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We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
by laxisOp 2mo ago
We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
- 47635274172635 2mo ago[dead]
- himata4113 2mo agoI don't think 10x density is possible without getting into nuclear, at least not with the chemistries we know of today, everything at a certain point becomes an explosive. Speaking of nuclear, getting tons of the material that powers mars rovers and putting them in every home would generate enough power for decades... At the cost of being able to build a nuclear bomb in a garage.
- Aboutplants 2mo agoThe next revolution will be small scale generation. Fuel cells, extremely efficient cheap solar, even smaller modular reactors, etc. I live in western Pennsylvania and have both natural gas and electric service, a roof and 1/3 acre of land to utilize. I would love to get rid of at least one of my utility bills and I’m becoming more interested in decoupling from the electric grid than natural gas service. I dream of a future where competition comes to monopoly utilities by way of direct competition with each other as there is a not so far off future where I can utilize solar, batteries and a natural gas fuel cell to cut ties with my Electric Utility. If that kind of competition can exist then the game is on for those utilities to start fighting for customers.
- bluGill 2mo agoWith modern heat pumps and induction stoves getting off of natural gas is fairly easy for most people and saves money in the long run. Meanwhile the grid is switching to renewables so getting off gas is your best investment. You can get of electric too, but on your 1/3rd acre that probably means significant lifestyle compromises - I will be impressed if you are willing to live with them.
- Tostino 2mo agoBatteries are cheap enough to build (using a commercial installer completely kills the economics, because you're paying five to ten times the actual cost in the US) a reasonable size personal battery bank (~100+ kwh), paired with some overkill solar, to totally replace the grid in a lot of cases. GP isn't limited to rooftop solar with 1/3rd an acre, so they can do it quite cheap if they want.
- robocat 2mo ago> love to get rid of at least one of my utility bills Some places don't allow going off-grid. They force everyone in neighbourhood to pay for gas and/or electricity infrastructure even if you're not using it. So many people have gone offgrid solar in Pakistan that it is causing severe issues for their electricity market and existing infrastructure.
- cestith 2mo agoI seem to remember recent advances in TMSR research and construction. Those tend to e much safer and have safer byproducts than uranium or plutonium fueled water-cooled reactors.
- utopiah 2mo agoIn term of dual use nuclear seems culturally radically different from everything else, wondering why.
- GuB-42 2mo agoThe problem with the stuff that powers mars rovers (RTG) is that gives off constant power. If your RTG gives off 100W, you will always get 100W, no more, no less, until it progressively decays on the scale of decades. You can't even turn it off. The energy density is great, but the power density is really bad. For most applications, you still want a battery in addition to the RTG. I don't know how easy it is to make a nuclear bomb from them, it is not the right isotope. You can probably make a nuclear exploding thing, like a dirty bomb, but not the nuclear bombs we know.
- himata4113 2mo agoThe hard part of enrichment is getting to around 20%, after that it actually becomes easier. They're slow-decay isotopes yes, but I am fairly sure you can build a multi-stage device to create a superheated plasma to release all that energy in a fraction of a second since they are capable of chain reactions and it is largely dictated by heat. Last time I looked into this was 5 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy, take it with a grain of salt. And yah, batteries would still be needed to even out the load, but it is extremely predictable and can be offset with preheating water and other things during valleys of usage, also those rovers actually have 500w of power!
- GuB-42 2mo agoIt is actually the opposite, RTGs use plutonium-238, which is much more radioactive than the plutonium-239 used in bombs. And it is a problem because it will blow up before you can assemble enough of it to make a big nuclear explosion. In addition, it is not as fissile as plutonium-239. I don't know about production, it is a hypothetical and I just assumed you had a bunch of plutonium-238 available, but as I understand it, rather than being an enrichment problem as with uranium-235/238, it is just not made using the same process as plutonium-239 to begin with.
- epistasis 2mo agoThe past 20 years have made lithium ion 2-3x more dense, both because of some chemistry changes and because of better pack level design. And it's still improving at about 5% per year.
