I've a feeling that's projected rather than realised.
- wesammikhail 8y agoHey Tim, you linked to my Enerpoly post from earlier. Enerpoly actually have a working massively rechargeable prototype produced for way less than 40. We´ll have to wait and see the final cost at scale but the whole thing certainly looks promising!
- tim333 8y agoWell good luck. Given that current grid battery storage seems to cost 100+ if people can ship in bulk for <40 it should make quite a difference to the economics of renewable energy.
- elcritch 8y agoCould you elaborate on the state of the prototypes and the remaining challenges to scaling to production units? Curious as a material scientist what type of issues arise with rechargeable zinc/manganese!
- wesammikhail 8y agoI am not an expert on the topic. All I know is that the production procedure is almost the exact same as regular zinc batteries. Any facility that can produce regular zinc batteries today can produce these. The difference is just in the chemical compounds used. The prototype is currently being tested 24/7 to ensure that they can deliver what they promise in terms of life cycle and output over an extended period of time. Enerpoly is planning on mass-producing and selling these battery cells within the next few years (R&D + business and production line takes time to setup). My understanding is that the scaling process is relatively easy as industry standards will apply here due to their technology´s backwards compatibility with existing production methods. If you have any specific questions that you´d like me to forward to their CEO, feel free to shoot me an email and I will put you in touch.
- spenrose 8y agoThe article states: 1. The price of Lithium will drop by half in the next five years: "prices, which averaged $1,160 per kilowatt hour in 2010, reached $176 per kWh last year and could drop below $100 in 2024". 2. Tweaks to the formulation "could boost the energy storage of a lithium-ion battery by 20 percent or more". 3. Supply is going to increase: "Capacity now stands at 302.2 gigawatt-hours, and plants with another 603.8 GWh are planned to open within the next five years." So there is something better coming: in a few years we will have vastly more batteries, which worker better, and cost much less. It's just that they'll be an evolution of lithium-ion rather than a brand new technology.
- Latteland 8y agoTesla is already at $100-150/kwh.
- ianai 8y agoSource? That ultimately reflects better on Tesla’s bottom line than current or near term electric car production across the industry. They’re not selling their batteries at cost to other manufacturers. Until the rest of the industry is at their level the full effects of those lower prices won’t be realized in the market.
- systemBuilder 8y agoNissan accidentally leaked their battery cost for the Leaf, $140/kwh. But they don't do cooling so their batteries die twice as fast as they have to ... Panasonic was livid about this ...
- theothermkn 8y agoThe article’s premise is that Li-ion can’t be disrupted because of the amount of current infrastructure built to produce them. I can’t help but hear a little desperation in this line of argumentation. I’m no expert, but isn’t this actually the kind of thing that we imagine vested interests in every entrenched industry saying just before they’re disrupted? For example, if flow batteries take less capital to produce. Or, if they take different equipment, maybe their capital would be cheaper, given a lack of demand?
- Latteland 8y agoIf you follow the area there are continuing new tech every month that are better than lithium but nothing ever comes to market.
- the8472 8y agothe TL;DR is economies of scale favor li-ion for the next few years even if other technology is superior in principle
- ianai 8y agoThere are probably some examples of how economies of scale discrepancies can be overcome by external market conditions from the WWII/I days. (Steel? Aluminum?) Basically government or significantly increased demand for those alternatives could push past the benefits of economies of scale of existing tech. Pricing carbon emissions or political outrage from the effects of climate change could do it.
- imtringued 8y agoThat's basically what happened with PV. Germany invested in it, costs came down and now it's profitable in the private market. Turns out our governments (and the free market) don't invest enough into promising technologies and if they do they will see great progress.
- imtringued 8y agoHow can an industry that grows by double digit percentages be an entrenched incumbent?
