Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion Coming Soon | Hacker News Reader

Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion Coming Soon

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Western 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).

Maybe 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-fu...

In 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

In theory you are right but, in practice, that only happens because they don't follow Norway's example :-)

Norway 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.

Do you have any resources about this? It sounds like a fascinating story.

Farouk al-Kasim. It's a fascinating story, glad I found this in webarchive as it's now behind a paywall.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100123225932/http://www.ft.com/...

Thank you, this is fascinating!

Holy moly, what a story. I remember reading it a few years ago, and what a crazy example of butterfly effect. The one Norwegian girl who decided she wanted to be an au-pair in London, and met an Iraqi boy there, changed the whole country.

I really enjoyed the story... but find myself wondering what was the specific “magic” that made it work.

Nowadays everything is “setup” for the cooperation of public and private, but what are the key “ingredients” to make it happen?

The fact that this worked out, is it something unique to that situation, or cannot be duplicated?

The part I find most enticing is this idea of the government shouldering 50% of the risk, and industry only having to do 15%. If anyone could expand on this, I would appreciate it.

> Nowadays everything is “setup” for the cooperation of public and private, but what are the key “ingredients” to make it happen?

Norweigans trust their government, corruption is low, there's strong institutions already in place (a point specifically mentioned by al-Kasim in the Planet Money podcast) to ensure a competent and transparent execution of the plan. There's not many places in the world where all those factors exist sadly.

Is there a source of information you could point me to that explains more of this story?

See my link to a sibling comment of yours

Planet Money made an episode about this http://www.podcasts.com/npr_planet_money_podcast/episode/301...

Thanks!

Dutch disease : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Also the "resource curse".

Although a more accurate formulation seems to be the "sudden resource curse".

E.g. how the discovery that citrus prevents scurvy and the subsequent spike in prices likely led to the emergence of the Sicilian mafia

Norway - the country that avoided the oil curse

Interestingly there's a connection between WA and Norway that not everyone is entirely pleased about: https://www.fightforthebight.org.au/

We would love to. Trust me, we really really would.

But the is such huge amount of great mongering about corporate add mineral taxes that no major party will attack it.

The Minerals Council of Australia is incredibly well funded and hugely politically influential.

Nah, we're far too short sighted for that sort of thing.

It's a sad story on the ground:

* We absolutely squandered the previous boom, once the tap was turned off it almost felt like it hadn't happened at all, outside of new developments in the CBD.

* Created an absolutely venomous environment for the workforce. I know dozens of FIFO workers or industrial workers servicing the industry, and I can only think of a few that don't suffer from either substance abuse problems, crippling debt despite massive salaries, depression or other mental health issues, or chronic physical injuries they can't get comp for, not to mention the great strain it puts on their family, and toxic workplaces (Not everywhere, but its not uncommon)

* We've let country towns supporting the industry wither on the vine. If you take Kalgoorlie for an example; Quite a lot of money is being spent in town, and if you take a drive over to the industrial estate most people will tell you that business is booming. The same people have been saying the town is just about ready to pick back up for a couple of years now, but it hasn't, and I don't believe it will. The industrial activity just isn't bleeding over into the town like it used to. The money washes straight back to Perth, back east, and overseas. Half the storefronts in the main drag are closed, and prime showrooms sit empty. The industry has raised the cost of travel to Kal so high that tourism is basically non-existent, and people who used to maintain two households in Perth and Kal are now having to chose one or the other, invariably leaving Kal for Perth

I honestly don't have the expertise to offer a solution to any of these, my gut says collecting fair royalties and using the money to fund services would be a start, but I don't have the background to really make that argument. But what I do know is, for the average punter on the street, it hasn't amounted to much, and one day it'll be gone. I look around sometimes and imagine where we'd be if the prices dropped and the sector closed up shop, and it's a pretty grim picture.

Some of these issues sound similar to energy workers in Canada.

Yes, eerily similar to the situation in Fort McMurray and other oil towns in Western Canada.

I was literally thinking about the fires a few years ago which exposed how unprepared for any future most people are. Financial literacy is such a need.

> I honestly don't have the expertise to offer a solution to any of these

My father worked a life time in the mining industry for several Australian mining companies, and as a result I spent a lot of time growing up in mining towns.

By their nature those mining towns can and do feel isolated, but the lived experience of growing up in mining town can be enjoyable.

Move on to the modern day miner and they are predominantly FIFO and that then which creates the problems you have outline.

So my solution would be:

1. The mining company can not use FIFO workers to mine a resource.

2. Instead they have to existing town infrastructure complete with schools, medical centres etc.

3. If no such infrastructure can be found then it will need to be built.

4. If under these rules the resource can't be mined with a profit then it should be left in the ground until it can.

The resources being mined don't belong to the mining companies, but instead belong to the community and to the country.

