CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
thedriven.io
thedriven.io
This is a lot more credible than most of the battery stories, because CATL is already producing a ton of batteries, lending them some credibility.
This is a little under 2x the density of current batteries.
The exciting part of this announcement is that if anyone can scale manufacturing, it is them.
Reminds me of the "revolutionary battery checklist": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930
edit: removed the paste of the checklist because of spam.
- Engadget, circa 2010
That's actually incremental improvement if you think about it in annual improvement terms.
Silicon anodes will be the same.
Sodium ion still has shills screeching about how it'll never come despite being last year's news.
Lithium Manganese batteries are another one of these exotic chemistries that arrived without fanfare.
But AA and AAA are increasingly rare not only because of price but also because of the ubiquity of USB charging, and because of the way the powerbanks that USB charging enabled weakened the "carrying spares" argument for AA a lot.
In essence: yes, the vast majority of consumer devices using standardized battery sizes continue to be AA or AAA (if we can agree in ignoring the ubiquitous CR2032). But costumer devices that use interchangeable standard size batteries have become super niche, at least outside a few fields where you expect years on a set of batteries. To go lithium means going fixed battery (unless you identify with the performance flashlight subculture, again something I very much agree with)
I hope we eventually get a consumer friendly standard for lithium though. It could be so much better than cylindrical cells, we could have all our cheap gadgets using micro versions of the power tool slide on shoe concept or something. Kinda unbelievable the ISO isn't trying to standardize prismatic type cells.
Edit: well, I'm a dummy and OP said mass-produced. Sorry.
FWIW, to provide the 225 amps (for a V8 starter motor) a Tesla car battery would only need a discharge capability of 3C (1C being around 80 amps), which is within its rated capabilities. This is also for batteries which provide higher voltages, so I'm vastly overestimating the C rate required.
C is the unit for charge/discharge rates, and is based off the capacity of the battery.
Conversely, a BEV traction battery has to support a wider range of loads at any charge state between its minimum and maximum charge levels, in order to have decent driving range. Like a starter motor, the BEV is not going to sustain high power output for very long, since a car only takes seconds to accelerate to legal road speeds. After that, it requires continuous output at lower power levels to maintain a cruising speed.
Even with lead-acid batteries, there are regular starter batteries and then there are deep-cycle batteries which have far less cold cranking amps but more durability when depleted to low charge states before being recharged.
The low density of lead-acid batteries is what makes them unsuitable for mobile applications. They might have 30-50 Wh/kg while various lithium ions might be 100-300 Wh/kg. And now this announcement is talking about 500 Wh/kg so 10x the best lead-acid batteries...
The 18650 Panasonic cells used in an older Tesla model S for instance are rated at only 10A draw per cell as their nominal 1S voltage (4.20V when full).
At say 30C you'd only need 7Ah lithium batery
CATL pushing this sort of capacity, though, is great news. It certainly will accelerate availability.
Compare to the discharge rate vs. energy density tradeoffs of plug-in hybrid EVs versus battery-only EVs: A Chevy Volt PHeV has a 16 kWh pack and 87 kW motor, a Chevy Bolt has a 65 kWh pack and not a 65/16x87=350 kW motor but 149 kW.
[0] https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/9682...
Battery pack energy density, battery, single cell, cathode, and their rated, nominal, and absolute capacity are all different things.
A single cell will always have > absolute capacity than the capacity at which the safety limiter will cut-off charging, and that will be > than the capacity to which BMS will charge/discharge the cell in daily use.
It may well be possible for a cathode material to excel in a small pouch cell, but have terrible thermals preventing its use in larger cells.
UAVs have high C rates and high durability.
EVs or even aircraft don't need anywhere near 40C.
A small quadcopter that uses a gensace/Tattu 1200 mAh lipo pack is not an expensive uav. I think everyone who uses hobby size lipo knows their specs around 135-160Wh/kg.
If yes, I hope they open-source it so that the fight against global warming can gain some momentum across the globe.
> What makes CATL’s announcement this week truly groundbreaking is that the condensed battery will go into mass production this year.
The manufacturer are pushing subscription-base model. Used electric car won't become cheap
It will take time for this to work out in the market. BMW is small enough to trick people, but the large car makers are not.
None of that implies less risk of a populist backlash, though; not for any class of 'mericans, rich or poor.
That said, in the interest of honest debate, it will shift the used car market prices significantly initially until supply of used EVs spins up. Although this is very secondary.
I think it's going to happen is essentially you're going to get like a $10,000 new EV you can buy that's going to be cheaper to use energywise/ fuel-wise than a clunker ice.
I think the driver this will be the Chinese / India markets where you have basically two to three billion people that will want cars at that price point and that stuff will eventually make its way into the US
In '35 it's doubtful ICE will be cheaper than EV anyway (look at price development over last decade...) Banning ICE will speed up this development.
Climate change will disproportionately affect people who are already vulnerable.
Tax carbon emissions and use the money to provide good affordable alternatives (public transportation) for people who don't afford an EV today.
You also mention climate change, but I don't see how an extra average degree of weather (if that materializes) will be worse than stripping poor people of transportation and condemning them to never having a job (since most lower rung jobs require a car).
Certainly, these poor people will absolutely eviscerate you at the polls if you level them with this massive poor tax.
As for public transportation, the US is incapable of building new rail infrastructure. California's $150,000,000,000 LA-to-SF train is an unmitigated disaster, Chicago's rolling stock is extremely old and falling apart and New York City takes 12 years to build 4 miles of new lines, at a cost that is quadruple what France would spend for identical infrastructure.
You're in a dream world. The same people who claim that a poor people tax helps them also support cash pits known as modern rail infrastructure in the US (it's more like grift and fraud, though).
The US is fundamentally incapable of building public transportation? Ludicrous. What's required is political will.
ICE prices will not drop faster than EV. It's much more mature technology.
If forbidding new ICE cars (in 7+ years) "strips people of transportation" we clearly need som kind of subsidies to alleviate that.
Climate change is a threat. It's not just something people talk about because it's fun. The current estimates predict 3 degrees of warming until the end of the century. That's assuming we stop burning fossile fuels some time this century. The disruption this would cause to agriculture and living conditions around the world are just staggering. If nothing else, consider the costs of 2 meeters sea level rise until 2100...
Preventing climate change is a cost saving measure.
