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Two things are happening here. One, we're bringing on much more Lithium production all around the world. The price increase is coordinating that, but people can

by eloff 4y ago

Two things are happening here. One, we're bringing on much more Lithium production all around the world. The price increase is coordinating that, but people can also see the writing on the wall. There's plenty of innovation happening in Lithium mining and extraction. The other thing is we're innovating in battery chemistry. It would not surprise me if Lithium were only one of many options in ten years, depending on the storage capacity and number of cycles needed per kg. Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. Iron, aluminum, and others are a possibility, for stationary batteries where weight doesn't matter. I know people here are very skeptical of every battery advance press release, and rightfully so. But nonetheless, some of that is going to pan out, and the world of energy storage is going to fundamentally change the economics for cars, airplanes, and grid storage within the next decade.

Tenoke 4y ago
Is it likely that current cars would be compatible with batteries that are that different to not even be Lithium in 10 years? If I look at say my laptop or phone, they definitely aren't compatible with newer batteries even if it's technically feasible so why would we expect cars to be?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  It’s a software update to support different chemistries. This is how Tesla supports various pack types (Li, LFP, etc) across vehicles and stationary storage products.
  - chamanbuga 4y ago
    To clarify: did you mean HW update? For instance, I can't imagine a software update changing my battery chemistry from Lithium Ion to Nickel Cadmium.
    - jxf 4y ago
      I think they meant that _supporting_ this type of battery is a software update. Software can't do matter-energy conversion yet.
    - criley2 4y ago
      Your car doesn't have to know about the "chemistry" of your battery. It just needs to know specifics about voltages and power draw and temperatures. This is what drivers do. This is like suggesting that my computer can't go from AMD to nvidia because they would need to know deep specifics about AMD's proprietary chips to support them. But that's what drivers are for!
      - what-the-grump 4y ago
        That’s because your video card sits on a standard well defined port. Where as charging an EV right now comes a bunch of plugs, voltages, charging times, etc. until a unified open standard is reached where you can go from super charging a Tesla to charging a sodium hyndai is reached, this whole ev dance will remain anti consumer.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      It's "just" different charge profile; wouldn't need any hardware change. Most chemistries can be charged using the same "constant current up to this voltage, constant voltage to the max voltage" method, just need to set the right values.
- jxf 4y ago
  Yes, it is likely. As long as the form factor is well defined or standardized, new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots. The reason it's not true for laptops is that batteries aren't standard form factor sizes in laptops.
  - axiolite 4y ago
    > new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots. You might notice that Li-Ion AA batteries CAN'T be charged by Ni-Cd or Ni-MH AA battery chargers. Even a smaller change like Ni-MH to Ni-Zn requires different equipment.
- lob_it 4y ago
  They were shoehorning V8's into miatas, well outside of the warranty period. Locked into obsolete engineering is a crutch/impediment, not innovation. Seeing the 4G rollout was a good economic course in environmental pollution and abandonded psuedo-innovation. All of the older surplus 2G/3G/4G hardware and abandonded software was sold to developing countries. Now every device on tcp/ip has inferior muck with an out-of-date ecosystem. Desktop computing had it right when the information superhighway still existed. Just install new hardware thats backwards compatible (the hardware was forward compatible by design). The tabloid quality fodder and disposible commerce has always been 3rd world, much in the same way that tcp/ip evolved. Anything for an inferior integer to stay relevant, huh? The environmental impact is someone elses problem :p
samatman 4y ago
I'd bet a decent amount of money that most electric cars in the developed world will still use the Goodenough chemistry in ten years. The theoretical energy density of sodium is too low for the weight, this isn't a matter of developing the technology. What we can look forward to is sodium batteries becoming cheap and reliable, replacing every application of lead-acid, and most, perhaps all, stationary lithium. Great choice for house or grid-level storage, where the lower density is basically harmless. Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around. This will never pencil out.
- tbalsam 4y ago
  Sulfur has entered the room.
  - samatman 4y ago
    I did say ten years, rather than more.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  150Wh/kg is completely fine. A small vehicle with a 100kg battery can do 95% of what is needed for the average person (or as a second family car), it's just a matter of whether the trend of legislating sane vehicles out of existence continues.
- Tuna-Fish 4y ago
  > Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around. This is absolutely not clear. Active lithium is just ~60g per kWh in a battery, or ~1% of the mass of a state of the art LFP battery. Even though sodium weighs 3.5 times more for the same charge, if it's use would allow just a few percent reduction in total weigh, either by reduction of inactive cathode material or some other source, it could easily beat lithium batteries.
leereeves 4y ago
> Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. If you split salt into sodium and chlorine, and use the sodium for batteries, what do you do with the chlorine?
- unionpivo 4y ago
  Dump it into Californians tap water supply apparently :) On serious note, Chlorine is widely use chemical, used in cleaning products, bleaching paper and cloth, pesticides , rubber, and some solvents.
- eloff 4y ago
  Chlorine has lots of industrial uses, so I imagine you sell it. If you produce enough as a by product the cost will go insanely low. If you had to dump it, you'd probably react it with something cheap to make it inert. This would generate energy, it's akin to combustion with oxygen. You could use that energy to decrease the energy requirements of splitting the NaCl in the first step.
  - namibj 4y ago
    For example, you could use it to turn calcium carbonate AKA limestone into calcium chloride, which is rather harmless. You would get carbon dioxide out of this.
    - leereeves 4y ago
      Then what do you do with the CO2, which we already have too much of? Something that might work on a small scale could become an ecological threat on the scale of a billion electric cars.
- samatman 4y ago
  Use carbonate, which doesn't have this problem. This would be preferred anyway: HCl is nasty, and carbon dioxide is not.
- xhkkffbf 4y ago

by eloff 4y ago

Tenoke 4y ago

Is it likely that current cars would be compatible with batteries that are that different to not even be Lithium in 10 years? If I look at say my laptop or phone, they definitely aren't compatible with newer batteries even if it's technically feasible so why would we expect cars to be?