- wesammikhail 8y agoIt depends on the application. There are plenty of applications where Li-ion is not the optimal solution. Li-ion is not the defacto standard for a myriad of reasons in various sectors. Certain massive installations have requirements that li-ion cannot work for. For consumer electronics, maybe li-ion is the best thing we have but for other applications there are breakthroughs made on yearly basis. Enerpoly for instance have prototyped Zinc-Manganese batteries that have great life-cycle, are rechargeable and have great power output for less than 40euro/KWh. In the next few years you will see more and more solutions targeting specific industries and needs. Li-ion is not a silver bullet as its production cost and lifetime is not the greatest of all the solutions offered. http://enerpoly.com/technology/ http://enerpoly.com/technology/ Full Disclosure: I know the CEO of the company and this is not an ad or anything like that. I just want people to pay more attention to upcoming improvements in the sector.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- barney54 8y agoI also wanted to make this note about the application matters. Lithium ion are great, especially for electronics and EVs. They are pretty good for grid scale, but we need other technologies there. Currently the largest source of storage on the grid is pumped hydro (about 95% of storage on the grid) and it will continue to be the largest source of storage for a long time.
- usrusr 8y agoDepending on what exactly you want to measure, the largest grid storage by far is the power-to-gas/gas cavern/gas power plant cycle. But of course only a miniscule fraction of the energy currently going through caverns and gas plants comes from power-to-gas, so it's not wrong to put pumped hydro ahead (possibly even battery installations, p2g is tiny)
- oliveshell 8y agoThat’s quite interesting, actually. I presume a rechargeable zinc-manganese battery would be less of a fire risk than lithium-ion. (A zinc-manganese chemistry is what most disposable alkaline batteries use.)
- KirinDave 8y agoDidn't we just see last year that a stabilized sodium-ion battery is partway through productization work[0] and proofs of concept are available? I can't find any mention of this fairly important and rapid work in the article? Lithium Ion batteries will be cheaper for a while, but once sodium ion batteries can be produced at scale it'll greatly reduce global dependence on very specific regions for high yield lithium mines. The net result will be cheaper batteries. [0]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180912111913.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180912111913.h...
- maxerickson 8y agoThere's a couple hundred dollars of lithium in a 100 kw-hour battery. It isn't particularly driving the cost.
- KirinDave 8y agoAnd if that was 10 dollars of sodium, that sounds like a pretty big cost reduction to me? Sodium is cheap to extract from all sorts of sources, less toxic to humans than lithium pre-processing, and you don't have to move it around the world. Sodium batteries don't just replace the lithium, they also use phosphorus electrodes. Also easy to source.
- fmajid 8y agoThe most important benefit of sodium batteries is safety, they don't suffer from the runaway thermal failures of LiIon. The 10% or so cost advantage itself is not compelling.
- KirinDave 8y agoThe ability to source parts globally and without scarcity seems pretty damn compelling. And the lack of thermal runaway means you can have cheaper charging and regulation features on the battery.
- maxerickson 8y ago
- AngryData 8y agoThe problem isn't that we don't know how to make more powerful batteries right now, the problem is safety. The more powerful your battery, generally the more dangerous/flammable/explosive it is when it fails. The only reason we can even use lithium ion batteries as much as we do is their exceedingly low failure rate. So not only does any new and better batteries need to hold more power, they need to be more stable and have more graceful failure modes.
- ianai 8y agoAgreed, which is why I always look to see stories about solid state lithium batteries. The documentary I saw on them made them look ready for use.
- barney54 8y agoSadly solid state is not currently ready on a large scale. There is still significant work to be done in large part to use a solid state electrolyte.
- sov 8y ago> The problem isn't that we don't know how to make more powerful batteries right now, the problem is safety. No, this isn't the problem. The problems are weight, volume, energy density and cost, and the fact that there's no single catch-all battery solution w.r.t. dis/charge rates, capacity, and the aforementioned values. Safety, while very important and somewhat costly (engineers time--mechanical and certificates), is something the big battery companies understand very well. > The more powerful your battery, generally the more dangerous/flammable/explosive it is when it fail There's a concept called single-cell isolation that basically obviates this.