Well, no, but
> society have built itself to be almost fully dependent on cars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
I'm not sure I agree with this. In many parts of the US or Europe, you could easily be in a position where you can afford a car (and need one for work), but cannot afford housing. It's true that you might well still be well off by world standards (a car roof is still a roof), but I think I'd require "food, clean water, clothing and reliable shelter" to be a bare minimum for "not poor".
Don't blame EV and or the environment for this. Car culture in the US created unsustainable cities and destroyed public transportation.
Car ownership itself has always been a regressive tax.
It’s sadly also true that the technocrats actually taking those decisions are a lot less directly accountable, but nothing that a second “yellow vests” movement won’t be able to fix.
(Edit: I see that you are being down voted. Perhaps elaborating on your desire to continue to be able to buy gasoline cars might help clarify your position better)
Your freedom to intoxicate other people goes against their freedom to remain unharmed.
(Not to mention noise, environmental damage, geopolitical risks surrounding oil... all well proven stuff)
But I know how harmful heavy handed-mandates can be. I have seen the damage such mandates have already made in other instances with voters being then easily recruited and radicalized by populist politicians.
This is a delicate issue, already highly politicized and deeply hypocritical for both sides. Completely curtailing people’s freedoms is not the way to approach it, if you want to change anything.
Some people like to have the freedom to choose between things, it isn't about trying to be some kind of villain.
What some people don't want to hear is that their freedom must be limited where it impacts other people. Nobody is alone in the world.
Some people value the qualities that the current (pun happened) alternatives do not offer: they are inadequate for some use cases. This includes long travel and refuelling in minutes.
Furthermore, since societies are now suffering an epidemic of lunacy, electric cars can be extreme noise pollutants, because insane manufacturers and users have turned them into a loud cacophonic concert - I have seen them. They can be unbearable.
They also seem to be internet connected in a staggering amount of cases, and many refuse to drive "a smartphone with wheels", or more explicitly a madness with uselessly installed security holes and privacy compromisers. This is especially relevant for The Car, the device that was built for deliverance - "our way to escape", as Karl Kraus said.
Well, isn't it then peoples choice to do that? Or do you instead argue for a ban of EVs? I don't get this point.
I've never heard an electric car making more noise than the road noise. Which of course is annoying in itself going at high speeds, but still less than an ICE. What you're describing is absolutely not something of the ordinary. ICEs revving their engine in residential streets, however...
No, you cannot have any freedom to be uselessly bothersome. That is basic in social rules. If you are missing that evidence, it is because societies have become extremely lax (especially in practical and mental effort. It's called a downfall).
> making more noise than the road noise
The topical noise is that which comes from the additional, artificial noises that are placed to warn the surrounding beings of the traffic, as a consequence of the fact that the vehicle would be less noisy because of the absence of the engine.
In a normal car you have the "natural" mechanical noises (hopefully muffled), whereas the lunatics have placed in a number of models a broadcast background sound that you could - if you never heard it - be assimilated to the starting sounds of operating systems in the nineties. Only, permanent during the running of the vehicle. The new noise is not "grey" as it was, but textured, like a chord of synthetic strings.
So, the prospect is of having streets full of running loudspeakers shouting their own unnatural chords. Which also means that even if you decided to live in an isolated spot of land you should not remain less then a few miles away from any street, if legislation and good un-common sense will not intervene.
> I've never heard
I have heard the scream from least two models from stellantis (probably from the same project); I am informed that the Bayern and others have researched sound textures of their own to promote the brand. I also have information that producers have contacted agencies to produce ringtones for their brand. Moreover, I have seen some implement beeps during parking operations - so your city will sound like a giant construction site.
--
Update: some passed by and left a silent note. Confirming the root point! The downfall is restricting people's freedom practically and creates a problem with freedom deontically.
walk, bike and horse are better solutions for noise, not ICE cars. Ban all cars?
Solutions are chosen for the balance in cost, risks and benefits. Noisy but useful, within boundaries, ok. (Note: some of us are bothered already by motorways miles away when in otherwise isolated woodlands - but we are aware that traffic somehow must flow, and know that we have to select more distant places.)
Electric cars are becoming a massive threat in terms of noise pollution because people have become dumb and passive - cannot perceive and cannot react. The issue is not intrinsic in the technology, but it is part of reality: opportunity for madness + latent madness → disaster.
> not ICE cars
You do not seem to understand: the noise some fools put into electric vehicles is completely different. As in, "not a hum but brass" - where "hum" can be annoying and "brass" will surely be. See my other post nearby.
ICE cars are such a nuisance in cities by polluting the air. I look forward to a time when my children will be able to enjoy clean air in the cities.
I much prefer the older ways with polluting factory in the city, at least everyone could see what it takes to provide each good, and share its cost. The current way of doing things is to ban everything, which force manufacturers to produce elsewhere in the world and import it. Plus we are loosing knowledge in the process.
I can't agree, because forceful bans are not the best way to accomplish change.
Simply keep improving battery technology to bring prices down and range up and it'll take a natural course once buying an EV becomes cheaper than an ICE car. Implementing bans makes it political and builds resentment which is counterproductive. Building a better product and letting the market decide works so much better.
https://www.google.com/maps/@48.147145,16.5005479,3a,75y,168...
People live on the other side of that highway, so I guess it's possible, but I used to drive through that area on a regular basis and the smell hard to forget.
Apart from that such facilities need to be large to be cost-effective.
Then, there's the more insane stuff:
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1024086_ethanol-powered-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire "largest peacetime explosion in Europe"
I live in Edinburgh, and there's regular complaints about flaring from the Mossmorran refinery, which lights up the night sky, produces smoke, and is incredibly loud.
Hence plenty of customers for gas stations
I think at some point, the cost of operating gas stations will fall below a threshold that it doesn't justify keeping them open, even if there is still _some_ demand.
E.g. imagine if demand were cut in half -- I think more than half of the gas stations would shut down.
Nowadays I can only think offhand of a single local retail fuel establishment that will sell you both US and UK "gas".
I assume the 11-ish litre butane capacity wouldn't be enough to be practical.
Finding a gas station may be problematic ( although i doubt truck will move to electricity that soon)
Most of the ICE cars sold now will be on the roads in 15 years.
There will of course be much less refineries. The other uses of oil are small niches, and so the world needs one-two small refinery to supply their needs. So there will be price shocks as the large refineries close.
