Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Every single one of these big breakthrough announcements touts how great this new tech is- in just one or two particular metrics.
The problem is that Li-Ion batteries are just barely acceptable in all of those metrics. No new battery is going to replace them unless they can match Li-Ion in every metric and beat them in at least one.
This Ars story talks about the ongoing improvements to battery tech… https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
Lithium based batteries of varying chemistries collectively in space that few other battery chemistries overlap.
Otherwise yes, it's important to find something better without sacrificing on any of those metrics.
The extra weight of a big battery requires a bigger frame to carry it, bigger suspension, wider tires, and so on.
I’m not really happy that some of these monster EVs are approaching 10,000lbs with fast 0-60 times. It’s like a kinetic missile that can reach a momentum capable of obliterating your average 3000lb compact car in under 5 seconds.
So the first person never set goal posts around efficiency, that was an assumption by the second person. The first person could always have meant that the collision risks from heavier vehicles are higher, while the second person misunderstood their meaning. No moving of goalposts here.
It's nice to have a way of recuperating energy but it doesn't solve everything.
I used to think that was the case, but then i think i read somewhere that it only recovers 20% of the kinetic energy. Can't find it anymore though
Maybe you're thinking of the total range boost provided by regen braking? That's often shown to be roughly 20% via studies;
https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/vppc.2011.6043109
> Simulations show that the energy reduction of the vehicles under test can be more than 20% by applying regenerative braking.
It's an older study, but they show the regen efficiency at 60% for the EcoTruck and 70% for the bus.
There is all the time friction of air and the road. You can never recover that.
And in rare cases where you actually can recover energy, at non emergency slowing down, it is probably indeed in that ballpark, wich is something(especially in city with stop and go), but not very high or much. With very high tech, you can increase that number a bit, but not worth the effort. Electric cars need good batteries and every improvement there is good.
That's better on all the metrics you listed except cost, which it doesn't mention. Whatever their current cost is, it should drop significantly once they complete their factory in 2025.
Most of the battery is standard lithium-ion, the anode is a drop-in replacement.
In any case, this looks like a very practical battery with serious advantages over lithium-ion.
Personally I'd like to drive an EV 400 miles to visit my brother without stopping to charge, which realistically requires at least a 500-mile range, preferably 600 (so 80% to 20% is about 400). Charging time of less than ten minutes would make that less important to me, and conveniently, these batteries provide that too.
Their large facility planned is still tiny in terms of battery factories.
This will remain an expensive niche product.
If you invent a battery that is 2x as large and heavy as current vehicle batteries but half the cost, then you might think you would be able to sell them for stationary storage, but you are then competing with the price of second hand vehicle batteries which may well be half price already.
There are also different performance profiles within EVs, where different tradeoffs might make sense. Though, like you, I'm somewhat skeptical that any non-lithium chemistries will break through in that space.
On the one hand, you're right that for different applications having different metrics can be acceptable. Sure, a battery for your home that never moves can be heavy and large and that's okay.
But then you have to consider the economics of production. How many of those batteries will you make? What will the factory for them cost to build? And what would it cost instead to just make a bunch more Li-Ion batteries at the existing factory instead?
This would also allow you to configure or offer cars optimized for the climate they are being used.
I personally also see those news more in 'im 5-10 years' we will have something much better than now.
And before you say "oh, but they could just use a voltage converter from the high voltage battery", they need to consider that some accessories use hundreds of amps briefly (eg. the power steering - that makes for an expensive voltage converter), and the car still needs to operate lights and stuff while the high voltage battery is offline (eg. after an isolation fault).
For all of the above reasons, the lead acid battery is still there, even though a clean sheet design would never have one.
This seems like an odd choice - unless you already bought a supply of lead-acid batteries for the next 50 years or so.
I've read about a car using supercapacitors in the regenerative brakes to capture energy at high current and, then let it trickle back into the main batteries (or drivetrain) at levels that won't damage it.
Many laptops had both a lithium ion battery and a watch battery used to keep the bios and an internal clock running after the battery died. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/why-does-my-motherboard-have-a...
https://insideevs.com/news/546087/tesla-liion-12v-auxiliary-...