- dzhiurgis 2mo agoTesla has been around for nearly 20 years. Model S (12 years) has gained 17% of range due to chemistry (rest is system efficiency and simply bigger battery).
- heaney-555 2mo agoRange is not a real issue for electric cars. Charging time is, though, and there are massive improvements happening for that right now.
- jqbd 2mo agoI would wager charging time is basically solved, adoption is only thing that's left.
- rogerrogerr 2mo agoYeah, when I take a road trip I genuinely enjoy the cadence of charging. 5-10 minutes every two hours, just enough to go to the bathroom or walk around. I get to my destination not materially later, and feeling far more relaxed than when I was doing death marches in a gas car.
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo agoThis is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station. Anyone who’s ever driven between Seattle and Portland and seen the e16b charging lots of people sleeping in their cars knows there is a whole different side to your rosey picture. EV owners are still internalizing their range anxiety into a benefit. I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
- toddmorey 2mo agoAgreed, but I think people can imagine and companies are very motivated: powertools, phones, laptops, watches, backup UPS, cars, hospital equipment... there's high demand for durable, long-lasting batteries. I think the research is there, it's just complex chemistry. We'll get there. Impressive to see the progress in EV batteries and they've actually turned out to be more durable than first feared.
- laxpri 2mo agohard core lipo user here(for DIY). battery is great but it gets balloon after using some time
- trollbridge 2mo agoI can - it’s called a bomb. Some of the problems with batteries are heat dissipation (one of those problems that superconductors would mostly solve), fire safety, and end of life disposal. Higher energy density makes it even worse. A good place to start would be a BMS on individual cells that monitors them for general degradation, unexpected discharge, unexpected temperature changes, and can remove a failing cell from the array.
- thechao 2mo agoGasoline has 10x the energy (MJ/Kg) than TNT, but it's not a "bomb". Being a "bomb" is about energy release rate. A battery is still controlled by its chemistry.
- trollbridge 2mo agoOne of the problems with gasoline is its explosive nature, which the fuel storage and delivery system of a car attempts to mitigate. It has a better profile for burning off than a battery though since it will spill out and burn away from the vehicle.
- not_the_fda 2mo agoGasoline isn't that explosive. You can shoot up a gas tank and it will just burn. What you see on TV is movie magic. Gasoline vapor can explode, but you need the right air to fuel ratio and a spark.
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo agoUh… gasoline has a super high vapor pressure. If you start out at the wrong ratio, it does what it can to make that ratio right. I’ve seen a few gasoline fires that start by burning, and then much more rapidly expressing potential.
- capitainenemo 2mo ago
- clickety_clack 2mo agoI think people can imagine lighter cars and laptops and things. Is there something bizarre that’s unlocked like battery powered space launches or something?
- nico_h 2mo agoElectric long distance passenger planes. Possibly requiring the help of EMALs. Electric long distance container ships. Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns. Even longer range drones.
- ricardobeat 2mo agoAviation, drones with hours+ flight range, more solar power usage as storage gets easier/cheaper, phones that last more than a day, robots with actually useful battery life, smaller IoT devices. A lot of current tech is severely limited by battery capacity.
- tflinton 2mo agoHigh density batteries allows us to have dramatically cheaper electricity. Think of it like this, what happens when electricity is 1/10th the cost? Beyond what others have pointed out (electric airplanes, cars that drive thousands of miles), costs for everything would drop as energy is a core driver of it in every good you consume. If you can pull energy where it's very cheaply available and store/transport it anywhere the world millions of lives would be saved. For example; If energy is cheaper than the price of water you can pull water out of thin air (dehumidifiers). If energy is cheaper you can grow food in areas you normally couldn't. When you can transport anything for cheap you can move food to areas that are vulnerable to food insecurity. If you can store energy at large scale you can nearly eliminate grid failures, savings lives in the summer and winter. Costs for transporting food would go down significantly, imagine groceries being 10-15% cheaper. Assuming airlines have competitive pressure you could expect plane flight costs to drop 20-30% improving everyone's mobility.