Well then, good thing the world's largest battery maker is starting to mass-produce batteries with twice the energy density.
Sure the infrastructure has a bit to catch up, but even without infrastructure, we're completely fine to use our EV for 90% of our commute (and our ICE car the other 10%).
But if density -- thus range -- were to double, infrastructure becomes even less of a dependency.
So how many people is that? Don't estimate house ownership or house rents on your circle of friends. What about cities, apartments with no means to install chargers? World is not urban sprawl where houses have garage and power available for charging cars.
https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-...
Also, the way North Americans are developing their dwellings and neighborhoods/suburbia is absolutely horrible
"In 2008, it was estimated that six out of ten Japanese lived in single-family houses." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Japan
I'm not going to keep googling this for everywhere but in developed countries at least, it doesn't appear that "home charging isn't a thing for vast majority of car owners."
Just look at what happened to the EU’s ice ban for personal vehicles.
Spoiler: while new gasoline burning cars are technically banned after 2035 it will be completely legal to sell new gasoline burning cars by labelling them e-fuel only…
(Except for "luxury" brands that just want to be special to distinguish themselves from the rabble.)
It will depend on their needs and if the device covers them. For example (as said already even here): long distance travel, practicality of refuelling (no, the need of some will not be fulfilled by leaving the car in charge nightly), decent technology (e.g. some will refuse to own an internet connected vehicle).
Would you drive them? Would you own an internet connected door, vehicle, pacemaker? Some would rather find the keys out of the asylum.
You say «little to do», but the point was that we are informed of «gas cars» without wireless connection, whereas word is that for some reason all electric vehicles seem to be. We know that some «gas cars» are spared, but they say all electric ones will be bound to the wave of improper engineering, so this defines some hope or way out for the traditional making and rules out the new one.
This is my first long trip in an EV vehicle but my wife drove about a 1000 miles through eastern Washington State a few weekends ago ( also mountains - even more remote ). She had to plan but there was certainly no risk of getting stranded. At least one of the hotels had overnight charging for free.
All this is today. These are going to be non-issues 5 years from now.
They are only LABELED as e-fuel cars. You can run them just fine with classical fuels.
EDIT: emphasis
In the e-fuel vs trad-fuel story you do not have that incentive.
What you DO have, is an incentive to actually do the switch. Projections put e-fuel production costs at a 1500% premium over fossil fuels and wide spread availability is actually a hard scientific problem as even the announced global production capacity* of e-fuels is only enough for a few thousand vehicles.
* Apparently, to date, the biggest portion of announced e-fuel production misses either an energy provider or financial backing or both.
A good German summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrudYCzh2E
The best car technology is the one you don't use much. And we already have decades of cars in good enough condition to be driven weekly rather than daily.
EVs will barely scratch the surface of environmental issues with transportation. And they will create a new range of supply problems while also not solving traffic congestion issues that plague our cities.
It would be far more preferable to encourage people to use the same car for longer and especially to leave it in the garage when they can use other modes of transportation. Or, use car sharing rather than a personal car.
Heck, Mazda makes new parts for the original Miata.[1] While the first generation Miata is a recognizable car, it's not very popular. A total of 433,000 were produced. Maybe half are still on the road today. That may sound like a lot, but twice as many Ford F-150s are sold every year. If it's profitable to keep making parts for 200,000 vehicles, it's going to be a long time before most ICE cars run into shortages.
1. https://news.mazdausa.com/2019-10-28-Mazda-Expands-U-S-MX-5-...
Its not going to be a cheap or painless conversion, but there is absolutely a path forward for most gas stations I think.
In denser areas charging will move to mall like areas where people will get out of the car for longer. Gas stations are not generally not setup for people to hang out for 30 minutes, they don't have enough space for people to park that long. They are setup for use the bathroom, grab a snack and get out. Most people charging will want to get groceries or other supplies they are getting anyway (which is to say since they can't charge at their apartment they are going to look for places to shop where they can recharge)
In rural areas (truck stops) are more setup for spending more time. They often have small restaurants already so you can eat inside. They are more general purpose stores and often serve the locals as the place to buy things between trips to dollar general or the city. They have more parking (land is cheap so they will buy more if needed), so there is place to put in all the needed EV chargers. Plus they get a lot more customers who are on trip so long they couldn't charge at home.
Even without the pump islands, there isn't much room for customer parking. These stations are often situated at corners with multiple driveways, small parking areas, and no adjacent street parking. Unless you can merge adjacent parcels for redevelopment, these small stations may only be able to support a convenience store, coffee shop, drive-through food stop, or some other quick turnaround. They don't have the right layout to support lots of simultaneous customers unless they are arriving on foot or by mass transit instead of personal vehicles.
That combined with bigger stores like 7-Eleven, CVS, Walmart, etc.. adding their own charging stations will kill most gas stations.
Hint: You can continue to use the ICE vehicle you bought in 2034 in the EU until infinity.
Sure, if you can find fuel. By 2034 EVs will be enough of the market that gas stations are already closing (remember today new cars are 10 year old used cars, and there is every reason to think EVs will be half of all cars). There is still one on every corner, so you might not see this trend, but it will be in the statistics. By 2038 you will noticed it because many corners won't have a gas station at all. And of course the stations will already see this on the bottom line and will be less interested in replacing their pumps when the get old, and if they break they might just close that one island instead of fixing it. By 2045 fuel will be special order in most places.
Note that construction, freight, and other high energy use niches will still use a lot of fuel, so diesel will be available for a while longer. However those vehicles tend to use larger nozzles that won't fit in your diesel car. Gasoline will be hard to find - you can still make road trips, but you will need to plan your fuel stops like people plan EV charging today (on some roads you don't need to plan your EV charging, but there are others you must).
I do expect ICEs will be just under 50% of total cars, you could argue they are more like 55% of all cars, but it won't be 75%.
I'm afraid the problem of generating/transporting enough electrons to all places where cars, buses, trucks, need charging will not be solved completely within 10 years.
Of course you'll find fuel; ICE trucks aren't being banned. You can use their fuel.
Might be slightly inconvenient to have to drive to a depot once a month, but people will do it if the economics are right.
See "red diesel" in the UK - its just plain ole diesel taxed differently for commercial use, but illegal for use in privately owned personal vehicles. It's dyed red to allow its use in private vehicles to be discovered from the discoloration of engine parts etc.