- audunw 8y ago"The more powerful your battery, generally the more dangerous/flammable/explosive it is when it fails." No, that's not really a thing at all. Li-ion batteries burn because they contain a combustable electrolyte. The initial explosive reaction doesn't have that much to do with the energy in the batteries. The long term reaction is related to the energy in the battery, but only because the electrolyte burned off letting the anode and cathode short out. There are plenty of demonstrations of solid state li-ion batteries that have way higher power density, but that can be cut in two without any explosive reaction at all. The challenge with most of these is cycle life btw. In the extreme case, you can get insanely high energy density out of aluminum-air batteries, but as far as I know they're perfectly safe. Making a safe battery with high energy density is easy. Getting all the other parameters right is hard.
- mips_avatar 8y agoCurrent lithium-ion technology in the pipeline will probably get us to 400watt hours/kilogram and $50-100 / Kwh. Just having that would give us 700 mile range electric cars. And if the glass substrate stuff dr. Goodenough is doing pans out we could see charge speeds 10x faster. So like 300 miles of range in the time it takes to pee.
- tcd 8y agoThe problem is, however, the longevity of these batteries. In the smartphone world, we've seen a huge emphasis on "50% charge in 10 seconds" but I like to believe batteries weren't designed with that in mind. I refuse to use 'fast charging' since I believe it will reduce the life span of the battery (which I guess is what they want so you buy a new phone). If it can be proven batteries can charge much faster AND have an acceptable life span, that's okay. But I don't think that's going to happen any time soon.
- systemBuilder 8y agoSlow charging reduces your lifespan? Doing things other than waiting for charging?
- callalex 8y agoI have started viewing the batteries in my electronics the same way that I do the tires on my vehicle. Sometimes it's fun to push the limits which eats up the tires faster, but they're not that hard to swap out when they're depleted. I refuse to buy electronics that can't have the battery swapped with half an hour of work and some tiny screwdrivers (no glue!).
- mips_avatar 8y agoIt’s true that every battery has a charge rate curve with temperature. If you go above it dendrites and other chemical junk starts to occur and you lose capacity. But your phone is designed to keep track of this. Fast charging is really about getting as close to that curve as possible. Glass anodes that I mentioned above basically make the chemical damage much less possible/likely. So you could safely charge at 10x current speeds.
- jalajc 8y ago“It’s not going to handle a day, a week, a month, a season,” said Moniz I believe that way solar thermal based approach is going to be future; energy stored in form of intrinsic heat of a liquified salt solutions (by the concentrated solar beam), or may be for that matter simply inside heated stones (by solar CSP), and then passing water to convert in steam and run turbines!! But ya that will be for grid level solution, not the mobile electronics' power source.
- aphextron 8y agoThe good thing is we don’t really need anything better than lithium ion for most applications (aerospace excluded). Solid state electrolyte lithium ion will get us to 400Wh/kg, which is more than enough for cheap cars with 400+ mile range.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pmlnr 8y agoSuuure. And lithium is infinite.
- pfdietz 8y ago150 ppb in seawater.
- hopler 8y agoIs it efficient to harvest?
- pfdietz 8y agoNot currently competitive, but the thermodynamic minimum energy goes as the log of dilution.
- 420codebro 8y agoTranslate that for me please.
- pfdietz 8y agoAs an aside: googling gave various numbers for Li in manganese nodules, but maybe around 100 ppm. There's about a trillion tons (!) of nodules on the ocean floors, so that would be 100 million tons of Li (and billions of tons of cobalt, used in Li-ion electrodes.) This is probably not worth mining just for the Li, but if nodules are mined for other metals (like cobalt) it might also be economical to extract the lithium.
- airbreather 8y agoWestern Australia, the Saudi Arabia of lithium, currently producing half the world's lithium and more coming on line. Albermarle are building a LiOH plant in WA that will add 33% capacity to current world production on it's own, plus the Tianqi plant adding maybe 15% is half finished construction right now. We are the also the Saudi Arabia of gas/LNG, plus as a state produce a metric fuckton of the worlds gold and iron ore, but a pity our state and federal governments practically give all our minerals away for trivial royalties and tax the sheeple to the hilt on personal tax... (plus we have a homeless and public mental health problems due to "lack of funding"" in one of the richest mineral states in the world with only 2.6 million people in an area almost size of Western Europe).