By using FIFO workers these companies are just taking that resource without giving back anything to the community and if that is all they have to offer then the resource is better of not being mined.

"Fly-In, Fly-Out" rather than a FIFO collection

On the plus side — and I realise I’m playing the devil’s advocate here — I think* some of this boom helped Australia avoid the general downturn that a lot of the rest of the world has seen over the past decade.

People here — normal working dudes — have money. What do they do with it? They spend it. On cars, mostly, but on houses, and TVs, and out in the pub, and whatever else. If that discretionary income hadn’t been floating round our economy for the last decade, I don’t think we’d be in the doing-quite-nicely-thank-you situation we are now.

Totally accept that this is to the detriment of specific places like WA, or Kalgoorlie more specifically. I’m not saying it’s good, just that it’s a thing.

(*I’m not an economist, I don’t work in this industry, and I live in Melbourne, so this is pure armchair economics.)

You are absolutely right I feel, I think the boom played a role in keeping us out of trouble.

But I feel like when you compare us to other natural resource rich countries, we've let them walk away with the goods for free.

And make no mistake, these jobs are temporary (If you take a long view). The industry is happy to just shut down projects the moment the price doesn't make any sense. We've been lucky that there's been enough they want out of our dirt that's there's always something on the go, but sooner or later it'll dry up, and those jobs will vanish, even if only for a while. And we'll be left with very little.

And this doesn't even go into the specter of automation floating over our head.

Is this going to be the next plastic that's going to destroy & pollute nature? Maybe authorities should invest into developing a good refund solution sooner than later. I already see some destroyed batteries on streets sometimes, and I wonder what they will do to our environment.

Enjoy life while we have it. In the long run we're all dead.

No. Lithium isn't cadmium.

However cobalt isn't something you want in your garden!

There is quite a bit of R&D going into negating the need for Cobalt in Li batteries. I would not expect Cobalt to be needed in ~3-5 years (for Li batteries).

Lithium Iron Phosphate is an already-viable chemistry that has a lot of upsides and only a few downsides compared to Lithium Cobalt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

The tl;dr is slightly lower energy density (~14%) in exchange for non-toxicity, extremely low self-discharge rates, not prone to runaway thermalling, and great cycle life.

It also has the advantage of being able to be essentially a drop-in replacement for many lead-acid uses.

In fact, there was a Science Versus podcast about the benefits of lithium in public drinking water. Lithium naturally occurs in some water sources more than others, and areas with more lithium in the water have better mental health.

Interesting!

What are the effects of too much lithium though?

(To answer myself, from Wikipedia..) >Common side effects include increased urination, shakiness of the hands, and increased thirst.[2] Serious side effects include hypothyroidism, diabetes insipidus, and lithium toxicity.[2] Blood level monitoring is recommended to decrease the risk of potential toxicity.[2] If levels become too high, diarrhea, vomiting, poor coordination, sleepiness, and ringing in the ears may occur.[2]

If you ever visit Ashland, Oregon—famous for its Shakespeare Festival and chill vibes—you’ll have a chance to drink from their “lithia fountain” at the heart of downtown: https://www.trover.com/d/95b7-lithia-water-fountain-ashland-...

Plus they are already pretty recyclable unlike plastic. Really lithium is probably one of the 'cleanest' materials we've had for batteries given that they aren't mostly heavy metal like NiCad or Lead-Acid.

Hostility to migration might be one of the reason. I have heard story but nothing concrete. Mining is quite difficult industry and without secondary or ternary industries, you can not keep most of the profits to yourself. So perpetual investment needed and people needed to execute that investment. Where is people to do the work coming from ?

I find it astonishing how much iron ore is shipped from Western Aus to China, it would be far more ecologically sounds to smelt it there, same is true with most of the things dug out of the ground. I suppose in the scheme of things this is the thin end of the wedge but shipping unrefined iron ore at a 30% weight premium is desirable so that China has a steel industry without depleting their own reserves of Iron ore.

It's probably down to the labor cost of smelting. Unskilled labor is prohibitively expensive in Australia compared to China. If they manage to fully automate smelting, end to end, I don't see why the smelting wouldn't be done locally in Australia.

You have an assumption that automatics is always cheaper than human labor. This is not obvious to me. You can have humans working 8 hour/day for as cheap as $100/month in some poor regions. And automatics still require R&D, service, electricity.

I don't think Australia has much metallurgical coal. Steel making is dirty, though Australia has plenty of places to make steel where it wouldn't cause a serious local air quality problem.

Australia does have a lot of coal, also exported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia

Metallurgical coal tends to be biuminous, which AU has much of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgical_coal Also:

http://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodit...

They export the coal and the iron ore which I thought was super weird, different sides of the country but still...

China also massively subsidizes its steel industry, and produces it below cost.