toomuchtodo 4y ago
It’s a software update to support different chemistries. This is how Tesla supports various pack types (Li, LFP, etc) across vehicles and stationary storage products.
- chamanbuga 4y ago
  To clarify: did you mean HW update? For instance, I can't imagine a software update changing my battery chemistry from Lithium Ion to Nickel Cadmium.
  - jxf 4y ago
    I think they meant that _supporting_ this type of battery is a software update. Software can't do matter-energy conversion yet.
  - criley2 4y ago
    Your car doesn't have to know about the "chemistry" of your battery. It just needs to know specifics about voltages and power draw and temperatures. This is what drivers do. This is like suggesting that my computer can't go from AMD to nvidia because they would need to know deep specifics about AMD's proprietary chips to support them. But that's what drivers are for!
    - what-the-grump 4y ago
      That’s because your video card sits on a standard well defined port. Where as charging an EV right now comes a bunch of plugs, voltages, charging times, etc. until a unified open standard is reached where you can go from super charging a Tesla to charging a sodium hyndai is reached, this whole ev dance will remain anti consumer.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    It's "just" different charge profile; wouldn't need any hardware change. Most chemistries can be charged using the same "constant current up to this voltage, constant voltage to the max voltage" method, just need to set the right values.
jxf 4y ago
Yes, it is likely. As long as the form factor is well defined or standardized, new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots. The reason it's not true for laptops is that batteries aren't standard form factor sizes in laptops.
- axiolite 4y ago
  > new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots. You might notice that Li-Ion AA batteries CAN'T be charged by Ni-Cd or Ni-MH AA battery chargers. Even a smaller change like Ni-MH to Ni-Zn requires different equipment.
lob_it 4y ago
They were shoehorning V8's into miatas, well outside of the warranty period. Locked into obsolete engineering is a crutch/impediment, not innovation. Seeing the 4G rollout was a good economic course in environmental pollution and abandonded psuedo-innovation. All of the older surplus 2G/3G/4G hardware and abandonded software was sold to developing countries. Now every device on tcp/ip has inferior muck with an out-of-date ecosystem. Desktop computing had it right when the information superhighway still existed. Just install new hardware thats backwards compatible (the hardware was forward compatible by design). The tabloid quality fodder and disposible commerce has always been 3rd world, much in the same way that tcp/ip evolved. Anything for an inferior integer to stay relevant, huh? The environmental impact is someone elses problem :p

samatman 4y ago

I'd bet a decent amount of money that most electric cars in the developed world will still use the Goodenough chemistry in ten years. The theoretical energy density of sodium is too low for the weight, this isn't a matter of developing the technology. What we can look forward to is sodium batteries becoming cheap and reliable, replacing every application of lead-acid, and most, perhaps all, stationary lithium. Great choice for house or grid-level storage, where the lower density is basically harmless. Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around. This will never pencil out.

tbalsam 4y ago
Sulfur has entered the room.
- samatman 4y ago
  I did say ten years, rather than more.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
150Wh/kg is completely fine. A small vehicle with a 100kg battery can do 95% of what is needed for the average person (or as a second family car), it's just a matter of whether the trend of legislating sane vehicles out of existence continues.
Tuna-Fish 4y ago
> Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around. This is absolutely not clear. Active lithium is just ~60g per kWh in a battery, or ~1% of the mass of a state of the art LFP battery. Even though sodium weighs 3.5 times more for the same charge, if it's use would allow just a few percent reduction in total weigh, either by reduction of inactive cathode material or some other source, it could easily beat lithium batteries.

leereeves 4y ago

> Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. If you split salt into sodium and chlorine, and use the sodium for batteries, what do you do with the chlorine?

unionpivo 4y ago
Dump it into Californians tap water supply apparently :) On serious note, Chlorine is widely use chemical, used in cleaning products, bleaching paper and cloth, pesticides , rubber, and some solvents.
eloff 4y ago
Chlorine has lots of industrial uses, so I imagine you sell it. If you produce enough as a by product the cost will go insanely low. If you had to dump it, you'd probably react it with something cheap to make it inert. This would generate energy, it's akin to combustion with oxygen. You could use that energy to decrease the energy requirements of splitting the NaCl in the first step.
- namibj 4y ago
  For example, you could use it to turn calcium carbonate AKA limestone into calcium chloride, which is rather harmless. You would get carbon dioxide out of this.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    Then what do you do with the CO2, which we already have too much of? Something that might work on a small scale could become an ecological threat on the scale of a billion electric cars.
samatman 4y ago
Use carbonate, which doesn't have this problem. This would be preferred anyway: HCl is nasty, and carbon dioxide is not.
xhkkffbf 4y ago