- RobertoG 8y agoMaybe Australia should follow Norway sovereign fund idea: "I don't think anyone expected the fund to ever reach $1 trillion when the first transfer of oil revenue was made in May 1996." From: https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/19/investing/norway-pension-fund-trillion-dollars/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/19/investing/norway-pension-fu...
- pytester 8y agoIn theory every country rich in natural resources should follow Norway's example but in practice the presence of natural resources tends to exert a strong corrupting influence on both the economy and the political system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
- RobertoG 8y agoIn theory you are right but, in practice, that only happens because they don't follow Norway's example :-)
- marvin 8y agoNorway only dodged this because we had a supremely visionary Iraqi visit the authorities, and managed to convince them of this danger while the industrial influence was still small enough for government to manage. It's a remarkably lucky coincidence.
- DennisP 8y agoIf a new battery tech like fluoride batteries has much more capacity but is more expensive because it's not produced at scale yet, a solution is to do exactly what Tesla did in the first place: put it first in expensive high-end cars and gradually work down the value chain. It'd be easy to charge a premium for an electric car with a 1500-mile range.
- anovikov 8y agoIf a car with 1500-mile range will become a reality with any chemistry, it will not appear first. These (fantastic) batteries with 4-5x the energy density of modern li-ion, will go into a much more profitable use: electric airplanes. Not sure if these ever appear though. This seems to push not just the limits of technology, but even the laws of physics.
- DennisP 8y agoGoogling "fluoride battery" brings up a bunch of articles claiming up to 10X better energy density than lithium. Until recently fluoride batteries had to be kept at high temperature but a recent development by Honda/NASA/Caltech changed that [1] [2]. However, "the team still has to figure out how to stabilize the anodes and cathodes, which tend to dissolve completely into the electrolyte. They're making some headway though, and further testing is currently underway." In any case, I'm not really making any particular claims about battery tech, just saying I see a flaw in the article's argument that lithium is unassailable. I agree that airplanes are a likely early application of radically better batteries. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/07/fluoride-battery-breakthrough-evs/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/07/fluoride-battery-breakth... [2] https://www.batterypoweronline.com/news/what-the-fluoride-ion-battery-breakthrough-really-means/ https://www.batterypoweronline.com/news/what-the-fluoride-io...
- pdxww 8y agoAn airplane usually spends 1-2 hours in the airport between flights. During that period it needs to be recharged.
- 8y ago
- dstick 8y agoI have nothing to add except that the title “Batter Reality:” would have been objectively better. Enjoy your weekend :)
- FabHK 8y agoBad news for electrically powered aviation. Cost is coming down, but the specific energy (kWh per kg) is not going up. So, probably no useful "flying car" anytime soon.
- dontbenebby 8y agoForgive my ignorance, but what are some of the "less good" options? I ask since it's my understanding L-ion supplies are not infinite, so it's probably good to think about alternatives if the price spikes. (For example, I'm not an EE, but is it possible that if you're willing to tolerate a bulkier rig for a device to store charge in capacitors?)
- Tepix 8y agoLithium is widely available, it's the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust.
- pfdietz 8y agoLithium is not the fourth most abundant element in the Earth's crust (that would be iron). Lithium is #33 (by mass), at about 20 ppm.
- dontbenebby 8y agoMy bad I must have gotten it confused with something else. I've seen mention that "rare earth minerals" may run out eventually and have implications for batteries but I guess I misremembered.
- allannienhuis 8y agoWhat's interesting to me is that neither of you provided sources for your claim. On what basis should I accept either of them? Not trying to be a jerk :) And I know not every statement deserves footnotes. Just thought it interesting that even in the case of refuting someone else's information it doesn't happen (often). :)
- pfdietz 8y agoYou could do what I did, and look up "Abundance of elements in Earth's crust" in wikipedia. I sometimes don't provide the link if wikipedia is the source, since that will be the first place you look. Crustal abundance is interesting, especially when it diverges from chondritic abundances (which represent solar system averages of most elements except hydrogen and noble gases.)