Lithium is vastly abundant and is not really the problem. If all else fails you can extract it by distilling sea water. The problem is Cobalt which is essential for working LiIon batteries and is required in equally vast quantities.

And 50% of the world cobalt production comes from DR Congo, a country that hasn't been stable since the 1990s. A lot of that cobalt money ends up in the hands of international mining companies doing dodgy deals with corrupt top government officials.

Nit pick, but "in the hands of international mining companies", mining companies don't have hands, it's never corrupt companies, it's corrupt [groups of] people.

Corporations definitely have a culture, for better or worse. And it's not always just the sum of their employees'.

Ergo "groups of people". It's easy to dismiss the responsibility that lies on people by saying "this or that organisation failed/was malevolent/whatever". Sometimes results are emergent and unexpected, but it seems starkly - from my observations - that individuals usually do realise, and often are consciously in control of their directing influence.

Group effects are known, cf bystander effect. Actually companies show a bystander-like effect, "what we're doing here is evil, someone [else] should change that".

Just because such behaviours are common in groups doesn't mean individuals aren't responsible. It's easier to ignore your moral responsibilities by invoking the company as the responsible party.

No. Not "ergo, groups of people." Not emergent effects. And not the bystander effect.

Corporate culture as in, we want you to be a {insert company name here} person. And the corporation is set up to make that happen.

You're discounting having the ability to mold someone for a decade+, which is not an insignificant effect on their behavior.

There are Li-ion chemistries that don't require cobalt. They don't have quite as high energy density.

No it is not. Tesla has the best batteries in production currently and they use the least amount of cobalt. They even have plans to stop using cobalt completely in future versions. But currently they have a battery that is 20-25% better in most metrics and uses the least amount of cobalt.

the hospitable area of AU is very small compared to that of EU. AU is mostly outback is it not?

90% of our population lives within 100km of the coast between Melbourne and Cairns.

However agricultural usage extends far inland in the temperate regions and there has been a lot of opposition to mining activities in our “wheat belts”.

Yeah, something like 60% of the country is basically uninhabitable... As for the rest, there isn’t really sufficient water resources to support much of a larger population without adding huge amounts of desalination.

I think Australia benefits from royalties AND taxes. The best way is taxes and a tough audit. In addition, the wages paid to the employees are also taxed, so add it all up and Australians do very well on their minerals. Royalties are bad because they flow constantly and when prices fall and the mine makes zero taxable profits, they then close the mine until the price goes up. With non royalty, just the taxes, production can carry on and wages get paid. Wages BTW, are far more than any royalty or taxes.

Royalties are collected because that's what the States are legally able to collect without interference by the Commonwealth.

“our minerals”

Australia isn’t communist. If you want to own the land that the minerals come from, buy some shares.

Just be aware that the mining industry isn’t unusually profitable, in fact it is expensive and risky, and owning (part-of) a gold mine isn’t a ticket to unlimited wealth.

TIL that WA is the Saudi Arabia of lithium. And I even live here! And yes: I feel like we absolutely missed a once-in-a-century opportunity by not establishing a sizable sovereign wealth fund off mining royalties.

Entrance to the rabbit hole: http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/minerals/mineral-reso...

It 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/

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.

I 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.

Depending 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)

That’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.)

That is indeed the case and they are also promising long life time and rechargability

Not to be the negative-Nancy in the room but there's a massive gap between prototype and commercially viable at a chemical level and then another between chemically stable and commercially producible. I wish them the best, but there a probably at least a dozen similar companies with roughly similar claims with different underlying chemistries (flow batteries, etc.) and many more that haven't panned out for one reason or another.

People are most definitely trying to replace Li-ion but its not an easy thing to do in practice, even if simple enough on paper.

I dont find your comment to be negative at all. You´re raising a valid point. All I am doing is drawing attention to the fact that people are trying. And if just one of all the experiments out there succeeds is a net benefit to us all. IF people can deliver on the other hand is a different thing. Only time will tell but I remain hopeful!

Not speaking about the above poster, but sometimes trying gets talked down by talkers.

I hope there can be other ways to be pragmatic and supportive. It's easy to be logical.

The thing is any new battery tech will have to be as good or better when introduced to stand a chance and lithium ion is not a standing target it also keeps improving. So someone working on new battery tech would need to target being at least 2-3 times as cheap and easier to produce 5 years from now if you look at the lithium ion cost trajectory.

My comment is in general towards these types of 'I don't mean to be negative but let me be not positive comments'.

Is HN the place to encourage doubt worship, or is it a place to encourage curiosity and put in effort?

When wishing someone the best to operationalize and commercialize, why not say just, that instead of packaging it in a backhanded well wish?

There's no doubt this iz a hard problem to get in market.

Innovation and breakthroughs like LiON also happened in a mindset of imagination, exploring possibilities, being a little posiviely reasonable and stubborn.

