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"CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg which it says will go into mass production this year" This is a lot more credible than most of the
by bagels 4y ago
"CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg which it says will go into mass production this year"
This is a lot more credible than most of the battery stories, because CATL is already producing a ton of batteries, lending them some credibility.
This is a little under 2x the density of current batteries.
- gibolt 4y agoCurrent mass produced batteries, which tend to hover around 260-300 Wh/kg. Higher density (but still under 500) are available, but in far smaller quantities for a very high cost. The exciting part of this announcement is that if anyone can scale manufacturing, it is them.
- oriel 4y agoReally it is encouraging for advancement areas like this. Reminds me of the "revolutionary battery checklist": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 edit: removed the paste of the checklist because of spam.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago“No week goes by without a revolutionary battery technology” - Engadget, circa 2010
- gibolt 4y agoWhile this is true, a tiny start-up with big claims is different from the world's largest battery manufacturer (CATL) already spooling up production with the intent to scale.
- jackmott42 4y agoAnd that is why batteries have become so much better now than they were 20 years ago.
- magila 4y agoEh, not really. Most "battery breakthrough!" press releases are about some new exotic chemistry while most mass produced battery improvements in the last 20 years have come from incremental improvements to existing chemistries and better packaging.
- _ea1k 4y agoMeh, the devil's in the details with a lot of those announcements. A surprising number of them are things like... it will be 50% better 5-10 years from now! That's actually incremental improvement if you think about it in annual improvement terms.
- zamnos 4y agoIt is, except for the fact that the future isn't guaranteed, so there could be unforeseen problems with scaling up, and that 50% improvement never gets delivered. As mentioned upthread though, CATL has expertise in that area, and "end of this year" is so a trackable claim, unlike the claims about gallium-based batteries.
- _ea1k 4y agoI agree. Its also not uncommon that the "old" tech improves incrementally during the same timeframe, mitigating the seeming impact.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoHard carbon anodes were one of these "exotic" new elements, but are now just standard. Silicon anodes will be the same. Sodium ion still has shills screeching about how it'll never come despite being last year's news. Lithium Manganese batteries are another one of these exotic chemistries that arrived without fanfare.
- usrusr 4y agoHave they? Other than lithium based batteries getting cheaper per kilogram so that year by year, more battery use cases have switched over from inherently worse chemistries? Even just ten years ago, eneloop were still the hot thing for many applications outside of laptops, mobile phones and the odd Tesla (ten years ago was when Model S was still the fresh new successor to the converted Lotus)
- notJim 4y agoCheap cynicism is fun, but Wh/kg has been steadily increasing since the '90s https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose/3/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
- walrus01 4y agoWhat battery pack that I can buy right now is 300Wh/kg? Sincerely curious because that's 50Wh/kg above what people are using in some very expensive UAVs.
- rdez6173 4y agoAmprius has 400+Wh/kg that are commercially available. I'm sure they ain't cheap, but the tech exists. https://amprius.com/products/ https://amprius.com/products/ Edit: well, I'm a dummy and OP said mass-produced. Sorry.
- ilyt 4y agoUAVs also have higher current requirement, and that means more weight "wasted" for chonkier electrodes Car batteries aren't pulling 50C worth of current
- frosted-flakes 4y agoDon't car batteries also have very high current requirements? Turning over an engine takes an enormous amount of power.
- mwint 4y agoGP is probably talking about EV main batteries, not the lead-acid 12v accessory/starter batteries.
- falcolas 4y agoMost batteries that run starters are not energy dense, they're typically standard lead acid batteries. FWIW, to provide the 225 amps (for a V8 starter motor) a Tesla car battery would only need a discharge capability of 3C (1C being around 80 amps), which is within its rated capabilities. This is also for batteries which provide higher voltages, so I'm vastly overestimating the C rate required. C is the unit for charge/discharge rates, and is based off the capacity of the battery.
- 4y ago
- tarunmuvvala 4y agoThe real question is, will this lead to reduction in cost? If yes, I hope they open-source it so that the fight against global warming can gain some momentum across the globe.
- chrismorgan 4y agoAnd the final sentence: > What makes CATL’s announcement this week truly groundbreaking is that the condensed battery will go into mass production this year.
- Moldoteck 4y agowow that's really cool, taking into account all shortages/crisis/war, it's really fast
- baq 4y agoMy plan to buy an EV in the next five years may be realistic after all. Happy!
- Akronymus 4y agoYou may not have a choice in the matter as more and more countries are thinking of/implementing ICE bans in the near future.
- bearmode 4y agoICE bans won't prevent people from buying used cars.
- 0xy 4y agoThey're unlikely to succeed because if the massive tax on poor people (ICE bans) actually gets implemented, all of the poor people who are forced to buy an unaffordable EV will vote for populists promising to unwind the bans.
- missingdays 4y agoNot all countries are car-centric as USA
- rootusrootus 4y agoThat's objectively true because it's an absolute. Most advanced nations are pretty much car-dependent, however.
- nicoburns 4y agoThey’re only banning sales of new EVs in the short term, and poor people don’t buy new cars anyway. By the time they are buying EVs, they’ll be much cheaper.