- RetroTechie 2mo agoBatteries are not power sources, but storage. The energy still has to come from somewhere, and power generation won't magically become 10x cheaper overnight. No matter how cheap battery storage becomes. But it IS crucial for removing bottlenecks & replace fossil fuels.
- raumgeist 2mo agoI think, apart from finding better Batteries altoghether, we should build multi-tier batteries inspired by biology. Humans have bloodsugar, sugar in the Liver and then fat. All of them have their respective properties with availability and amount. This way, engineering tradeoffs could be allocated much more fine grained. For example, a while ago I read about a startup building an energy storage where they heat up large amounts of sand to store the surplus of renewables. This could serve analogous to the fat in humans.
- jqbd 2mo agoI think I've heard of sodium, lithium hybrids. But that's only 2, what's the fat? Gasoline, LPG hybrid? Shit gets expensive fast. Probably 2x cost of just a sodium or ion EV? The human body is too amazing.
- andrewflnr 2mo agoHumans do that because we're big and extra complicated. The closest analogue is probably a hybrid car, though ideally you'd want one that can create synthetic fuel from its battery. But I suspect cellphones are properly analogous to e.g. bacteria that have much simpler energy storage.
- kansface 2mo agoI look to a future of regularly servicing the immune system of my battery.
- spockz 2mo agoThat reminds me of the gel packs in the USS Voyager. At some point they became “infected” and they needed to the raise their temperatures to let them destroy the infection!
- jubilanti 2mo agoBiological power is marvelous, but really inefficient. All that sugar and fat in entire human body only generates 50-150 Watts.
- 2mo ago
- dmix 2mo agoThe article says $4B was put into solid state research/companies as of 2025 in the US alone. Seems like they are working on it
- laxpri 2mo agomaybe, but not enough. but if there is level 1 to 10 and the chips are level 10, from transistor to today. the battery would be level 2-3 . if this continues the battery cant keep up with more advance tech,where energy density matters like flying cars,BCI etc . like people are selling two same products to the same person(same time), because the battery life is bad.
- dmix 2mo agoI'm all for more
- iso1631 2mo agoNot all batteries need to be mobile. A 1 GWh grid scale battery takes up about 4 hectares at the moment. The UKs total energy use is about 2,000GWh a day. It would need to use 240,000 hectares to store all energy requirements (eletric, transport, heating etc) for a whole month. Even in extreme cold conditions it would last a couple of weeks. That would be about 1% of land use.
- epistasis 2mo agoStoring a month of energy use doesn't make any sense when it comes to renewable grids. Since you don't have to mine/extract and transport an inventory, far far less storage is required.
- barbazoo 2mo agoDoesn't that depend on the sources of energy though? Pretty much constant short and mid term supply like geothermal, hydro, tides, etc vs unpredictable or variable in the short term like wind and solar. As a society relying on solar, I'd want to have more of a buffer than one that relies on hydro.
- womble2 2mo agoA month is probably excessive, but there are large regions of the world where its not uncommon for both solar and wind power to be running at <5% for multiple weeks in a row.
- epistasis 2mo agoThere's an engineering tradeoff between having excess generation capacity, for that seasonal minimum, and having more storage. The cost optimal decision on that tradeoff will be determined by the ratio of excess generation cost and storage cost for rarely-used storage. Until that ratio falls by at least 3x to 5x in favor of batteries being cheaper than generation, extra generation is going to be the way that grids actually get built out. Batteries and generation are both falling in cost fairly quickly, but generation still has the overall edge in learning rate. Cost decreases won't bottom out for at least a decade, because there's been no slow down yet, so I wouldn't expect this ratio to change for a minimum of 20 years, which means that pretty much a full energy system interchange will have happened by the time that this price ration changes. So there's at least a few assumptions about the current industry and it's future development that underlie my assertion that a month of storage makes no sense, but I'm confident enough that I'd place money on the bet, and there's very very few things I'd bet on. Edit: one thing that would break my assumption is the industrial development of storage that's super cheap for once-per-year usage. Most storage now needs to be cycled about 300x per year to make economic sense. "Long duration" storage is actually better defined as "economical storage at few battery cycles per year". There's nothing like that in the research hopper, but that doesn't mean it couldn't appear tomorrow and be deployed within a decade. Something that only gets used once or twice a year has to be dirt cheap, even if you could get 10x or 20x normal electricity prices for it.