When Sandy Munro interviewed Elon Musk a couple of years ago he said "Why are you still using 12v stuff in the cabin?"
Musk's answer was that the automotive supply chain was entirely geared around 12v equipment and they had to take advantage of that to get to market quickly.
I'm glad those days are almost over.
Both lead acid and supercaps are not even remotely comparable to the main liion battery, they're suppliments, and not interesting ones
As for 12V, all one needs is a regulator. Unless you have a long-term supply contract (that, I bet, won't be renewed for too long), a lead-acid battery is just dead weight.
Having multiple chemistries in one battery pack is of course possible, but I don't any car who is actually doing that.
I read about it a few month back but ev battery and types etc. Shows a lot of other topics.
Might have been Tesla when they announced the other cell type.
It also depends a lot on use case; for example, for home electricity storage (like a PowerWall) I would gladly give up energy density for safety. If there's some battery tech that can handle 50000 charge cycles and completely non-flammable but weighs 100 tons and has 10% of the energy density of Lithium, I'd gladly make that trade. Maybe build part of the building out of it.
Current LFP batteries should last multiple decades as a home battery. The already have low flammability. The price is getting more affordable. They could just be part standard of a home electric system in a decade or two, like a whole-home surge protector.
Low rates of spontaneous thermal runaway, sure, but they still are extremely flammable if externally ignited or physically damaged. A house fire that could otherwise be put out might turn into a full disaster. An earthquake that physically damages the battery pack could cause a fire that would have otherwise not happened. A flood or minor tsunami might allow for early evacuations and most lives saved, but now the entire town is on fire instead of just water damaged, if every house has a massive lithium pack in their basement.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/05/13/ev-ran...
I'm not sure if the paper is open access or if my library is automatically logging me in again, but the cycling behavior is shown in Figure S18 of the Supporting Information here, page 12:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?do...
There was a post a while ago about a small scale battery manufacturer named Amprius, which reported 500Wh/kg batteries:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35276709
Thing is, the company is producing 450Wh/kg batteries NOW and they're planning on scaling up their manufacturing capacity to 5GWh:
https://www.convertingquarterly.com/ConvertingQuarterly/Indu...
This solid state news piece is exiting, but the real revolution is happening in the background, with LFP achieving decent densities without sacrificing cost or longevity and silicon anode batteries reaching large-scale commercialization as we speak.
So, I'm less excited about LFP. There are a number of ideas in the works that might double the energy density over the current leading lithium ion chemistries and if any of them work out its going to unlock a lot a things that don't quite work yet like:
1. light weight sports car EVs (like a miata) 2. EVs that can tow things or carry 4 mountain bikes on road trips 3. Some aircraft 4. EVs that can do a track day for a reasonable amount of time 5. EVs that are lighter than ICE counterparts rather than heavier
And economy of scale: if we can produce it, the chance that we can scale it might only be a question of few years.
Why do seemingly so people here understand clipping functions?
The lethality of a pedestrian-vehicle collision with a 4,000lb vehicle at 60MPH and a 400,000lb vehicle at 60MPH are both 1
In practical terms, the additional weight of an EV has zero effect on pedestrian collision lethality, whereas something like bumper design would.
However, not all collisions are at highway speed. Most collisions are at relatively low speed, where weight is an even more significant factor in the energy involved. There are tradeoffs you can make between weight contributed by safety equipment (e.g. bumpers), but to a large extent those tradeoffs are mandated by regulations rather than consumers or OEM engineers.
[1] https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/auto/analysis/pedestrian... [2] https://www.nber.org/digest/nov11/vehicle-weight-and-automot...
In a direct collision between a moving 1000kg car going 10 m/s and a stationary 50kg person, the person will end up moving somewhere between 9.5 m/s (perfectly inelastic collision) and 19.05 m/s (perfectly elastic). The car will end up moving 9.5 m/s (perfectly inelastic) and 9.05 m/s (perfectly elastic).
In a direct collision between a moving 10000kg car going 10 m/s and a stationary 50kg person, the person will end up moving 9.95 m/s (perfectly inelastic) and 19.90 m/s (perfectly elastic). The car will end up moving somewhere between 9.95 m/s (perfectly inelastic) and 9.90 m/s (perfectly elastic).