Personally I expect rules on what can be pumped into what will be different by 2045 in a lot of places, and while it might still be possible it may not be so simple.
> https://www.crownoil.co.uk/faq/red-diesel-questions-and-answ...
Maybe, but we're talking about the banning of ICE vehicles, not the banning of fuel.
I mean, "you won't find fuel because it will be illegal to possess it" is a substantially different argument from "you won't find fuel because no one will produce it anymore".
This is a bizarre point to make? Regulation of fuels and regulation or bans of ICE vehicles would obviously go hand in hand (it already does today!), if ICE vehicles were to be banned as discussed here. You can't have combustion without fuel... Controlling who can pump gas would be hugely important to the introduction of any hypothetical ICE ban.
My point also is not that fuel may be banned - it's that the regulations governing the pumps may be different than today, and that there is international precedent for this. If combustion really is largely relegated to commercial trucking by 2045, I'd be honestly shocked if the rules governing the pumps didn't change too in a lot of places.
look at the vast difference in fuel laws pretty much everywhere between today and the 1970s if inspiration required - remember we used to be able to buy leaded fuels?
Infinity might be a long time, but we had fuel stations when there were 25% of the cars on the road that there are now.
There are around 25-50 petrol stations within 30 mins drive of me.
There is no reason to believe that it will be impossible to fuel your car until ICE cars become collectors' items.
In the very most remote areas, maybe.
I highly doubt gasoline will be hard to find in most places by 2045; I'd expect a lot fewer fueling stations, but I think even at 10% of the station count, gasoline will still be convenient and easy. And, if gasoline is less convenient, you can always use gas cans to extend your range. They're not too expensive, and not too inconvenient (epa 'anti-spill' nozzles that make it hard to fill without spilling not withstanding); long term storage is problematic, but if you're regularly using it, no big deal. Most gasoline powered vehicles have at least a 300 mile range, and it's not hard to find vehicles with a larger range.
I pass multiple stations when I leave town to get to work. Where I work looks like here ( home ) from a station density point of view.
For longer trips, you may be right that you may have to plan. But there could be very few ICE cars on the road before one station every 400 km ceases to be profitable. And, unlike electric, nothing is stopping me from filling up a gas can before hitting a leg I am really worried about.
I cannot see “lack of stations” being a problem for ICE for a long time.
The cost of fuel could be a thing I guess but, if demand drops faster than supply, the economics of that do not really make sense.
Also, if I am somebody that uses a vehicle “once a week”, is this really the car I am going to take on a 1500 km trip through unpopulated areas? I cannot rent or borrow an EV for that trip?
What you are suggesting seems to be that ICE vehicles are going to end up being errand vehicles for farmers, or the old truck hooked up to the boat to go fishing once a month. Or that people that live and work locally need them for the occasional errand. For the latter use case, where I live at least, just the insurance cost would incent me to replace such a vehicle with a ride share subscription even now.
I think it is going to stay viable to run an ICE vehicle for a long time yet. I also expect fewer people will want to.
This announcement has the potential to push things like Teslas to 1000 km of range. What happens when it hits 2000 ikm ( over 1300 miles ). What are you going to want to head out of town in?
10 years from now, people that can afford it will have all gone EV. People who cannot will drive their ICE until it needs a major repair. And then they are going to go EV.
Every ounce of oil coming out of the groud and getting burned ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. Banning that has nothing to do with ICEs.
You can run an ICE on synthetic fuels. It's not as energy-efficient but only half the efficiency from a renewable source is still better than "full" efficiency from a fossil source. If you _really_ must use an ICE, there will be a way. It won't be cheap, but it's your choice. There is no human right for cheap ICE fuel.
Nobody is forcing you to do so, it just doesn’t make much sense to keep driving that ICE. When everybody is making that decision parts and maintenance will be more expensive and harder to come by too - accelerating the transition.
Imagine saving all of that for a much smaller battery (say, 100 miles range) which is enough for 45+ weeks of the year, and then for the rare case of driving further than that you bring gasoline with you, with its vastly superior energy density and thus range. Only for those few trips. It can well be super expensive, but who cares, it's only for that rare trip to the grandparents or the skiing resort. And then you don't need to care much about the bad end-to-end efficiency. After all, you don't care about that when taking a plane to Hawaii either, do you?
Currently, plug-in hybrids tend to just be used as gasoline cars because people are lazy and don't charge every night. There are gas stations everywhere, fuel is cheap, and you are used to filling up gas anyway. But once gasoline prices spike to 3x-5x because it's synthetic fuels, the dynamic will change, fewer gas stations around, the reduced economies of scale lead to further price hikes and boom, everybody will use their plug-ins mainly as EVs. Which is what I'm describing above. Which could outperform pure EVs because you don't need a 500 miles EV range anymore, you can make do with 100 miles.
Or build public transit for the commute and don't use a car at all.
I understand the drivetrain argument. What about a simple generator to recharge the battery on the go? Like the original BMW i3 had. That one didn't take off, but likely in part because it was ugly, too small to be practical, and the gas prices still being very low.
I am not sure if its a good idea, nothing seems to be a good idea in London, but the congestion charge and the newer diesel charges surely add up.
And predictably, some of the worst usual suspects are exempt.
They'll be sabotaged by reality. Thinking ICE cars and gas stations will become a fading memory by 2035 is wishful thinking. Politicians get big headlines and praise for proposing ICE bans and such, but as the date draws closer the reality of "OK, maybe we're not quite there yet" sets in and the date will be pushed back again and again. There is a very long tail with ICE, and it's going to take a very, very long time to replace them. Wholesale upheavals of established technology are difficult.
For a noteworthy example in another domain, IPv4 has been on its last legs for how long now?
It’s an analogous situation demonstrating how hard it is to unseat an incumbent, ubiquitous technology with another, and how long it takes, even if that alternative is superior.
Nonsense; it's just harsh reality landing on green wet-dreams.
They effectively propose a ban on cheap cars, and you expected ... what, exactly?
The only way they're replacing ICE vehicles is by making the EVs cheaper, and there is a limit to how high they can tax sales of ICE vehicles or fuels without a population revolt.
Even if electric cars would be cheaper, faster and longer running - some people would rather die, than give up their ICE cars and motorcycles.
The strong lobby in germany against banning aren't the poor, but the rich who want to drive their roaring Porsche till eternity. They literally say that.