- toss1 2mo agoIt should be relatively straightforward to imagine — we already have that in gasoline-powered internal combustion engines. The Watt-hours per kilogram of good Lithium Ion batteries is around 250-280 Wh/Kg; for Lithium Iron Phosphate it's about 180 Wh/kg, and for Sodium-Ion about 170 Wh/Kg. The raw energy in gasoline is about 12,300 Wh/Kg but automobile internal combustion engines get only about 20-30% efficiency yielding about 2500-3600 Wh/Kg. For aviation piston engines it is a bit better at 25-30$ so 3000-3600 Wh/kg. So, the batteries, instead of being 10-12X the weight of the gasoline for the same net driving/flying range, could weigh about the same as the gasoline. So, a typical car with maybe a 16 gallon tank and 30 miles per gallon fills up with 128 pounds (58 kg) of gasoline to get 480 miles of range. The Li-Ion battery for that range would weigh something like 1300 Lbs (590 kg). That is a substantial additional weight for a car that could be 2800-3800 Lbs in ICE configuration, so 35-45% added weight (a bit less because of savings on the ICE engine, etc). This requires everything else to also be heavier, from the structural frame, the suspension system, and even the wheels and tires (which is also unsprung weight, further impairing performance). With a 130Lb/60kg battery instead, and saving the weight of the ICE engine and fuel system, the overall car design could go much more lightweight, regaining a lot of performance and range, all while gaining the huge torque of electric motors. In aviation, a battery systems of that weight would enable all-electric aviation to go from small performance niches to the default for general aviation. So yes, it would be a HUGE benefit to achieve 10X energy density batteries, and we do have reference points for people to imagine it.
- rootusrootus 2mo ago> With a 130Lb/60kg battery instead, and saving the weight of the ICE engine and fuel system, the overall car design could go much more lightweight, regaining a lot of performance and range, all while gaining the huge torque of electric motors. I think you're underselling it, even. A typical like-for-like modern EV is only marginally heavier than the ICE equivalent. If we were able to drop the weight of the battery by a thousand pounds, cars would be lighter than they have been in decades while retaining all the modern safety and convenience features we've come to expect. And if density improved along with weight, we could make EVs with the same form factor as today but with over a thousand miles of range. Not that we need that, but it is just as a tiny example of how mind boggling the game change would be. As it is I've only recently internalized the notion that the most powerful electric tools are battery powered (what can I say, I grew up when rechargeable batteries were NiCad and they basically sucked). And it will just get better and better as time goes on.
- schainks 2mo agoHow is billions every year on R&D not enough, especially when you measure consistent improvement year over year in the technology? 10x energy dense does not mean 10x safer. Gasoline is still widely used because it is considered one of the safest options around! The problem is more nuanced than just "let's do all the battery density"
- laxpri 2mo agomaybe you are right . I was thinking a world where battery improvement is the rate as chip performance improvement ,
- schainks 2mo agoComparing how those technologies improve is apples to oranges. Transistor manufacturing as we know it today started in the 1950s. Lithium battery tech as we know it started in the early 2000s. Not only is there a massive difference in time spent on each tech, but the engineering disciplines involved are completely different from each other.
- torginus 2mo agoGenerally a >10x is easily achievable if we use a chemical reaction that uses oxygen - which we do not have to carry around, that's why things like hydrogen fuel cells have a theoretical energy/mass that we can pretty much assume is best possible with a chemical reaction. Unfortunately the problems with hydrogen storage and the fuel cells have prevented them from really taking off.