Solid-state battery startup claims breakthrough for electric vehicles
electrek.co
electrek.co
According to [1], the specific energy is ~300 Wh/kg- the best li ion cells are ~275 Wh/kg, but only barely. When the OP article refers to 2-3x capacity improvements (2x on the website), it refers to energy density, or Wh per liter. That's not really considered an important metric except for phones. Unfortunately, the battery has to be over 150 Celcius for the solid electrolyte to work, so don't expect better phone batteries any time soon.
The way this would work is that cars would have a small conventional battery of ~15-30 kWh that could supply acceleration power and preheat the solid state battery. The larger battery would just back it up on long trips. How attractive this is depends 100% on how much power they can crank in the battery, since it isn't that much bigger than a normal battery.
Lots of people think solid state batteries will eventually replace liquid electrolytes, but it's effectively anyone's guess. We've had a lot of trouble finding high-power solid electrolytes for a looong time. The main benefits are safety related right now.
The basic reason is that conventional cathodes are highly oxidizing, so when a liquid electrolyte gets too hot it steals that oxygen and breaks down, causing a runaway reaction. Solid electrolytes and metallic cathodes don't have extra potential energy, so when there's damage to the cell like a short or overtemperature it simply burns itself out. The solid electrolyte is also far more stable and isn't very subject to breakdown from overtemperature or overvoltage.
[1]: https://qz.com/1383884/a-startup-promising-an-all-solid-stat...
>But the battery only functions properly at temperatures above room temperature and up to 150°C
It doesn't have to be over 150 Celsius, it has to be over room temperature.
Interesting fact: Tesla achieves their ludicrous mode (2.3 seconds 0-100kph) by pre-heating their batteries so that more power can be drawn. During my test drive, it took an estimated 40 minutes to heat the batteries to do this...
There aren't really any perfect solutions, but cold temperatures are a problem we've dealt from the beginning with both batteries and internal combustion engines. My dad used to tell me stories about his time in Alaska as a teenager, and a bush pilot who would talk about when he'd have to pull the drain the oil from his plane, pull the battery, and take both inside overnight to keep them from freezing.
0. http://popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a21999984/e...
That isn't the standard, at least not in North America (120V/240V) or Europe (230V):
I am not sure where it comes from but in the US it's not uncommon for supplies to be referred to as 220/110 rather than 240/120. They're generally understood to be the same thing.
With current batteries, there are just many tiny 18650 cells connected in parallel / series to get the desired power and voltage, right? Are you saying there are some unstated engineering limitations that would hinder getting to the desired "C" by connecting more battery cells in parallel?
When connected in parallel, each cell has to discharge at same rate within a small margin. That means you have to match cells by capacity and internal resistance during manufacturing process. The more cells you put in parallel, the more chance some of them will age differently and cause whole battery to underperform or fail spectacularly.
And why the batteries have to discharge at the same rate in the first place?
That said this is a problem with all batteries which is solved trough rebalancing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_balancing
Without this we wouldn’t ba able to make battery packs with 100s not to mention 1000s of cells and even smaller battery packs would die much much sooner.
A good analogy would be if you have a boat with multiple people rowing and one of them can’t hold the same pace if you don’t adjust for it you aren’t going to hold course and if you don’t let the man catch a break they’ll pass completely eventually.
It's the definition of the cells being in parallel. Since they all have the same voltage difference (as the fronts and backs are all tied together with wire), they have to discharge at the same rate. The balancing dogma1138 was describing is done to allow some batteries to run at slightly different voltages so they all are at around the same state of charge.
Two batteries in parallel have the same C rating! You double the output current, but you also double the capacity. When you put cells in series, you change the voltage but the current capability and capacity stay the same. In both cases the C rating doesn't change[1].
The C rating is just how quickly the battery can discharge itself, so it is entirely dependent on the chemistry and battery conditions.
[1]: there are finer points; more batteries in series lowers output current slightly in practice, and batteries in parallel are quite complex to deal with. Cell size, construction and cooling all have large impacts on the C rating as well but at the end of the day it's simply how quickly a square centimeter of battery material can carry out its chemical reaction safely.
