The new chemistry mentioned has no commercial use cases unless it beats LiFePO4 in its niche or surpasses mainstream chemistries, which is a big stretch.
BYD intentionally went full in onto LiFePO4 because they very well foreseen cobalt shortages.
Who knows. I remember articles about LiFePO4 back in the late 1990's. Took them a long time to solve the problem of high cathode resistance and put them into production. Seems like there is a huge space to explore here and little to judge what will work.
My company abandoned cobalt lithium ion batteries in our products because installers will mount our product in utility closets and then people will do things like store cardboard boxes in there.
They can be more fully charged and discharged, while other lithium cells have to overprovision massively to extend the battery life. This alone makes it so that energy density advantage of NCA cells is thrown out of the window if you count the effective battery pack capacity with BMS sparing cell life.
And in comparison to NCA cells, LFPs are much, much cheaper, exactly because of the aforementioned cobalt and nickel use. Phosphates are, after all, spent by tonnes as a fertiliser.
Add to that that have a very, very rare trait among chemical batteries — they are stable at high temperatures.
This allows for making them work in very hot climates without liquid cooling which would've added a lot to cost and weight.
It also allows them to take more regen current, and therefore they don't suffer from as big range reduction from "regen choke" in hot climates. From the above, we also get their higher charge current tolerance, meaning that they can be charged faster.
Another very useful trait is their resistance to swell, offgassing and high dimensional stability. This allows for bigger, higher volume fill ratio cells, reducing the battery pack size, and thus its housing mass. Near all "brick" cells are LFP for this exact reason.
They age more evenly, unlike other chemistries, and that too contributes to ease of making bigger cells, and lessen the need for battery balancing, reducing charging times.
EV makers are stuck with small 18650s because it is very hard to increase cell sizes without not worrying about swelling. And the lower volume to area ratio of 18650s also lead to noticeable mass disadvantage.
thank you. i've always wondered why they aren't just the size of like a soda can, or a thermos.
Here's a tesla battery pack that comes in at 212 Wh/kg if the specifications are accurate: https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&prod...
> And in comparison to NCA cells, LFPs are much, much cheaper, exactly because of the aforementioned cobalt and nickel use. Phosphates are, after all, spent by tonnes as a fertiliser.
Is there a good source for LFP that actually is cheaper than plain lithium ion? I've been looking at doing an electric conversion, and it seems like they tend to run about $400-500 per kwh, whereas lithium ion tends to be more like $300-400. I can believe that LFP is cheaper to make, but if that were so, it seems like it ought to be reflected in retail prices unless vendors are selling them at a huge markup. (I've only looked into this recently, so I don't know if battery prices have spiked because of tariffs on China or something like that or this is just the normal retail price.)
The question is how much of that is overprovisioned for extra battery life
LFP cost more retail, mostly thanks to fewer makers selling on open market, but lower wholesale price on LFP is something quite certain.
400 Wh/kg batteries are starting to reach the market pretty soon (interesting for aviation).
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LFP like you are talking about are considered power cells (along with Manganese Spinel). The specific energy is about half of an energy cell at around 90-120 Wh/kg. These are that cells you use when you want the stored energy quickly, such as with an electric car or power tools.
The talk is about specific energy of the whole pack, not cells alone. After you take into consideration higher wiring, casing, and cooling weight, the mass advantage of NCA cells will not look so apparent.