Comment by wesammikhail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wesammikhail | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 ;)

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.

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? :)

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...

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

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

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

Different usecase.

| 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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