A doubt based mindset isn't as open to possibilities or innovating as a curious mindset that undertakes action and puts in effort.

This is the first time I've heard of this company and I hope the battery issue leaps soon and hope they continue their efforts, unconditionally. Maybe they could go after safe incremental improvements with a shorter shelf life.

There's a reason creators are following your own compass and not others.

Is today's HN becoming less about dialog, only doubters downvoting on their way by?

On paper replacing Li-Ion is trivial: it's designed for small scale low weight applications at room temperature with limited lifetime and highish safety requirements (consumer electronics). Remove any of those requirements and some other technology is theoretically superior. In practise the amout of research poured into improving Li-Ion and the economies of scale achieved in production along the entire supply chain make it very hard to compete.

This. For example, for people with old fashioned ICE cars like me, Li-ion isn't going to replace my lead acid battery for SLI (starting, lights and ignition) any time soon in -30 degrees C temperatures ;)

| This.

No. We don't do that here.

It’s ok if you add a substantive comment too.

I wish, though, that people left it out the same way the HN guidelines encourage deleting the "Didn't you read TFA?!" from otherwise substantive comments. It adds nothing and annoys at least two HN readers.

We will regulate your entire car out of existence. Soon.

Battery electric vehicles still have a lead acid battery in addition to the main lithium-ion one. It makes no sense to substitute a 10^3 USD lithium battery for a 10^2 USD lead battery.

Even if parent were making the comment you thought you were relying to, you're in a bubble if you genuinely believe that ICEs are going to be regulated out of existence any time soon.

assuming 15 years for 100% fleet turnover and a target of zero carbon-emissions from gasoline/cars in the US by 2040, new ICEs will need to be banned in about six years.

And how likely, according to your estimate, is this to actually happen, vs. the target falling in the category of "I love deadlines and the whooshing sound they make as they fly by"?

things only get worse the more we procrastinate. it is a compounding debt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...

Costa Rica has banned new combustion vehicle sales as of 2021, Norway 2025, and other countries 2030-2040. As EVs go mainstream, I expect those deadlines to be pulled forward.

Costa Rica installed their first public charger in 2017, and has a $10k GDP per capita. The details in this Clean Technica article are damning for this claim. It's pure post election puffery and the plan will be quietly set aside.

Norway is aggressive, but the rest of Europe is generally targeting 2030. I'm not expecting the US to even come close to the EU, as range is a much larger factor there.

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/31/costa-rica-is-on-the-br...

I agree with you.

However, I can't help but think that a shift in economics might be the method of changing over, maybe rather quickly.

Come and take it. Good luck chasing me in an electric vehicle.

Please go to YouTube and search for “Tesla Ludicrous”.

I ain't racing to 60. I'm racing to ~120-140 and seeing how long those Teslas can hang with a machine that's optimized to go fast and far

Soon enough it won’t even make sense to buy an ICE, once the gas stations all start closing for lack of business.

IMO the bans are silly politics and really just grandstanding. We are barely into the adoption curve of EVs and already a base Model 3 is cheaper to own than an Accord or Camry.

Give EVs 10 more years (a relative eternity) and they will probably be the majority of new vehicles sold just due to market forces. 10 years after that gas stations will have trouble staying in business.

Any fleet will have to switch to EV to be cost competitive on a $/mi basis. Once you can spend $1 to save $1.10 (including interest on the loan) anyone with access to financing will go EV. Which with interest rates only going lower, is almost everyone.

The best way to incentivize the next wave of adoption IMO is dramatically reducing the cost of non-peak electricity. Generation costs are already dropping significantly but retail rates are still averaging over 10 cents for supply and another 10 cents for delivery. In MA for example, many areas do not even offer TOU billing, and where it is offered it only reduces the generation cost slightly, not the supply cost, so it barely even saves 25%, which is asinine. [1]

My impression is we should be able to deliver non-peak energy for under $0.08/kWh total, supply and generation all-in. That would significantly increase EV adoption!

[1] - https://www.eversource.com/clp/vpp/vpphistory.aspx#EMA

It already is, at the high end of the market. The weight savings is attractive to performance car owners in particular. Temperature apparently isn't that big of a deal.

Lion temperature is still a big deal, which is why EVs (and exotics concerned about weight) will use a system to heat the lithium batteries in sub-zero temps.

Most ICE engines don't bother because it costs extra for not much benefit unless you're operating on the edge of performance. Actual race cars do away with the battery and starter altogether.

that's interesting, how do they start a race car's engine? :)

Externally in the pits. No need carrying the weight of a starter or battery when you don’t need them on track.

I noticed that for racing off road motor cycles. They kick start them instead of carrying a battery/started motor.

Or old time movies where people started airplanes by spinning the propeller by hand “airplane hand prop” Seems dangerous...

https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-hand-prop-planes-Is-it-possi...