I can somewhat understand the appeal of an loud engine, the feel of the road etc., but personally I will indeed celebrate the day, all those loud polluting machines are gone from the cities and one other bright day also from the mountains.
But I am not sure if I will see that day, as cars have allmost a religious meaning to quite some people, especially here in germany, but not only here. But yes, the bigger problem in the short run will be economics. Otherwise all the old cars just will get sold to africa and go on running there. But china is mass producing cheap electric cars for example, so things are scaling up.
So what you're proposing is basically "Let's make using cars (even more than it already is) something for the rich only!"
Well lets stop calling this the reason for unbanning until EVs get cheaper, faster and longer running.
I mean, sure, some people are like that, but we won't know how many there are until EVs are cheaper, faster and longer running. Painting the opposition to ICE bans as "they will argue the same even when EVs are cheaper, faster and longer running" is irrational.
It becomes increasingly certain that we won't need as much lithium as the fossil lobby would like us to believe.
> https://www.electrive.com/2023/04/21/catl-and-byd-to-use-sod...
The reality of these bans is that exception after exception is tacked on for a long time.
One of the cool things about this type of political maneuver is that it's a bit like the Fed Put. You can get the market to move in the direction you want without actually shooting your bazooka. Just by saying your thinking about banning ICE cars - you're going to get manufacturers and sellers preparing for that and shifting over as much sales as they can to non-ICE cars.
I don't need launch control, giant screens, self drive etc. just a basic EV under $30K with standard dash gauges.
Wow, that's amazing, creeping up towards the energy density of gasoline at around 1200 Wh/kg
Of course you don't have to lug around the spent gasoline after you've used it, but that's really the problem too innit?
it's not nitpicking, electricity production has a cost. It's just a different cycle of production / pollution.
It's still a problem, but batteries can already do a lot of heavy lifting (and pulling).
lead acid 123 Wh/kg
lithium ion 250 Wh/kg
zinc-oxygen 1,084 Wh/kg
sodium-oxygen 1,605 Wh/kg
lithium-sulfur 2,600 Wh/kg
magnesium-oxygen 6,800 Wh/kg
aluminium-oxygen 8,100 Wh/kg
lithium-air 11,140 Wh/kg
gasoline 12,700 Wh/kg
Bumping the energy density closer to something like lithium-sulfur would probably make 95% of ICE-based technology scrap heap tech.
[1] 2017, Yanguang Li, Jun Lu, Metal–Air Batteries: Will They Be the Future Electrochemical Energy Storage Device of Choice? https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00119 Betteridge's law of headlines answers "no", but good overview.
[2] https://formenergy.com/west-virginia-governor-jim-justice-an...
They tend to get heavier as they discharge. They usually aren't rechargeable (or if they are, only a few times or with much lower energy densities). They tend to self-discharge within a few weeks of non-use.
EDIT: this is for nuclear fuel enriched to 3% in a normal (not breeder) reactor 35000 MJ per 10g pellet https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-density.html Only a tiny fraction of the total energy is actually used
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=100kwh%2F%282.5+gwh%2Fk...
That'll make the numbers ... a bit different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPHS-RTG
You'd need about 3 metric tons of them to power one Model 3 cruising at highway speed (assuming ~16 kilowatts continuous power draw).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery
[2] https://www.cei.washington.edu/education/science-of-solar/ba...
[3] https://thedriven.io/2023/04/03/scientists-hail-new-battery-...
IIRC, EV motors are 90% efficient with battery power --> road power conversion. A typical ICE engine is, what, 30% efficient and maybe a bit more with good turbo design. So practically gasoline is about 4000 Wh/kg?
Aren't you missing a 0 there? Gasonline should be at 12 kWh/kg instead of 1.2.
[1] https://chemistry.beloit.edu/edetc/SlideShow/slides/energy/d...
This has a lot of potential coming from CATL. However, there is no mention of price. I'm betting this is going to be very expensive.
At least these guys are announcing production.
News articles on breakthrough discoveries are mostly bullshit and even when they aren't, most of the time they don't affect my life in the slightest because the tech is impractical or expensive.
It may be interesting to read about science discoveries, but I don't want to take the time to sort out the bullshit from what's real just to find out that the breakthrough is irrelevant to me and society at large.
i like these sorts of stories because they have prepared me a bit for some of amazing technology changes i have seen over past decades. by the time i can by an iphone i was at least expecting it. when email hacking stories started appearing in politics, i already knew the details. the first time i bought an electric car was not the first time i had thought about the issues of range and charge speed and so on.
surely not everything that looks promising becomes popular, but that is also useful information, to me, a person whose job is building/helping to build novel systems.
(This is especially frustrating on the EV conversion front, since the best parts are usually unobtainable except from salvage vehicles. The products specifically made for EV conversion are usually rather underwhelming compared to what the OEMs can get.)
[brackets mine]
But the best batteries contain unacceptably high levels of cobalt. Practical EV batteries are made with nickel or iron, maybe vanadium someday, and have lower density than pure LiCoO2.
>CATL is already producing a ton of batteries, lending them some credibility.
A couple of years ago CATL claimed that they had figured out how to make durable sodium-ion batteries with a ferricyanide cathode, to be released in 2023. The press cheered about the end of lithium dependence.
Yesterday, not long before this announcement, it was revealed that CATL's "sodium-ion" battery contains lithium:
https://cnevpost.com/2023/04/20/catl-byd-sodium-ion-batterie...
"CATL and BYD's sodium-ion batteries to be put into mass production will both be a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries, according to local media."
[sad trombone noises]
And nothing wrong with having some lithium in their battery. The important thing is how much cheaper is it.
> CATL and BYD's sodium-ion batteries will both be carried in mass-produced vehicles within the year, and they [the vehicle battery packs] will both be a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries, according to a report by local media 36kr today.
By my reading of that, and the rest of the article, it's saying that the vehicle battery will be assembled from of a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion battery cells, not that the sodium-ion cells contain lithium.
> With its pioneering AB battery system integration technology, CATL has achieved a mix of sodium ion and lithium ion, allowing them to complement each other and thus increase the energy density of the battery system, Huang said at the time.
Basically, a "battery system" using only sodium-ion cells does not yet have enough energy density to support their range targets, so they are using a mix of cell types to improve the energy density and increase the vehicle range.
Your car may not need this as much, an aircraft does.