Even though we 10x'd the weight of the car, we only increased the velocity of the person after impact by about 5%, and energy imparted on the person by about 10%.
I suspect vehicle size (or rather, the size/shape of the front of the vehicle) has way more effect on pedestrian survivability than the weight of the vehicle. SUVs and trucks will impart the force of impact directly to your torso and head, and then subsequently run you over. Sedans hit you in the legs and then roll you over the top of the vehicle.
Basically every kilo you save is more useful load and range. It's also a very conservative market. Most of the planes in the process of being certified, or already certified (like the Pipistrel trainer) are using batteries that are quite unimpressive in terms of wh/kg. That's because the technology is typically at least half a decade old by the time a plane gets through the certification process.
Manufacturers can't just switch battery supplier without triggering a lot of re-certification activity and most of them would have locked in their supplier many years ago; long before even starting the certification process.. It's their next models that are being designed now that would get something that is state of the art now. Like this battery. We won't see those in the market until 6-7 years from now.
The exception to this is probably going to be experimental aircraft. I think that should become a growth market pretty soon. A 500wh/kg battery of say 100kwh would weigh about 200 kilos, give or take. That should get you some usable range and be light enough to put in a small plane. And it would put a nice little dent in the cost of what used to be a 100$ hamburger flight. Fuel cost is high and planes use a lot of it. 5-10 gallons per hour typically. And combustion engine maintenance on planes is very expensive. All that goes away with battery electric. Servicing becomes a lot simpler, less moving parts that can break and the few remaining ones last a lot longer.
Irresistible for a lot of private pilots, I would imagine. This is a market that doesn't currently exist but I don't think it should take long for people to start experimenting with battery electric.
Companies like Amprius scaling their high end battery production (like they announced recently) is interesting though.
-LFP wins on price where it fits the use case, so grid storage, current-gen EVs.
-Silicon anode competes for market share with solid-state in areas where LFP can't, namely aerospace and next-gen EVs or even aviation, should they ever reach 1kWh/kg. The former has easily a decade lead considering that they're already selling packs and the latter exists largely in the lab or on paper.
I also believe even 400Wh/kg at pack level is already good enough to be a serious proposition as replacement for internal combustion in land transportation, provided pricing is adequate.
But I’m not fully convinced on silicon anodes versus solid state. Yes, energy density is very promising, but I understand capacity fade is still a huge problem due to silicon volume expansion/reduction while charging/discharging?
For EVs they advertise cells with no less than 410Wh/L, 4C rate of discharge.
That being said LFP survives the nail penetration test without causing a fire, so it's considerably safer than the usual alternatives.
These are technically the same units, but they don't measure the same things.
I understand where you got this number, but I would rather stick to units which are easy to interpret.
Yes, 5GWh per year or 570kW - in a sense.
If not now, at least doable.
Then I started to wonder: what if this really could be done? I am afraid not, because you need two contacts to create a potential difference, don't you?
Perhaps they meant there wasn't an anode that gets degraded by use?
The point I think the article was trying to make is that while everyone is focused on lithium ion, Toyota was biding it’s time and getting ready to one-up everyone with solid state batteries and vehicles with double the range.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/toyotas-new-solid-state-ba...
but more power to toyota. can't wait to get an electric hilux. hopefully it's cheap.
Is it though? Can't be a hedge if it doesn't really work well fundamentally.
Although I'll admit to being largely ignorant of the Japanese car market.
IMO, it'd be much more practical to invest in automotive LNG tech and combine that with synthesizing LNG from the atmosphere (or at least developing the tech to do so).
Practically, both H2 and LNG are both "dirty", since H2 is made though natural gas reforming these days.
Sure H2 is dangerous, but so is LNG, and petrol for that matter. 100+ years of accidents and safety controls means that even a drunk person smoking at the pump can (probably) fill their car up safely.
Japan has very poor carbon security, so LNG reforming might come with its own challenges, but they could generate it via electrolysis using nuclear or wind power, or import ammonia from future mega producers like Australia.