My dad replaced the batteries in his off-grid system last September. This was not an inconsequential purchase, but none of the lithium batteries commercially avaliable were cost-competetive with lead-acid. Sure, they are higher-maintenance, but it was 1/2 the cost of lithium.

That being said, I use lithium in my motorcycle for weight savings, and also in my 4WD truck (engine swap, no convenient place for a conventional battery). However, neither vehicle is one I regularly drive in winter, and I don't see lithium replacing lead acid in most cars any time soon. The weight savings are minor enough that it would only be noticeable for the automakers' CAFE ratings.

Your dad did the math wrong. LiFePO4 batteries last significantly longer than lead acid, 2-10 times more cycles. They can handle higher loads and charge faster. They are also more energy dense so they take up less space.

But for personal off-grid system charge and discharge times aren't really concerns- fast charging would only be beneficial if the amount of PV panels was grossly oversized. And fast discharging would only mean that it would be that much easier to drain the system and be out of power.

Smaller batteries would be nice, but his enclosure was already sized for lead acid, so there isn't much advantage (this system was put online in 2008). And while lead-acid may not be as long-lived, neither he nor I was able to find any batteries currently on sale that offered similar warranty without being prohibitively expensive.

He ended up purchasing 8x Trojan SIND-06-920 6V [1] batteries for 735 each ($5880). Add ~$250 for fuel expenses to pick up the batteries (cheaper than trucking) and 300 on new bus-bars (new interconnects would have been needed anyway) for a total of ~6500. There are advantages to lithium, but neither he nor I was able to find any alternatives that were (1) avaliable now (2) at least somewhat price competitive.

I see that Trojan now offers Li-ion batteries, but these were introduced after he made his purchase [2]. No clue on their pricing, but they don't look all that much more attractive.

I challenge you to find any lithium batteries avaliable that match the performance of this bank for 2x the cost or less. They may last 10x longer, but I couldn't find any real-world usage reports to back that up. Off-grid industrial PbA is a very different beast to car batteries. His last system lasted 10 years, and likely would have lasted longer had his charge-controller not failed and cooked the batteries through overcharging (never went into trickle, just provided full panel power for 1 month before the problem was noticed).

[1] https://www.trojanbattery.com/product/sind_06_920/

[2] https://www.trojanbattery.com/trillium/

Wow, those are rated for far more cycles than I expected. At $133/kWh, 2000+ cycles, and already having equipment for lead acid it makes sense to go with those instead of lithium.

Different usecase.

What, you mean you don't live in California??

Get with the times, gramps! Internal combustion engines, are, like, totally last century.

True. In the next 100 years 99% of the world’s current population will be dead.

Zinc based batteries seem to have promise for grid energy. Enerpoly was mentioned yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19586068 and NantEnergy have been making them: 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.

Hey 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!

Well 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.

Could 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!

I 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.

I'm curious what edge your guys have over NantEnergy. CNBC have an interview with their "billionaire LA Times owner" CEO by the way. He seems quite an interesting character https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/09/26/patrick-soon-shiong-on...

The 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.

Tesla is already at $100-150/kwh.

Source?

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.

Tesla info: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-c...

I’m confused by the differentiation of 100$/kwh at the cell level vs pack level? Does that mean they’ll still have more than that cost due to the non-lithium parts of the battery for the short term but not the long term? Ie their 74kwh battery might someday cost 7400$ but with the cheaper cost per cell its more like 7400k+X where X is the cost future tech may reduce?

There is nonneglible cost in the pack. Tesla's have heating and cooling and individual battery wiring. Not sure of the cost difference, maybe 10%more wag

From the linked article [1]:

> Transforming cells, via modules, into the whole battery pack typically adds 30% cost per kWh on top of the cost of the cells alone.

And to get a bit more info on what a module is [2]:

> A battery module is more than just a mechanical frame that holds the cells - it also includes bus bars to connect the cells electrically, a cooling interface and a sensing harness, which sends information about the state of each cell to the battery management system.

[1]: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-c...

[2]: https://evannex.com/blogs/news/learn-more-about-tesla-batter...

Packs need a radiator system like any engine. Tesla cooling systems are leading the industry. Nissan and many plugin battery companies use air cooling which doesn't work and which cuts the battery life in half. Many uncooled Nissan leaf packs failed before a hundred thousand miles.

I wonder how the I-PACE cooling (and general battery conditioning/preservation technology) compares?

I’ve thought about this. Why don’t they integrate better cooling? Maybe something that hooks into the charging cable as well. While the battery is charged the pack is cooled by the facility.

(One crazier idea of mine involves cooling by boiling off sea water. Have piping built to pump large amounts of sea water inland to charging locations. Perhaps each charging location also sits next to a pumping location for the sea water.)

This is exactly what they are attempting to do with solid-state batteries. Again, the whole point of the article is that Lithium Ion batteries will continue to improve and with the vast economy of scale, will continue to be a cost effective option

Nissan 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 ...