Thanks!
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/solid-power-series-...
See also Theranos, Clinkle, Yo.
>... on the morning of September 17, 2010 "employees were told about Cuil's demise [...] and the servers were taken offline five hours later." Laid-off employees were told they would not be paid.
It looks like there are some serious investors involved that clearly believe that these guys know what they are doing. They presumably did their due diligence. That generally means this company used some seed funding to do proof of concepts and prototypes that are showing some promise.
In any case, 20M is nice but clearly nowhere near enough for mass producing stuff like this. So, what this means is this company just received funding to do more R&D from a nice consortium of investors that would clearly benefit from having a stake in a company like that if it had at all any chance of succeeding. Presumably there are still some hard problems left to work on otherwise, we'd be reading about some company investing billions to actually build the factories to mass produce this.
Since there are now several companies working on solid state batteries, the chances seem pretty good that one of them will eventually come up with viable products that can be produced at a quality, scale and cost that is interesting.
IMHO that will likely happen second half of the next decade or so. One application where this stuff might be applied early might be electric planes. That's a use case where improved energy density and safety is so valuable that even a very expensive solid state battery might still be interesting.
And as I've said before. You can't make broad generalisations based on two data points. Huge investments from reputable companies are still a pretty good indicator of company success.
Also, Theranos owed a large part of their funding to the fact that the CEO was cute & female. Stuff like that is super sexist of course but that doesn't make it any less true. Investors were a bit less critical than they might have been and the company certainly got a lot more press and exposure due to this than would otherwise have been the case. Not all investors are idiots.
In any case, I checked, there's very little chance of that happening with the CEO of Solid Power. Looks like a pretty solid linkedin profile for somebody running a company like this.
We have a number of car manufacturers involved here and they don't mess around when it comes to validating new technologies. Especially given how important batteries are to the future survival of the companies.
And they never even had a product that worked, and what devices they did have were fraudulent.
Having high profile people involved should never have been relevant to the quality of product coming from a company, but now that we are all aware of Theranos is should be absolutely clear to everyone that it is meaningless. It is likewise meaningless to make claims without backing it up with results from at least an independent third party if not making devices available to multiple technically competent reporters.
Also, as near as I can tell, Theranos got their later investment rounds by being willing to wildly lie. IIRC, they claimed something like $100e6 of revenues where the actual number was approx $100e3 [1]. That is probably going to (slowly) lead to criminal liability for some of the principals.
Here (as parent mentioned) you have battery companies investing in a battery company.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/14/theranos-president-exaggerat...
Which was in turn in a post-Enron world. The one sure way to make sure that crap can keep happening is to pretend that something has really changed, so it can’t happen again. It can, stay vigilant.
- Spinoff from battery research program at a University, not a bachelor degree dropout
- Investors are technical
So no, Theranos did not have any "serious" investors if using the definition of "serious" as those that are technically competent/know how to evaluate the technology. It's possible of course that it's all still a scam like Theranos, but more likely if this doesn't pan out it's going to be some limitation with the underlying tech, market adoption, competence running the company rather than outright fraud.
Theranos is one example. But there are many examples of where funding and corporate investment is a sign the company has something serious and industry changing. The point is that without statistics both of us are just dealing in effectively anecdotes.
And the idea that independent third parties need to be involved is simply not true. (1) They already have car manufacturers willing to validate the technology (and they are often quite conservative) and (2) this company isn't at the point yet where their technology is being commercially sold.
Following that initial seed funding from DFJ, all of Theranos' early stage funding came from fly-by-night wannabe venture capitalists. A123 systems definitely does not fall into that category.
Then when those labs post their results (and they will because testing claims like this on a battery is a simple and cheap process), then I'll consider investing.
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2013/09/18/solid-state-batter...
Is this per unit weight? per unit space? per dollar?
No, not particularly- the energy stored in an li ion cell is only a small amount of its potential energy. The cathode (eg cobalt oxide) and the organic electrolyte act as an oxidizer and fuel, >10x more energetic than the energy stored in the lithium.
Solid state batteries carry far less energy than a normal battery.