It’s very likely that global demand in the transport sector will tend towards H2, so they need to gear their industry towards that market.
I worked as a project engineer in a hydrogen fuel cell test lab for a few years. H2 is EXTREMELY hazardous. It can be ignited by a miniscule amount of energy (i.e. a tiny static spark will do it), and it has a very fast flame front, which creates an extremely energetic explosion. It's also the smallest molecule, so it's very difficult to prevent leakage, and it embrittles and degrades most steels over time. Additionally, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (the most common kind) are poisoned by anything NOT H2, so you can't add odorous agents to H2 to easily detect leaks, like we do with natural gas. H2's only non-dangerous characteristic is its high buoyancy, which means it dissipates quickly in outdoor environments, but in my opinion that is not sufficient to offset all of its other dangerous characteristics.
I would NEVER live in a building that had H2 stored inside (as in, inside a vehicle tank) or pumped in it, and I would definitely not trust the general public to use it safely.
It also has to be stored at either incredibly high pressures (as a gas) or incredibly cold temperatures (as a liquid), neither of which are conducive to large-scale, long-range transport.
But the worst part of H2 isn't how dangerous it is or how impractical it is; the worst part of H2 is how incredibly inefficient a hydrogen economy would be. See Paul Martin's excellent summary of H2 for a thorough debunking of the main H2 talking points.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distilled-thoughts-hydrogen-p...
Hydrogen would allow Toyota to swap one messy, expensive, heavy power plant requiring lots of maintenance (ie fuel cell) for ICE technology.
Whereas EV technology has almost no maintenance, a motor with one moving part and regenerative braking that means even the brakes last forever. The accountants at Toyota would definitely frown at that.
All the other car companies did the same calculations and said 'NO'. Lets just say we'll do that and keep kicking the can down the road for as long as possible.
Now, thanks to Tesla, the cat is out of the bag and the entire industry knows they'll need a new financial platform to survive in the future and no, hydrogen will not save their sorry butts.
That doesn't seem right.
Of all the major brands, Toyota (and Lexus) is the most reliable. They are the opposite of planned obsolescence - they work hard to make their cars last for a very long time.
I suppose in the short term, that's a downside for them, but in the long term, their reputation for being extremely reliable pays off in multiple ways - more demand, higher residual value, etc.
I have no idea why the Japanese auto makers chased hydrogen so hard, but there as to be some other reason. Otherwise we would have seen declining reliability in their gas lineup before now.
But the writing's on the wall: H2 is dead tech for passenger vehicles.
Oh that's right, it's because you all parrot the same nonsense.
The valuable materials in EV batteries don't get used up - they're still in the battery, and can be recycled. We haven't figured out the particulars, but there's no reason why it can't be done. In fact, the biggest issue that battery recyclers are facing right now is a lack of batteries to recycle.
Stop swallowing propaganda wholesale. Start thinking for yourself.
Seriously, the battery people act exactly like climate change deniers. An entire argument based on denying or obfuscating the problem, and pretending nothing better could ever exist.
Seriously, your whole post is projection.
98% of H2 is made from fossil fuels.
You know why, right?
H2 is already expensive when reformed from natural gas - you can expect to pay 20-30 cents per mile to travel in the most advanced, fuel efficient H2 vehicle out there.
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/exclusive-fresh-bl...
H2 made via electrolysis is a bit more than 3x that cost. Are you ready to pay $1 per mile to drive?
Of course, price generally declines with volume, so we could expect those numbers to come down if H2 were more widely adopted. But there is a thermodynamic floor on the cost of H2, which means that it will never be cost-competitive with pure electric vehicles.
https://medium.com/10x-curiosity/the-hydrogen-hopium-ea11c7a...
And then there's the complexity issue. As a former fuel cell engineer, I understand better than most how complex and finicky proton exchange membrane fuel cell systems are. They are easily poisoned, they're prone to freezing, they have long startup times, they require high-speed, expensive electric air compressors, and they have complex valving and sensors to ensure safe operation.
Purely electric vehicles simply do not have these problems. A battery and a motor is about as simple as a drivetrain can possibly be. EVs will always be fundamentally far simpler than FCEVs, which translates into a lower upfront vehicle cost.