Fuel is one of the highest costs for an airline, so eliminating the majority of that will make the demand for any viable options go bananas, even with a much higher upfront cost.
Being seen as 'green' is a big bonus for the airline.
God such a tantalizing solar punk dream. I would love just to hear the inside of an electric commercial airliner at altitude.
More like kids watching movies without headphones, over loud conversations and screaming babies if other public transport is anything to go by.
But we can dream!
Anyway, mass transit does not have to be noisy. It varies by custom and culture.
Energy density of the fuel: 9.6kWh/L
900 flights per day = one flight every 96 seconds
26024.706L per flight
Total energy per flight: 9.6 x 26024.706kWh = 250MWh give or take = 900GJ
Total power supplied from Gatwick in the form of aviation fuel: 900GJ/96s = 9.375GW.
That's not only outside the range of SMRs, it's bigger than any single nuclear power station that's been built, by a comfortable margin.
To make electric flight work you can't think in terms of the way the current industry is structured because it's so distorted by the energy density of the current fuel.
Thinking in terms of disruption (from the innovator sense), their top 3 destinations [0] are Dublin, Barcelona and Malaga. Skipping barcelona becauese it's as busy, I don't think it's out of reach to consider that a 737 could do a return trip to dublin or Malaga without charging.
Another perspective is that taking off is significantly more energy intensive than cruising. According to [1], takeoff is equivalent to an hour of cruising. One way of looking at this is it only makes sense for mid haul travel instead. If we replaced transatlantic flights, or similar (us to Europe maybe) the savings would be immense and significantly more achievable
[0] https://www.gatwickairport.com/business-community/about-gatw...
[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/47262/how-much-....
The way you'd have to do it is something like the Tesla approach: put small charging stations for luxury planes in as many airports as possible (because nobody, but nobody, will fly a plane into an airport they can't fly out of), and build out from there. That way you can do something financially interesting at SMR scale, and build momentum for the next step on something marketed as aspirational. Because the hardest SMR to build will be the first. Once you've got one, installing a second should be an easy sell. And two leads to four, and so on and so forth.
This is, of course, making the further assumption that something can be done about charging times. Getting 90GJ into a 737 currently takes about 23 minutes. That's 65MW, which is a nontrivial problem to solve all on its own; anything that slows down the recharge means longer queues to turn around, which, one way or another, means more land area or fewer flights for the airport, and worse economics for the operator.
Jet engines are 35% efficient, I'd assume electric planes would be double that, does that change the calculation? Naively I'd say we 'only' need 4.5GW?
I thought I must have slipped a power of 10 too somewhere but if I did I can't spot it.
Between that and the efficiency difference mentioned elsewhere I think that explains about an order of magnitude. I'm totally willing to accept they'd need a 1GW power station to power Gatwick but 9GW seems high.
EDIT: unless, of course, you have removable batteries that let you carry less weight for a shorter flight. That might be the only way to make this practical, and would have some other benefits: you could charge them off-site, for instance. It creates a hell of a logistics problem, but no bigger than liquid fuel.
I don't know that it would actually save anything though. Aircraft of carriers are held back while they throttle the engine to full throttle. Only after the pilot is convinced the engine will run long enough to take off do they release the brakes - probably using more fuel than a regular takeoff. (the other option is to get in the air and then discover the engine isn't running and so you crash land a few meters later). I'd want a real aircraft engineer to speak to this.
The carrier example is wrong, the planes stay on the catapult only a few seconds while they go full throttle (this takes time), even with the burn rate it is not a significant quantity of fuel. Regular planes can do the same on the runway, I did it myself several times for fun, but it rarely bring benefits - the only place where it helps is with very short runways. In any case, the fuel consumption is not significant.
I don't have the numbers for a jet fighter on a carrier, but I think it is in the same range. The takeoff assist is not for saving fuel, but to allow takeoff at the loadout of the plane that would require otherwise a longer runway or lighter loadout (less fuel and weapons).
Obviously jet fuel is what it is it wont get more dense but a more efficient engine means less fuel needed means even more efficiency and so on.
This allows the plane to land at Brisbane and refuel if the calculations are done wrong. Couldn't find stats on how many times it's had to land in BNE.
Pre-COVID, it was apparently common to try and off-load passengers to single stopover flights to reduce fuel needs (I was one of those passengers, and the crew confirmed it was a regular occurance).
An example is Singapore Airlines' former New York to Singapore flight, which could carry only 100 passengers (all business class) on the 10,300-mile (16,600 km) flight. According to an industry analyst, "It [was] pretty much a fuel tanker in the air."
Is it math errors, or uncertainty about exact weight of cargo and passengers, or wind conditions different from predicted, or something else?
You might also run into some weather you didn't have to plan for and that changes the prevailing winds at the altitude you were previously cruising at or causes you to divert to fly around it.
A normal diesel fueled sedan such as the Chevy Cruze diesel runs at about 31mpg, which is 13.2 km/l or 15.3 km/kg. Diesel has a mind-boggling 12700 Wh/kg energy density[1], which translates to an efficiency of ~827 Wh/km for the Chevy.
By contrast, the Tesla Model S, has a ~540 kg battery[2]. At 272 Wh/kg (from the posted article), that's ~147 kWh of energy storage, and the Tesla can do a rated 650km on a single charge[3]. So that's an efficiency of ~225 Wh/km, which is ~27% of the energy required to run a normal car!
It just wouldn't have been possible to run cars on batteries without this efficiency bump.
1. https://chemistry.beloit.edu/edetc/SlideShow/slides/energy/d...
What is also missing here is that it takes 20-30% of energy to refine diesel or gasoline plus there is oil extraction cost. Accounting for that electrical car produces less CO2 when electricity comes from a modern coal plant than a diesel car.
Electric motors are very efficient, regenerative braking helps, EVs are designed to be super aerodynamic, etc.
Particularly German made ones, for some reason.
I guess if you care about panels gap and not performance, go ahead and get a Brokeswagon?
I will, and "Brokeswagon" marks you as a Tesla-Musk tech-bro from a mile away...
I do wish my Model 3 LR would actually go 358 miles on a charge, that's for sure, but it would have to get even lower Wh/mi than Tesla claims on the Monroney sticker. I suppose that's not the most egregious lie on Tesla's web site, however.