I wasn't saying they couldn't work, just that if they did fail they'd have the potential to fail spectacularly. Same is true for a gasoline tank.
A bomb requires way more than just energy, it needs to have a mechanism to release quickly. Li ion has a mechanism like that, but solid state batteries don't.
Ordinary matter contains about 90,000 terajoules of energy per kg. But that hardly makes everything a bomb. There needs to be a way to explosively release the energy for it to be a bomb, and for some types of energy storage there isn't such a mechanism.
That number is an upper bound, I don't believe any process is known to convert matter into a useable form of energy with reasonable efficiency and yield. Neither fusion nor fission count as they only "convert"/release a tiny fraction.
My point is that energy density doesn't make a bomb, it's also necessary to have a mechanism for the spontaneous and rapid release of that energy. Ordinary matter has a very high energy density (the highest), but as you point out it takes special processes to release that energy.
Similarly, I can have a soda can filled with Lithium-Deuteride (a fusion fuel) and that can have a very high energy content (terajoules per kilogram) but it's not a bomb unless it's connected to a system that can actually release the fusion energy in that fuel all at once. It's not something that could even remotely happen spontaneously without those other components that make it a bomb.
Another example would be Potassium. Naturally occurring Potassium contains about 400 megajoules of radioactive energy per kilogram, which is about 100x as much as TNT. Even in the form of, say, a Potassium salt that would avoid the issue of the chemical energy of Potassium metal, that material would still have enormous energy density. And there's nothing you need to do for the energy release to happen, it'll happen automatically. But it's still not a bomb because it will take over a billion years for just half of that energy to be released, and there's no known way to substantially speed up that release of energy (without inputting even more energy) to make a bomb.
In a press release, the company listed a bunch of advantages that they claim their technology has over current batteries
The aversion to link to source documents really hurts the credibility of publications like this. It forces me to try to find the "press release" on my own. Ok, here it goes.
I went to the Solid Power press release page and found nothing about a breakthrough - indeed nothing since last June, and then nothing of technical note:
https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/press-releases/
The blog has one more recent entry, but it's just a trade show event:
https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/
Oddly, neither page mentions the recent funding round.
So far all of the solid state batteries that I've read papers on suffer from an inability to charge quickly because they cannot dissipate heat fast enough. The whole swap the battery packs thing is a work around for this where you get a car and 'n' battery packs. Charge the packs slowly (limitation of battery) but swap packs quickly (mechanical issues, not a problem). To my way of thinking such a solution is fine for a commuter car but exacerbates the range issues. Maybe that is ok in this space but so far until Tesla's "300 mile range" cars hit the market EVs were pretty niche.
>Major companies present in All-Solid-State Battery market report: BMW, Hyundai, Dyson, Apple, CATL, Bolloré, Toyota, Panasonic, Jiawei, Bosch, Quantum Scape, Ilika, Excellatron Solid State, Cymbet, Solid Power, Mitsui Kinzoku, Samsung, ProLogium ,,
But have they implemented any of these 'breakthrough' technologies?
That's a long time if you are talking about announcements made today but there's been lots of announcements in between and there is considerably more investment now than 30 years ago.
And MSRP was reportedly $34k.
Expect an increase in the production and sale of EV by a factor of ten in the next five years, barring a global economic crash. That scale should easily drive down the cost of conventional LiIon cells below the cost of gasoline engines (you will probably be paying around 100$/kw/h or even less).
In such a scenario there is not much room to develop and scale a brand new technology. It could be interesting for planes though.
Why ?
Have I missed something where electric cars are done as a industry and the technologies we have today will be the status quo for future iterations.
Because the way I look at it the era of electric cars is just beginning and great that Tesla has helped to validate the market/technology but they aren't what we will all will/want to be driving.
https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/02/07/renault-n...
> ...
> Solid Power said that it plans to use the funds from its Series A investment to “scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in 2019.”
Is $20M enough for "multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility" ?
There is an excess of VC that reduces quality of due diligence.
yeah would be fun
(that is, your grandchild comment here done be killed)
In terms of power to the wheels, yes. Some of that latent energy can be useful, especially after it's converted into heat.
discarded.