You have no answer to these problems.
I suggest you stop furiously responding here and instead consider your biases, and reevaluate your position. Batteries are so much better than H2 for transportation on just about all fronts that the two are not even close to comparable. H2 at this point is a malicious distraction being foisted on the general public by oil companies attempting to stay relevant, and governments engaging in sunk cost fallacious thinking. The sooner fuel cells for transport (and H2 for heating) are relegated to history's dustbin, the better.
Oh, and as for your assertion that electricity sans nuclear and hydro is 85% fossil fuels... that's true... and irrelevant. 40% of electricity generated in the US today is renewable, and that number grows steadily each year. We would be absolutely foolish to use that electricity to crack water, compress the H2, transport the H2, and convert it back to electricity in fuel cells, losing 65% of the energy in the process, than simply using it directly via batteries. Come on man! Discard the propaganda, separate your emotions from your positions, and think for yourself!
A fuel cell is also an electrochemical system. An FCEV is also an EV. Same electric motors and everything. They can attain the same level of efficiency as a li-ion battery and not any more complex. Less complex even, if you seriously analyze the complexity of the battery pack. And because of that, it can easily displace BEVs.
I don't know your background, but your writing is that of a bullshit artist. It completely ignores basic facts and substitute BEV propaganda.
No, they cannot attain the same level of efficiency. It's not even close, and no one who was arguing in good faith and had done even the most cursory research on the issue would make that absurd claim.
https://tide.theimi.org.uk/industry-latest/motorpro/efficien....
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mirai-fcev-vs-model-3-bev-pau...
You're just making stuff up. We're done here.
Do you see BEV becoming the dominant truck technology?
If FCEV trucks were to take off as a technology and get to a share of say 30 % of all trucks in some region, then I'd speculate that the FCEV tech in itself would ultimately displace BEV not only in the truck but also partially in the car sector.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
In order to deliver enough electricity most of the time, without needing huge amounts of storage (which are tiny right now), renewables will have to be massively over built. I assume there'll be times when there's 5x or more the electricity available compared to actual consumption.
Let the sun shine and the wind blow in summer and there'll be huge amounts of electricity which cannot be stored or consumed by BEV or some other grid connected battery because they're not enough. Industrial processes won't easily consume sudden surges in available electricity either.
Take the UK grid with its average of ~ 31 GW. Let's say they triple their wind power capacity which is currently at ~ 18 GW and double their pv capacity which is currently at ~ 3 GW. That'd be 60 GW so roughly twice the electricity that's consumed on average.
We're in summer, heat pumps don't consume .. so 30 GW excess electricity over say 3 windy days adds up to ~ 2 TWh. That's the capacity of 26.7 million Tesla Model 3 (long range) with a 75 kWh battery each. And they'd all need to be charged from 0 to 100 %.
Batteries won't suffice, I think.
So what'll be done? Electrolysis, I think -> H2, ammonia, methane, ..
So there'll be significant amounts of these being produced and stored.
Ammonia might well become the energy carrier of the future, being shipped around the world with large tankers to transport energy from where it's produced to places where it's used.
If that were to become true, wouldn't the fuel cell be the fitting technology for heavy duty and/or long range vehicles?
And once there'd be infrastructure for trucks and heavy vehicles, roughly the same ifrastructure could be used for FCEV cars.
As for smoothing out the electricity supply, EVs themselves are likely to play a large role, as will home batteries. The grid of the future will be much more distributed than what we have today. Tesla recently released a report which outlines where we are, where we need to be, and what is required to get there. It's succinct yet comprehensive, and well worth a read.
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
Feel free to point out a specific claim I've made that you believe is bullshit, and we'll proceed from there.
>Serious incidents are rare.
Even so, they're probably more common than you think. Google it.
>there hasn't been a single hydrogen car that has exploded
Uh... google "hydrogen car explosion."
>So just from that your argument is just lazy fearmongering and FUD.
So far, every point you've made has been weak or outright incorrect. Meanwhile, you have yet to seriously challenge any point I've made.