- j16sdiz 4y ago
- elevaet 4y ago> battery with 500 Wh/kg Wow, that's amazing, creeping up towards the energy density of gasoline at around 1200 Wh/kg Of course you don't have to lug around the spent gasoline after you've used it, but that's really the problem too innit?
- rippercushions 4y agoYes, it would seem preferable to reuse the same energy storage over and over again, as opposed to digging it out of the ground at huge expense, shipping it across the world, and then spreading it out into the environment as a cloud of toxic particles after one use.
- bsaul 4y agoyour analogy doesn't old : ice cars reuse their tank. it's not nitpicking, electricity production has a cost. It's just a different cycle of production / pollution.
- VBprogrammer 4y agoI wonder what it does to the other axises: cost, volumetric density, resilience and charging speed etc.
- oblio 4y agoThat's a problem for shipping and aviation. It's still a problem, but batteries can already do a lot of heavy lifting (and pulling).
- adwn 4y agoYou're forgetting to take into account that an electric drivetrain (power electronics and electric motor) is several times more efficient than a gasoline drivetrain (ICE motor and gearbox). It also weighs less.
- pawelk 4y agoIsn't it break even point, considering >60% of the gasoline energy is dissipated as heat, and <40% to make the wheels spin?
- sixQuarks 4y agoYes, I'm always skeptical whenever battery breakthroughs are announced because it's easy to make a breakthrough in the lab, but almost impossible to transition it into mass production. This has a lot of potential coming from CATL. However, there is no mention of price. I'm betting this is going to be very expensive.
- legohead 4y agoMy litmus test for battery/solar stories is: can you buy it? If not, consider it bullshit. At least these guys are announcing production.
- justin_oaks 4y agoThis is why I generally skip over any "breakthrough" science/tech stories on HN. News articles on breakthrough discoveries are mostly bullshit and even when they aren't, most of the time they don't affect my life in the slightest because the tech is impractical or expensive. It may be interesting to read about science discoveries, but I don't want to take the time to sort out the bullshit from what's real just to find out that the breakthrough is irrelevant to me and society at large.
- lanstin 4y agowhat is your time horizon? not commercialized today == bullshit? i like these sorts of stories because they have prepared me a bit for some of amazing technology changes i have seen over past decades. by the time i can by an iphone i was at least expecting it. when email hacking stories started appearing in politics, i already knew the details. the first time i bought an electric car was not the first time i had thought about the issues of range and charge speed and so on. surely not everything that looks promising becomes popular, but that is also useful information, to me, a person whose job is building/helping to build novel systems.
- elihu 4y agoThere's also kind of a grey zone in there of "no, I can't buy it, but if I was a major car manufacturer I could." I wish we had access to all the good stuff as retail customers, but that's just not how it is. (This is especially frustrating on the EV conversion front, since the best parts are usually unobtainable except from salvage vehicles. The products specifically made for EV conversion are usually rather underwhelming compared to what the OEMs can get.)
- dang 4y agoOk, we'll use that as the title above. Thanks!
- scythe 4y ago>This is a little under 2x the density of [the best] current batteries. [brackets mine] But the best batteries contain unacceptably high levels of cobalt. Practical EV batteries are made with nickel or iron, maybe vanadium someday, and have lower density than pure LiCoO2. >CATL is already producing a ton of batteries, lending them some credibility. A couple of years ago CATL claimed that they had figured out how to make durable sodium-ion batteries with a ferricyanide cathode, to be released in 2023. The press cheered about the end of lithium dependence. Yesterday, not long before this announcement, it was revealed that CATL's "sodium-ion" battery contains lithium: https://cnevpost.com/2023/04/20/catl-byd-sodium-ion-batteries-mass-production-this-year-report/ https://cnevpost.com/2023/04/20/catl-byd-sodium-ion-batterie... "CATL and BYD's sodium-ion batteries to be put into mass production will both be a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries, according to local media." [sad trombone noises]
- jackmott42 4y agoMy EV with cobalt in the batteries seemed practical to me. And nothing wrong with having some lithium in their battery. The important thing is how much cheaper is it.
- scythe 4y agoYour EV probably has the usual NMC or NCA chemistries which have around 10-20% cobalt. I don't know of any car that uses a 100% LiCoO2 cathode — it's just not practical.
- elihu 4y agoCobalt is practical if you want to make low millions of cars. It ceases to be practical if you want to make a billion cars. There just isn't enough of it readily available to scale.
- diggernet 4y agoWhile I agree that the blurb you quote strongly implies that the sodium-ion batteries contain lithium, I don't think the article itself really says that. > CATL and BYD's sodium-ion batteries will both be carried in mass-produced vehicles within the year, and they [the vehicle battery packs] will both be a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries, according to a report by local media 36kr today. By my reading of that, and the rest of the article, it's saying that the vehicle battery will be assembled from of a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion battery cells, not that the sodium-ion cells contain lithium. > With its pioneering AB battery system integration technology, CATL has achieved a mix of sodium ion and lithium ion, allowing them to complement each other and thus increase the energy density of the battery system, Huang said at the time. Basically, a "battery system" using only sodium-ion cells does not yet have enough energy density to support their range targets, so they are using a mix of cell types to improve the energy density and increase the vehicle range.
- patja 4y agoIt is 4x the density of the Victron LiFePO4 batteries I have on my sailboat.