The 3 and Y is even more efficient, mostly due to size. But it has a smaller battery, I can get about 69 kWh out of my AWD 3 after losses and it hovers around 170-180 Wh/km at 120 km/h and 130-140 at 90.
At no point was it ever illegal do display the old units. There were no martyrs; there were only idiots.
(Quite normally for my age in the UK I think, I'm familiar with both metric & Imperial measurements, but generally fairly bad at converting. Except I know 568ml = 1 (UK! Not US!) pint - for which I can thank my alma mater Imperial and its student bars: Metric, and FiveSixEight. I could probably guess effectively at lbs and kg from butter/flour. Of course I know 2.54cm = 1". A yard is 'a bit' less than 1m. It's the bigger ones that seem more obscure/are harder to work out from familiarity I suppose.)
1. I think with liters, people typically reverse the relationship so it's liters/100km. Which is a much more intuitive unit.
2. If you're buying gas in liters, I think it'd be a lot easier to switch over to using liters for efficiency. You may not be able to compare easily to other vehicles, but you'd be able to estimate your personal fuel more easily.
I think it's the other way around. Distance per quantity of fuel is the intuitive measurement that humans understand and can relate directly to how much fuel they purchase. It could be argued that it is less intuitive when comparing two cars, however. Although better MPG is still strictly better, which is about the level of detail most non-nerds care about.
Only since the 1958 International Yard and Pound Agreement tho. Before then the US used what is now known as the Survey Mile, which is why the survey mile exists (and survived until this year).
In the United States and some other countries, a gallon is equal to 128 fluid ounces or 3.785 liters. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth countries, a gallon is equal to 160 fluid ounces or 4.546 liters.
But wait there’s more! The US also has the “food labelling” fluid ounce which is not the customary one, instead it’s exactly 30mL.
I mean, there are a million things, that do not need universal standards, but standards are imposed anyway.
But where one standard would be really helpful, like scientific values, we have many. And some people would rather go to prison, than adopt. (I think that happened in the UK, after they force switched to metric)
1 ft = exactly 30.48 cm; One pound is exactly 0.45359237 kilograms as in 0.453592370000000000… kilograms.
Well, my 12 years old (gas) Honda Fit does +40MPG being very "pedal happy" and near 50 driving normally, and my dad's 20 years old (diesel) Citroen Xsara Picasso does around 60MPG
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform...
3.9l/100km in a Xsara, really?
https://www.advantagebmwhouston.com/2022-bmw-3-series-fuel-e...
My diesel 3 series (2.9 litre, late 90s design) would get 8.83 L/100 km (32 mpg UK, 26 mpg US) driving round town, stopping at traffic lights and averaging <20 mph and never getting past 3rd gear. This didn't require much care, just a question of not trying to accelerate too hard at low RPMs or doing a 0-60 run from every stop.
Engine technology will presumably have moved on in the past 25 years, and efficiency will have improved, but you'll still get crappy fuel economy for stopping and starting all the time.
Very few people check the facts, and the only reliable way to know yourself is to take notes at the pump: gas pumped vs km travelled. I did check for a while and the numbers were quite different :-)
On a related note, for the VW ID.4, the manufacturer states 17kWh/100km which is actually achievable (much to my surprise) in city driving when it isn't cold. My real numbers are closer to 21kWh/100km. This goes up really quickly if you exceed 130km/h.
So when you look at the headline "efficiency" of an electric car, you need to take that thermodynamic penalty into account first.
A modern series hybrid like a Toyota Prius is effectively an electric vehicle and a gas generator (which means it has the same efficiency gains due to regenerative braking). That gets 52 mpg, which is about 493 Wh/km. If you generated the 225 Wh the Tesla needs in even the most efficient combined cycle gas turbine powerplant you'd need 375 Wh. Less - but not nearly as drastic as it first seems.
Renewables change the picture though - once you have significant renewable generation the carbon intensity of electricity starts dropping, which means that remote powerplant vs local powerplant argument falls apart. That is when the real power of electric vehicles kicks in - they can take their energy from anywhere.
Yes it usually is
I fell down a rabbit hole and found this link, which gives 46% for the theoretical limit for the efficiency of the internal combustion engine.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98966/maximum-th...
[1]: https://engineerine.com/meet-wartsila-31-worlds-most-efficie...
I don’t get your point on centralization however - more efficient but less robust (just like in software).
Wait, does a new prius or something like a hyundai ioniq (also 52-53 mpg) not have the internal combustion engine mechanically coupled to the transmission and drive wheels anymore?
I really like this setup, because it gives economy, but also a range and I don't need to worry about where to charge the car.
I also take issue with anyone calling a hybrid 'effectively an electric vehicle.' That is only true for PHEVs. A regular hybrid still gets exactly 100% of it's energy from gasoline.
While ICE are heat engines with a theoretical limit of 70%, they’re more specialised subsets described by the Otto (gas) and Diesel (… diesel) cycles, which have a much lower theoretical maximum.
Just plugging the temperature ranges into Carnot will give you a Carnot limit of 50%, and using Otto will yield 46% (https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/98992).
Add in that gas engines are not spherical and into a vacuum (losses and delays) and you’re in the 30s.
Once you get to cruising speed the transmission usually engages something called a "lockup" that bypass all that to get as close to the 100% number for energy transfer as possible.
Anything that doesn't require charging directly from the grid all the time, because although parts of the USA and Norway are ready for that, it's very tricky to get right globally.
Maybe hybrids like the Prius get to be so efficient that such cars will have a truly negligible impact on global warming.
You can use a smaller battery, which means using less rare materials that are very expensive. There are a lot of indirect emissions with electric vehicles, and it's important to look at the big picture.
It's an argument pushed by fossil fuel company's because it pretends the world is static and unchanging, as though the energy mix of the electrical grid can't vary, or that changes in fuel source and process for mining operations to be cleaner wouldn't drastically effect downstream users overall emissions profile.
CO₂ -> C + O₂
2 H₂O -> 2 H₂ + O₂
C + 2 H₂ -> CH₄ (methane)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
You're just going to throw that out there? You'll cite the Fischer-Tropsch process, but not "actually global temperatures are declining"?
Here[1]. The temperature hasn't gone down. The narrative hasn't changed from global warming because of this (the term was in fact dropped because people are idiots and trying to explain what global temperature is measuring in terms of energy dynamics in the climate system doesn't work...). 2022 was the 6th warmest year on record, and based on all data the overall trend is up.