The reason for this isn't that I'm better at this than you. Your position is simply untenable.
I hope you figure out how to account for the bias that so obviously pervades your thought process. Cheers, I guess.
Sorry, but you are a liar. Your attitude is just a mask for your BS.
Pretty sure at this point you're a paid propagandist.
If that's true: fuck you, die in a fire.
If not: I sincerely hope you learn how to think critically at some point. Have a nice day.
You literally are the dumbest person on this site I've met. Not are you incredibly stupid, you act like you have actual knowledge. You clearly are in the Dunning-Kruger zone, assuming you aren't intentionally trolling.
Introducing this technology will require incremental changes across industry, infrastructure and communities. Today, green hydrogen is out of reach for many economies. Building H2 ecosystems, will almost certainly require initial investment in brown/black hydrogen by burning fossils fuels, which is currently under development in Australia and Japan.
The transition to blue (renewable>LNG>H2) and eventually towards green (renewables>H2O>H2) hydrogen will be slow and will take decades to achieve. Purple (nuclear) hydrogen may be a next logical step for Japan.
It’s simply not possible to replace everything everywhere all at once. We should have gotten onto this two decades ago, so we unfortunately have to make compromises that seem cynical and small on the outset, but are still very difficult to implement and gain consensus.
And no, it is not "less cost effective" because batteries involve dramatically higher upfront production costs. The argument is really just a troll argument and virtually identical to the same arguments used against battery cars.
Why is that better than putting it back into the grid and/or putting it into a battery?
The H2 for medium-term tank storage idea is not bad .. except for the very high capital cost of electrolysis. Without some means of making H2 that doesn't involve tying up a chunk of platinum as a capital asset this is a non starter economically.
Better to compare it to thermal storage, PHES, simply curtailing it or even virtual storage via hydro or w2e (or hydrogen generation with no step where it is converted back to electricity or motion). All of which are more sensible than hydrogen for personal transport.
I honestly don't get the criticism Toyota has been getting recently. I think their decision to not go all in on just electric vehicles makes sense, especially for countries where it is highly unlikely that full EV will be a reality in the next decade.
Because for a while it seemed they were going all-in on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, a technology that makes little technological (and even less practical) sense.
I assume it's this one:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Toyota-secures-h...
It seems to behind a soft paywall, so here's the archive.ph edition:
> while everyone is focused on lithium ion
Please remember that 'solid state' is just a marketing term. The actual meaning when talking in terms of automotive battery is 'lithium metal anodes'. So these are still lithium ion batteries.
And lots of people are working on lithium metal anodes, and have been for 50 years.
> Toyota was biding it’s time and getting ready to one-up everyone with solid state batteries and vehicles with double the range.
That is certainty what Toyota marketing has been telling people. But in reality scaling a new battery technology is incredibly difficult and if these claims were actually true we would see massive Toyota battery factory being build. When in reality its incredibly low volume production stuff that might show up in a few hybrids.
Also, 'solid state' isn't magically better then everything else. You can hit the same density with silicon. There are 100s of companies working on silicon and lithium metal anodes.
Toyota has announced some EVs but no actual product with these magical batteries that they have. The reality is, nobody, not Toyota best battery engineers know how difficult it will be to scale production of these things to a massive gigafactory. And if its not a massive gigafactory then its practically irrelevant in the EV market.
So unless we actually see a massive gigafactory somewhere that is dedicated to this type of battery, this is just marketing.
Genuine question, because optimistic battery articles have been popping up for decades, but here we are still with lithium ion in practice.
Lithium ion batteries are actually amazing tech. I certainly remember the world without them; laptops had an hour of battery life, mobile phones were "car phones", everyone was running around paranoid about the "memory effect", and electric cars were an interesting curiosity always ten years away. Here we are today with pocket computers that last for days and electric cars buzzing around the city. In 30 years, some of this new tech we read about will be widely adopted, but in the meantime, it's not like things are that bad.
I think that electric airplanes will be the thing that new battery technology unlocks.
If there are existing manufacturing processes that can be leveraged to build cells with this chemistry—and do so economically—then commercialization could happen very rapidly.