- zackmorris 8y agoI just did a quick search and it looks like the consumer price of li-ion is more like $250 to $400 per kWh by 1000 * dollars/(volts * amphours), so the bulk price of $176 from the article is believable: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=lithium+ion+battery+48V+50AH https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=lithium+ion+battery+48V... I challenge the idea that Li-ion is the lowest price though, because it's one of the densest storage options. The actual cheapest (lowest density) energy storage known is gravity, at a potential energy of E = mgh, so we get roughly 9.8 J per kilogram-meter of height. 1 kWh = 3.6e6 J, so with something like a 95% efficiency winch generator, that's E/(g * efficiency) = 3.6e6/(9.8 * .95) = 387,000 kg or right at 175 metric tons (cubic meters of water). A 90% efficient one-way trip with pumped hydro storage would be 408,000 kg or 185 metric tons. Note that round-trip effiency is the square of one-way, so remember to take the square root of any reported round-trip efficiencies when calculating displacements. An olympic swimming pool holds 2500 cubic meters of water, so that's 2500/185 = 13.5 kWh per meter raised. The average US home uses just over 10 kWh per day. So a good rule of thumb to remember is 1 olympic swimming pool raised 1 meter powers 1 home for 1 day. After writing all of this out, I think that the cheapest energy storage will be to pump air down tubes to big bags under the ocean (or lakes) to displace water. Since volume grows by the cube but surface area only grows by the square, this is the only scalable energy storage system that doesn't require access to a reservoir or oil well. Also since it only requires 1 atmosphere of pressure per 9.8 meters of depth, the low compression might be close to an adiabatic process by not raising the air temperature much, and could get close to an 85% one-way (72% round-trip) efficiency. I feel like by PV = T, for each doubling of pressure but halving of volume, the temperature should stay the same. Maybe someone more experienced with entropy can provide an equation for what percentage is lost per atmosphere of compression, say at 50 F (10 C) ground/water temperature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage#Adiabatic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage#... Hey it looks like they're already doing this in Toronto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GicQwXbNnv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GicQwXbNnv0 But I think it's always good to derive an idea from first principles instead of taking someone's word for it. So I'd put money on this as an alternative to batteries. And just so we have it, about 4 of the $600, 2400 WH Chevy Volt batteries at a total cost of $2400 would also power a home for a day (not counting inverters).
- 8y ago
- Causality1 8y agoEvery time you see one of those "amazing new battery technology" articles, just do a Find on the word "patent". If the creators don't think it's worth patenting you can skip reading the rest of the article because it has no chance of real world application.
- Scoundreller 8y agoWe all know the story: someone's uncle invented it. The government refused to give him a patent, and then he died before he could tell anyone about it.
- nabla9 8y agoLet's hope that lithium becomes economic in the future. Currently recycling lithium costs five times more than mining it and it's not done in large scale.
- iamgopal 8y agoElon knew it 10+ year ago. Also given amount of intellectual and monetary capital being employed, I think sooner or later, Li batteries with the help of combined efforts will beat gasoline in energy density.
- ksec 8y agoWhen could we get a Lithium-Ion Solid Battery or is that a pipe dream? I once read it was used in extreme small quantities, sort of in AAA Battery size for Military purpose, but it was not a well known source of publication. And I could not find other evidence. While it is important to further drive down the price for EV adoption, the price of battery makes little different to devices I am interested in, such as Phones, Tablet and Notebook. We want higher energy density, and even the optimistic projection we could get only 30% more from better formula in the next 5 years. Battery is already the taking the largest volume in these devices, Not only do I want my iPhone thinner, ( The current iPhone is thicker, I prefer it to be iPhone 6 ~6.7mm or even iPad Pro 5.8mm thick ) I want it to have more battery. Which means we need to increase the battery density by at leat 50% compared to today to hit a useful battery life improvement while having a thinner design. Then there is other improvement we want such as rapid charging and higher cycle counts.