Our 2015 model year Leaf has not had any observable loss of range, FWIW.

Apparently they had a reformulated chemistry, that might help.

However, I think the climate you live in has a profound effect:

http://www.electricvehiclewiki.com/wiki/battery-capacity-los...

scroll down to the battery aging table depending on location.

If you live in Juneau, Alaska you're probably good for a while.

Maybe taking steps like not charging to 100% and not discharging below 20% will help.

Googling this brought me back to this comment. Do you have a source for this please?

I 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.

Completely 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

> 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.

Didn't phones from 2005 last for a week :)

Joking aside, a blackberry bold from 2011 had 1200mah and the samsung s10 has 3400.

Here'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.

The 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.

Suuure. And lithium is infinite.

150 ppb in seawater.

Is it efficient to harvest?

Not currently competitive, but the thermodynamic minimum energy goes as the log of dilution.

As 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.

We just need cheap batteries first so we can harvest the nodules with robots ...

It is about as infinite as steel.

I think the average BEEFY desktop PC uses 300 to 600 W in practice (idle or full load). Let's call it 400 W.

1 kg is 2 lbs.

Also, an iPhone 5 is 0.112 kg.

If 400 Wh/kg is the best lithium will take us, then we'll never have iPhone 5-sized or weighted devices capable of the same power as a desktop PC, and if we did they'd need to have a battery weighing 1 kg to be capable of it for even one hour. So the mobile and desktop ecosystems will be forever apart. That's sad.

Also, what kind of mileage does 400 Wh/kg get you for artificial hearts? (It may be good; I don't know; but, whatever it is, you'd probably like it to be better if you had one.)

I could argue that more efficient energy storage and processor will make it reality, but then, same logic can also be applied to desktop computing. So ultimate argument becomes, bigger machine will have more power than smaller machine. Ok. Right.

> the average BEEFY desktop PC uses 300 to 600 W in practice ... an iPhone 5 is 0.112 kg ... if 400 Wh/kg is the best lithium will take us, then we'll never have iPhone 5-sized or weighted devices capable of the same power as a desktop PC ...

Except that Apple’s A12 is already matching up against Skylake, meaning the iPhone/iPad is currently beating Intel desktops still widely in use. The gap is not so large.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12694/assessing-cavium-thunde...

This seems hasty to me... my eight year old laptop processor gets a 7500 on the Geekbench 4 benchmark. According to the first source I found [1], the A12 only gets an 11000. Surely modern components beat my old laptop processor by a huge margin... Even the popular old i7-6700 which came out in 2015 gets a 15000 on the same test. Obviously you have to factor in power use and other requirements, but I would be shocked if anyone with the data to back it up is seriously considering replacing desktop components with something like the A12. (I admit I want this to happen as much as anyone - I would love to see a workstation class PC with 4x ARM processors, for example. I just don't see it being quite economical yet.)

[1] https://www.igen.fr/iphone/2018/07/premier-benchmark-dun-mys...

“Apple’s CPU have gotten so performant now, that we’re just margins off the best desktop CPUs; it will be interesting to see how the coming years evolve, and what this means for Apple’s non-mobile products.“

“What is quite astonishing, is just how close Apple’s A11 and A12 are to current desktop CPUs. I haven’t had the opportunity to run things in a more comparable manner, but taking our server editor, Johan De Gelas’ recent figures from earlier this summer, we see that the A12 outperforms a moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-threaded performance. Of course there’s compiler considerations and various frequency concerns to take into account, but still we’re now talking about very small margins until Apple’s mobile SoCs outperform the fastest desktop CPUs in terms of ST performance. It will be interesting to get more accurate figures on this topic later on in the coming months.”

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...

A mains powered a 400W iPhone 5 sized device seems impractical from a heat dissipation standpoint.

Heat is a by product of design flaws.

All power ends up as heat. If a device consumes 400W of power it is going to put out 400W of heat in some form or other. Fix the design flaw so it puts out less heat and it will consume less power and no longer be a 400W device.

Now that’s an interesting thought. Are manufacturers turning to phablets because they can’t work out the heat dissipation engineering for smaller devices as much as because of demand?

Why do you need sustained desktop level performance for your phone? Anyone who cares about graphics will use a console or PC anyway. Then there is the heat problem. You don't want to hold a 600C hot phone in your hand anyway.

Portable VR headsets one application of a powerful GPU in a small form factor.

Why is it sad? Would it be happy if desktops were slower?

"Average" varies greatly, but 20-100W is far more typical at idle.

https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/5600/how-...

> The good thing is we don’t really need anything better than lithium ion for most applications (aerospace excluded).

I highly doubt that you can achieve decent flight times on battery powered plane. The extra battery weight is managed by increasing wing size which in turn translates to higher drag. Higher drag is compensated by more power meaning bigger batteries. It's an engineering nightmare.