Otherwise, it's likely to be filled away until future manufacturing technology comes along, which may be "too late" if even better or more economical options exist at that point.
The 'Lithium ion' from 10 years ago is very different from it now. 'Lithium ion' is an umbrella term that contains lots of things. Just as 'solid state' is not really what anybody is talking about. What actually matters about 'solid state' is lithium metal anodes. There are also companies who are doing lithium metal anodes without being solid state.
If 'solid state' ever make it into the market, they will just be the new 'Lithium ion'.
So basically, if I wanted the freedom to have occasional heavy-usage days, I would have to buy a larger, heavier phone.
They suffer from poor wearing like almost all new battery technologies. Until that's solved they aren't useful.
Wikipedia: With an abundance in the Earth's crust comparable to that of platinum (about 1 µg/kg), tellurium is one of the rarest stable solid elements.
Always.
I'm happy they found something that might perhaps some day become real, but it's going to stay irrelevant for years and may never happen. Unless you really care about minor scientific discoveries (rather than things that are directly going to influence industies related to energy storage), there's not much to see here.
No, we're not all going to have Aluminium-Air batteries in our cars next year. The hype around this stuff reminds me of the one around fusion reactors. Just around the corner. Sure, dude.
Research on solid state batteries has been ongoing since then. E.g. Quantumscape founded in 2010. and is planning to start small scale production next year. We'll see how successful they are of course. You are right that it takes quite long to take technology into production. But the counter argument is that there are a few decades behind us with stuff that is now slowly trickling into the market.
Double the energy sounds amazing. Until you ask the question "double of what". Double of what's available in the market right now (450 wh/kg, Amprius sells these in low volumes) would be 900 wh/kg. That's perhaps not what they mean. The article is infuriatingly hand wavy on what is being compared to what. Or maybe they do. Hard to tell.
iPhone 5: Dimensions: 51 x 39 x 3.6 mm (2.01 x 1.54 x 0.14 in) Capacity: 1440 mAh Voltage: 3.8 V
iPhone 5s: Dimensions: 51 x 39 x 3.8 mm (2.01 x 1.54 x 0.15 in) Capacity: 1560 mAh Voltage: 3.8 V
iPhone SE (1st generation): Dimensions: 51 x 39 x 3.95 mm (2.01 x 1.54 x 0.16 in) Capacity: 1624 mAh Voltage: 3.82 V
iPhone 6: Dimensions: 66.4 x 51.8 x 3.8 mm (2.61 x 2.04 x 0.15 in) Capacity: 1810 mAh Voltage: 3.82 V
iPhone 6s: Dimensions: 65.6 x 51.7 x 3.8 mm (2.58 x 2.04 x 0.15 in) Capacity: 1715 mAh Voltage: 3.82 V
iPhone 7: Dimensions: 73.1 x 32.4 x 5.2 mm (2.88 x 1.28 x 0.20 in) Capacity: 1960 mAh Voltage: 3.8 V
iPhone 8: Dimensions: 74.5 x 26.6 x 6.9 mm (2.94 x 1.05 x 0.27 in) Capacity: 1821 mAh Voltage: 3.82 V
iPhone SE (2nd generation): Dimensions: 67.3 x 40.9 x 3.73 mm (2.65 x 1.61 x 0.15 in) Capacity: 1821 mAh Voltage: 3.82 V
iPhone X: Dimensions: 88.9 x 32.5 x 3.25 mm (3.5 x 1.28 x 0.13 in) Capacity: 2716 mAh Voltage: 3.81 V
iPhone XS: Dimensions: 87.16 x 32.61 x 2.96 mm (3.43 x 1.28 x 0.12 in) Capacity: 2658 mAh Voltage: 3.81 V
iPhone XR: Dimensions: 76.0 x 30.8 x 3.25 mm (2.99 x 1.21 x 0.13 in) Capacity: 2942 mAh Voltage: 3.81 V
iPhone 11: Dimensions: 90.0 x 31.9 x 3.25 mm (3.54 x 1.26 x 0.13 in) Capacity: 3110 mAh Voltage: 3.83 V
iPhone 12: Dimensions: 81.5 x 32.4 x 4.1 mm (3.21 x 1.28 x 0.16 in) Capacity: 2815 mAh Voltage: 3.83 V
iPhone 13: Dimensions: 84.5 x 30.9 x 5.7 mm (3.33 x 1.22 x 0.22 in) Capacity: 3095 mAh Voltage: 3.83 V
Watt-hours per kg, and watt-hours per liter.