- audunw 8y agoStill the most promising I've heard of is Solid Energy Systems. They claimed to be selling batteries to the aerospace field already. In their last presentation it seemed like their challenge is cycle life, but that it's improving. But there's been a while since there's been any news from that company. http://www.solidenergysystems.com http://www.solidenergysystems.com
- ChuckMcM 8y agoIt is useful to look at what it took for Nickel Cadmium to be replaced. (NiCd used to be the dominant rechargable battery tech which had replaced PbSO4). Nickel metal hydride came in and replaced the "big" negative of cell memory for NiCd (so it took out a big user facing 'gotcha' to the tech.) LiOn replaced the weight of NiMH which was a big user facing gotcha. The next battery technology will have to be as light as LiON, have similar power densities, and be impervious to catching on fire I think (that is the current 'gotcha' of using LiON batteries today).
- zild3d 8y agoThe current user-facing gotcha isn't fire, it's capacity. Consumers aren't walking around worrying that their headphones, watch, or phone might explode (except for the brief galaxy note stint). They are worried their phone is going to die before they get to a charger, will their laptop last through the meeting, will their headphones die mid-flight
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI think those are the same problem :-) But I may be looking at it in a way that is slightly different than you are. The way I see it, capacity is unbounded if size is unbounded, you can just have giant batteries. But if size is bounded (as it is in cell phones, laptops, cars, etc) then capacity is a function of energy density. And the 'flaming battery pack' problem is a function of energy density. The more surface area, and thinner the electrolyte layer, the more dendrite development you get and the those are the things that start fires. The Galaxy is a good example of the trade-off, they made a battery with as much capacity as possible, that lead to a an area that was 'pinched' which allowed for dendrites to short, which caused phones to catch on fire. If the battery had 10% less capacity (the fix as I recall) the dimensions can be smaller and the fit better. No pinch, no fires.
- mntmoss 8y agoIMHO the experienced future is likely to continue seeing improvements for a good many years without battery technology changes, for the smaller consumer devices. Vehicles aren't going to get hugely more efficient without something massively disruptive like an efficient levitation technology but for a lot of electronics now, things like backlit screens present a bottleneck, and these can be tackled at multiple layers: * Changing the types of device(screenless device, external display with its own battery, wireless peripherals) * Improving average-case device environment(further standardization of charging methods, external displays as part of furnishings) * Miniaturization and efficiency improvements of the internal hardware and software("battery with a phone attached" becomes increasingly true year over year and I have been living with an all-day battery phone for several years now) Although energy density is a critical enabler, and we could definitely benefit from some jet-fuel-grade density in our alternate energy sources, the larger-scale stuff is also just a lot harder to tackle in a short time frame because it's more infrastructure-dependent. Rethinking our cities is a necessary step, one way or another.
- williesleg 8y agoThank. You. Elon. Musk. The world is cleaner thanks to you and your battery research. The fake media is "concerned" about global warming yet they vilify you.
- bufferoverflow 8y agoI predict this title will not age well. The progress is accelerating. Material science is getting revolutionized by cheap computation and large-scale simulations.
- d-sc 8y agoYeah. Agreed. Also, new technologies tend to come along and disrupt things from completely outside the scope of the people working within the industry.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThere's only so much room at the top of the periodic table.
- bufferoverflow 8y agoSo? Alloys, compounds, and metamaterials give you an almost infinite search space.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThere are limits to electronic charges found, period. Adding additional elements increases mass. https://youtube.com/watch?v=AdPqWv-eVIc https://youtube.com/watch?v=AdPqWv-eVIc
- bufferoverflow 8y agoSo? We don't know what we don't know. We might find some way to store energy within chemical bonds like fuel (39,405 Wh/kg limit of liquid H2) or nuclear (8,700,000,000 Wh/kg of Pu-239) or matter-antimatter interaction (24,965,421,631,578 Wh/kg). Current lab records of 1000-2000 Wh/kg are just a start, we're far far away from hitting any limits.
- dredmorbius 8y agoIn this case, we do. Really.
- lawrenceyan 8y agoSuper capacitors are where the real innovation is going to come in the next few years. Look to see them implemented in high end performance cars like the Tesla Roadster within a year or two, and then make their way into the mainstream through the Tesla Semi, Y, S, X the generation after.