Yeah, I looked into this a bit. Planes and rockets absolutely require expendable fuel to achieve efficiency; the ratio of wet to dry mass provides an exponential factor to either flight range or delta-V by virtue of lowering weight as it provides thrust. A lighter flying thing can use less thrust to counteract its own weight (indirectly by generating lift in some cases) thus making its remaining fuel more efficient. This is why the Saturn V had an absolutely gargantuan booster stage, followed by a large booster, then a small booster, and finally a tiny Apollo CSM to actually get to the moon and back. Lifting a rocket itself requires an exponentially bigger market just to get you a few km further off the ground.

For planes it’s arguably worse because a plane in level flight thrusts forward and relies on that to indirectly provide lift, whereas weight is always pulling straight down. Also, thrusting forward creates drag backwards.

> Planes and rockets absolutely require expendable fuel to achieve efficiency

This may change for planes soon: https://www.eviation.co/

It should be mentioned that electric motors allow for designs which can drastically lower drag. See NASA X-57 Maxwell for instance. But it will take quite some time for that to translate to commercially made planes.

I think the key to electric flight is just a rough doubling of battery capacity, along with finishing the R&D around new designs like the X-57. Nothing that's out of the reach in the near future.

A doubling of capacity can be achieved with lithium using either solid state electrolytes or silicon anodes. There's a decent chance that something like that will reach mass production in the next 10 years.

Sure the current ~250Wh/Kg LiIon battery tech gets many jobs done that could not be done with earlier battery technologies.

That is not the same thing as saying that further improving the technology would accomplish nothing (as seems to be implied).

Gasoline is about 10X that at 2500Wh/Kg (albeit also requires carrying around fuel storage tank(s) & a combustion engine, which is only ~40% efficient on a good day).

Getting battery technology up to nearly those energy densities would completely revolutionize everything.

Current phones would have 1-2 weeks of battery life, or you could power a pocket workstation (if you could cool it). Ordinary multirotor drones would fly for hours instead of 15-30min. Electric airplanes would be quieter and more efficient.... the possibilities are nearly endless.

That doesn't include the weight of the liquid cooling system which is substantial and which might even INCREASE in weight as the cell energy density increases.

Solid state has serious issues with power density and IR heating, the next battery chemistry for cars isn't going to be solid state Li-ion.

Magnesium-Air or Zinc-Air are interesting for automotive applications, since they have high specific capacity without sacrificing too much on power. Li-Sulfur also has potential, but it currently suffers from the same problems as Solid State Li.

I predict this title will not age well. The progress is accelerating. Material science is getting revolutionized by cheap computation and large-scale simulations.

Yeah. Agreed. Also, new technologies tend to come along and disrupt things from completely outside the scope of the people working within the industry.

There's only so much room at the top of the periodic table.

So? Alloys, compounds, and metamaterials give you an almost infinite search space.

There are limits to electronic charges found, period.

Adding additional elements increases mass.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AdPqWv-eVIc

So? 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.

In this case, we do. Really.

I think maybe you missed the point of the article, which is the scientific breakthroughs alone aren't enough. Even if you create a battery technology that is, on paper, cheaper and better performing than li-ion, the advantages inferred by incumbency mean the odds are stacked against the newcomer.

I do think li-ion will be disrupted eventually, but it will be more like the process of solid-state drives replacing hard-disk drives. Only a combination of diminishing returns on incremental improvement of li-ion tech, and a competitor technology that is fundamentally superior, battle-tested in high-performance niche applications, and mostly a drop-in replacement, will create the conditions necessary for an industry switch. And even then the process will likely take many years to complete.

The 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.

Agreed, 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.

Sadly 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.

> 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.

"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.

I don't think that follows given that we already use hydrocarbon fuels which are far worse for flammability and explosiveness.

The higher retrieval efficiency by definition makes an equivalent volume of batteries lower energy density and thus safer than an equivalent amount of fuel. If you need to extract X energy at 25% efficiency you need to store 4X. If you can extract X energy at 70% efficiency you only need to store 1.25X. Both could wind up exploding but you want the one with only 1.25X the stored energy not the one with 4X.

The 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-...

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.

I 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

It 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).

The 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

I 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.

IMHO 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.

ah :) yes in that case it is just a different viewpoint

engineers choosing the non-exlodey designs leads to users feeling capacity-limited

Bad 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.

Didn'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.h...

There's a couple hundred dollars of lithium in a 100 kw-hour battery. It isn't particularly driving the cost.

And 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.

The 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.

The 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.

$200 on a $10,000 or $15,000 battery.

I definitely think we can run a nice civilization on sodium batteries if we need to, that wasn't my point.

If you want rock bottom materials cost, go with sulfur chemistry.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

"the cost of active materials per stored energy is exceptionally low, ∼US$1/kWh when using sodium polysulfide."