And with all solid state, have they solved scaling production beyond a small demonstration cell? It is now a known investment "con" to create a solid state cell that appears to kick the tar out of conventional cells and then try to get funded to "solve production". I lost count of how many companies were doing this.
This is an embarrassing article from an engineering organization website.
What appears to be happening is that solid state will simply be a distraction technology. Sulfur chemistries (medium/long term) and prosaic unsexy LFP and sodium ion (short term) will drive the true revolution in electrification of transportation and grid storage.
Solid state may produce usable use cases around laptops / phones / etc at some point, and who knows, solid state sulfur may become a thing eventually, but what's really needed from batteries now is scale and cost.
The 200 wh/kg LFP (230+ on the roadmap/12-24 months away!) and 150 wh/kg sodium ion (180-200 wh/kg on roadmap) going into mass production are the big revolution in batteries. That is a non-cobalt/nickel LFP battery that can do 400 mile cars, and a sodium ion battery that should drop to 40$/kwh costs that can do a 300 mile car, and the roadmap should further upgrade/cheapen those chemistries.
The 150 wh/kg sodium ion battery should mean 250-350 mile range city cars that are significantly cheaper than ICE drivetrains can achieve. It is tranportation for 3-4 billion people that won't use fossil fuels.
LFP should eventually be able to do the medium range electric semi truck. Sulfur chemistries should enable or better a long haul semi, but sulfur chems are probably 8-12 years from mass production (I really hope I'm wrong and it is sooner though)
Sources:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-apri...
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...
Expect more consistent prices in Q3 2023 once the end of the lithium bubble works its way through the system.
20 years ago laptops had two hours of battery life. Today a MacBook has 20+ hours of battery life. Obviously many components have become more efficient, but battery improvements have also contributed to that large increase in battery capacity.
The 100Wh battery limit means they have little incentive to further improve battery technology. Any increased storage capacity wouldn't be legal to fly with, so all it could do is make the laptop very slightly thinner or lighter.
But then you wouldn't be allowed to carry it on a plane. The limitation is not tecnological, is regulatory.
similarly airplanes stopped getting faster because we hit the point where the atmosphere starts melting you to death, and not much can be done about that.
battery chemistry is hardly dead though, since 20 years ago there have been all kinds of improvements in different directions. Just no big leaps. But the little improvements add up.
While I agree with your point in general, have to nitpick here. Thermal protection is mostly solved problem by now (think Space Shuttles and other reentry vehicles). Commercial airplanes stopped getting faster because they hit a sweet spot between speed and fuel consumption. Military airplanes are stuck because hypersonic aerodynamics is very hard and different from subsonic/sonic/supersonic ones.
Aeroplanes stopped developing because the whole industry is now highly regulated. The barrier to getting a new type of plane/engine design to market is beyond what pretty much all startups are capable of. That's why we still fly some planes like cessna designed in the 1960's, back when regulation was more lax.
I don't think either rockets nor planes are anywhere near fundamental physical limits if we took away the 'human' limiting factors.
Title seems a bit weird for an IEEE audience ...
I've heard nothing about them for a solid 16 months, so I'm guessing the shorters were right.
Solid State batteries appear pretty easy to crank out a demonstration cell with lots of density advantages over the production cells, and handwave away the scaling of production as a detail resolved in investment. There are a solid dozen companies I've seen with that basic approach.
None of the solid state companies appear close to scaling production.
Likely the sulfur chemistries will beat them to market with far superior material cost and density and scalability. Solid state still has a good opportunity in cell phones / laptops / etc, which is a big market, but the real play in batteries is grid storange and tranportation, which will dwarf phones/laptops by several orders of magnitude in volume.
Not sure where people got the idea that they claimed they are on the verge of large scale production.
They were on a little bit more then lab scale production.