- travisoneill1 8y agoI remember hearing about a sugar powered fuel cell battery that was being developed a few years ago. Supposedly would be able to bring energy density up close to hydrocarbon fuels. I guess it didn't go anywhere, though, as there doesn't seem to be any news around it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_battery
- stcredzero 8y agoThe article says nothing about technologies formulated for larger scales (literally "cheap as dirt") like molten salt. https://blog.ted.com/reinventing-the-battery-donald-sadoway-at-ted2012/ https://blog.ted.com/reinventing-the-battery-donald-sadoway-... We may have to wait for utility scale storage using Li-ion to become big, to spur investment for alternative utility scale storage which could beat Li-ion cost at scale.
- baybal2 8y agoI am surprised to see a competent opinion on a technical topic in a popular business journal
- varelaz 8y agoDoes anyone know status of mechanical accumulator project. I've heard that flywheel could be promising, while it has its flaws.
- torpfactory 8y agoHere's an interesting argument WHY you still might choose lithium ion (or whatever you use for automotive storage) for stationary storage instead of some other technology. Total electricity generation in 2012 was ~21k TWh. Say you need ~8 hours of battery storage daily (i.e. 1/3 of daily use). That works out to about 19k GWh of battery storage, assuming you can recharge daily. For reference, Tesla's Gigafactory produces ~35GWh of batteries per year currently. Total oil consumption for road transport was ~2k Mtoe in 2012. That works out to 23k TWh of energy. Assume you only need half of that when you go from a heat engine to an electric motor. Now you've got 11.5k TWh of total use. Now assume that you recharge your vehicle nightly. The world would need ~32k GWh of batteries to hold all of the energy currently used for road-going vehicles (given the above assumptions). The market for whatever battery technology that works for automobiles is the same order of magnitude as the market for grid-scale storage. If you're a battery maker, you can increase your total addressable market by selling into both automotive and grid-attached storage.
- rwqa 8y ago
- michaelcampbell 8y agoI've joked in YC before that it's about time for the semi-annual mind-blowing battery technology announcement, so this was a bit of a surprise.
- mrfusion 8y agoI’ve always liked the idea of batteries based on ATP. It’s the energy currency of the cell, why not use it to power out batteries.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Matador79 8y agoIn terms of electricity, this company is still refining its design, but most energy used in industrial is heat energy and these guys are solving it. https://1414degrees.com.au/ https://1414degrees.com.au/
- 2sk21 8y agoCan the stored heat can be converted to electric power or is it intended to be used as such?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thoughtstheseus 8y agoWhat happened to those train batteries?
- sytelus 8y agoI went to article hoping to read some story like researchers have spend X million hours looking at Y thousand chemicals and nothing better is found. Instead the article sounds like directly published by lithion-ion lobby essentially saying that there is too much legacy now with us and nothing new would be accepted so don't even try. Right. If someone found battery that produces 10X more kWh in 10X less form factor, I'm sure this can easily be changed.
- yogthos 8y agoCompletely agree, a battery with 10x capacity would be huge. Imagine having mobile devices that only need to be charged once a week or so. There's one promising approach using fluoride that's being investigated right now. It's only a matter of time until this or something similar comes to market. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1144 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1144
- zimmund 8y ago> Imagine having mobile devices that only need to be charged once a week or so. In practice we would have devices consuming 10x more power. The battery from your phone would probably power a phone from 2005 for more than a week.
- abandonliberty 8y agoDidn't phones from 2005 last for a week :) Joking aside, a blackberry bold from 2011 had 1200mah and the samsung s10 has 3400.
- xbmcuser 8y agoPersonally to me the weird thing is that most people on hacker news or even in general make up their mind about something and stick with it. I have noticed it the most when it comes to solar and battery news as the tech is improving at such a breakneck speed that what you find out today might no longer be true 1-2 years from now.
- vixen99 8y ago"The annual output of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory, could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. It would require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of materials are mined, moved, and processed for every pound of battery produced." https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0319-MM.pdf https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R...