Plus high grade nickel (as in only some refineries make it), cobalt, graphite.

You need lithium, but it doesn't do it on it's own.

Sodium Ion batteries use a dramatically different design that doesn't include the common components.

When 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.

Still 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

If 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.

If 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.

Googling "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-breakth...

[2] https://www.batterypoweronline.com/news/what-the-fluoride-io...

An airplane usually spends 1-2 hours in the airport between flights. During that period it needs to be recharged.

Or the battery needs to be swapped out with one that was charged while it was in the air.

I guess it would start with niche technologies where the battery is small and expensive. Like extremely miniaturized personal electronics, or drones. Given the cost advantage lithium has due to mass production, it will be more than 10 years until something else can replace them.

I find our interesting that Cobalt mines outside of the Congo aren't being funded. There's a few in Australia and a couple in Namibia in the early stages that don't look like they'll be developed.

In 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/

Can the stored heat can be converted to electric power or is it intended to be used as such?

"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...

“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.

I’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.

Forgive 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?)

Lithium is widely available, it's the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust.

Lithium 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.

My 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.

What'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). :)

You 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.)

>Not trying to be a jerk :) And I know not every statement deserves footnotes.

Do you think these statements deserved footnotes? Did you attempt to verify the claim and find it difficult to find a corroborating source?

Sources are good, but many people use "have a source for that" as DOS attack on civil discourse.

I think in the case of a rebuttal, particularly when the original statement didn't provide any source, it is a useful practice to provide some type of source - even if was a simple reference. eg 'wikipedia' or '1st result on google!'.

Otherwise it's just a really uninteresting he-said-she-said back and forth, no?

I really don't think every statement of fact needs references - this isn't scientific paper writing. But where someone is calling out something specific as incorrect, I think its often worth a little bit extra effort to avoid things degenerating into something not much more interesting than name calling.

That said, neither of those folks owe me anything. :) I'm just happy I get to learn new things once in a while on HN.

You're right, i must have confused it with something else. Anyway, it isn't rare.

If you can tolerate bulk, lead acid batteries can work pretty well. If you can tolerate a lot of bulk, liquid flow batteries (vanadium) can work too, but I’m not well versed enough in current tech to describe why things might not be in wider use.

Tons of research going in to reducing usage of lithium in Li batteries. It's in grams per kw range and reducing, there could be solid lower bound but till we reach there we are trying.

Current 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.

The 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.

Slow charging reduces your lifespan? Doing things other than waiting for charging?

I 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!).

It’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.

Every 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.

We 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.

Super 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.

They 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.

That doesn't really help with grid storage.

That sounds potentially incredibly scary if you get into a fender-bender.

They 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.

The next question is how do you repair damage in that scenario?

Composite structures don't tend to be very repairable in general, but if it's localized damage usually you will just glue a patch in place.

LiFePo4 also works better in the cold.

How does the structure behave in a fire?

Let'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.

Does anyone know status of mechanical accumulator project. I've heard that flywheel could be promising, while it has its flaws.

The 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?

If you follow the area there are continuing new tech every month that are better than lithium but nothing ever comes to market.

the TL;DR is economies of scale favor li-ion for the next few years even if other technology is superior in principle

There 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.

That'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.

How can an industry that grows by double digit percentages be an entrenched incumbent?

Flow batteries have no where near the energy density W/kg of lithium, the only thing that approaches petrol in any practical sense currently. So for vehicles, maybe coupled with a 5-10% supercapacitor for an electronic flywheel, will dominate transport requirements for some time.

Flow batteries, given a non toxic electrolyte, are hard pressed to be beaten for the closest thing to base load a battery is going to get.

The need of the application is everything currently as it is all edge cases and probably will be for an indefinite future, without some kind of totally off the radar break through.

Personally 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.

I am surprised to see a competent opinion on a technical topic in a popular business journal

I 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...

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#...

Hey it looks like they're already doing this in Toronto:

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).

If your gravity battery isn't based on water then it's just vaporware like the thousands of other gravity batteries.

Did you look at the linked video of the pilot in Toronto? That doesn't seem like vaporware to me? It may or may not meet its goals, but it's a pretty simple concept to execute on I think.

But if there's no water, where is the vapor coming from? /s

Compressed air energy storage (CAES) into either engineered pressure vessels or underground former nayural-gas formations (large high-pressure reservoirs) is another promising option.

Boyle's law heating and cooling is a principle issue.

Lake Ontario (where Toronto is situated on) has fairly deep water not too far off-shore which is close to 4-5C year-round (the temperature where water is densest).

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jerry-langton/toronto-beaches_...

I'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.

What happened to those train batteries?

Elon 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.

I have nothing to add except that the title “Batter Reality:” would have been objectively better.

Enjoy your weekend :)

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