[1] https://www.noaa.gov/news/2022-was-worlds-6th-warmest-year-o...
May I suggest a less belligerent/dogmatic attitude when discussing this subject? If the narrative holds it won't change the conclusion. If new data shows the narrative to be false or misleading - e.g. ice core records show the atmospheric CO₂ concentration to lag behind temperature changes, not lead them, climate sensitivity wrt. CO₂ concentration is low, feedback mechanisms are unclear, there are far too many fudge factors in the climate models to make them reliable sources - it will be much easier to adapt to the new situation. We're not talking religious dogma after all but scientific theory, that which can and should be discussed lest it turns into the former.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
[2] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-ear...
[3] https://climate.nasa.gov/global-warming-vs-climate-change/
Running the denialist playbook as usual: slip in a insinuation that the issue has stopped without evidence, then drop a bunch of articles which don't support it while continuing to say "what if all the data supported me?" And then started alluding to a conspiracy with language choices like "dogma". Throw in some upfront tone policing because heaven forbid you have to defend your position vigorously and the recipe is complete.
Go on: hit me with "climate cycles are natural" and then lean into how the media just don't talk about the controversy.
Please refrain from using terms like denialist, it does nothing to help the discourse. Also, that 'bunch of articles' I sent does support what I said, this being a break in the rising temperature trend. You seem to want to hear much more in what was said, why is that?
As to the 'conspiracy with language choices' I think you realise that this is no conspiracy but a simple fact - what used to be called 'global warming' is now called 'climate change'.
As to 'tone policing' I'd suggest reading your posts I replied to.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene#/media/File:Holocene_...
When one party wins by default, they benefit from stalemate-seeking tactics. "Just Asking Questions" unfortunately works very well for this purpose. Dogma poisons the discourse, yes, but so does accidentally extending good faith to a bottomless well of bad faith questions, which has been the conservative playbook on climate change since forever. The counter-strategy is dogma.
In order to have a scientific discussion rather than a political discussion, we need to know your intentions, and that's extremely difficult on a pseudoanonymous internet forum. It sucks, but this is probably how it has to be.
The truth, freed from ideology. This will be hard to achieve given the enormous amounts of money involved on all sides - from "green new deals" via trillions of € in subsidies to even larger amounts of money on the fossil-fuel-status-quo side. With politicians who have made their careers on either portraying themselves as apostles of Gaia or ensuring the continuous flow of oil, gas and coal - and thus the continuation of an industry which more or less defined whole US states and several countries.
Just because it is hard - and probably impossible - to get the actual truth does not mean I want or need to cave and just follow one of the narratives. Given enough people looking for the actual truth it may become possible to reach it and act upon it but it better be sooner rather than later.
What is your purpose in asking such leading questions by the way? Do you agree that an actual scientific discussion - as opposed to one directed by The Science™ - is the better course? Also, who are the we who would like to know? I speak for myself, not for others. Who do you speak for?
The IPCC reports are one google away.
When you're done reading at least the abstracts in the IPCC reports - but it is worth the time to read the actual reports themselves - you can also read a few other sources, e.g. Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Björn Lomborg's False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet and Steve Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. These give a far better view over what climate change entails and how it can be dealt with than the breathless fear-mongering as seen in the media and as spouted by politicians.
It's a much longer trend than 2012-2016. I remember 2011, the last time conservatives were playing the "global warming has paused" game, but then oops! It returned to trend. No Ls were acknowledged, of course.
What do the radiative flux measurements say this time around? They measure the derivative directly and are upstream of the most chaotic mixing process. Last time they said "sorry, heat is still piling up, globe's still warming." They were correct. What do they say this time?
2012-2016 is not the period of warming, it is the period from which the warming trend changed into a cooling trend. Seen over the last century the warming trend is far longer, the most recent one starting somewhere in the beginning of the 70's until the mentioned 2012-2016 frame. After that a slight cooling period followed, taking down the temperature by 0.06°C/yr until 2022. 2022 was another warm year so if 2023 will be warm as well the cooling trend is most likely broken. These sort-time variations are not significant when discussing 'climate' - roughly defined as 'the weather trends over at least a 30 yr stretch' - but they do control what makes the news.
One question: why do you state is is ´conservatives' who claim that the warming trend was broken? You don't know whether those people were conservatives nor do I. It does not make sense - and is extremely counterproductive - to equate a person's stance on single issues like 'climate change' with their political affiliation since these issues should not in any way be connected to political ideology. If they are connected they are by definition suspect since ideology trumps objective reasoning. Either the climate changes - and it does, no question there - or it does not, independent on whether you or I vote for whatever party we choose. Allowing ideology to taint the discussion just turns off a large part of the populace no matter which ideology it happens to be. It is just plain stupid for climate change to be a 'progressive' cause, crime reduction to be a 'conservative' cause, etc. These issues should be pulled out of the ideological realm so that they can be discussed by everyone without accusations of -isms by 'either' side.
<compose> + _ + [0-9]
superscript: ^ + [0-9]
O⁰… O⁹
The long-winded way is to use your OS's character map tool: find the glyph you want there and copy+paste. Under Windows 10+ there is the emoji keyboard (hit [win]+;) which also gives access to much more including super-/sub- script characters, which is a little more convenient than character map. Presumably other OSs have similar available too.
Better is to have support for a compose key sequence. Usually build in to Linux & similar, you just might have to find the setting to turn it on and configure what your compose key is. Under Windows I use http://wincompose.info/ and there are a couple of similar tools out there. In any case it is useful for more than super- and sub-scripts: accented characters & similar (áàäæçffñ), some fractions (¼,½,¾), other symbols (°∞™®↑↓←→‽¡¿⸘♥⋘»‱), and configurable too so you can make what you use most easiest to access (and if you are really sad like me you can do something https://xkcd.com/2583/ to type hallelujah too!).
On mobile devices a fair few “special” characters are usually available (though it depends what keyboard you have installed) via long-press on the right keys of the virtual keyboard.
Imagine you were tight on money and then think about your grocery store bill. Wouldn't you try to save in all categories, even though, say meat, was "only" 11.9% of your total bill?
Carbon reductions need to be made in every sector.
I looked at the link and to me transportation does indeed seem one of the larger sources of emissions. Everything else seems either very fragmented (lots of entries with around 2%) or similarly if not more complex - like energy use in buildings for all of the appliances.
What am I missing here, what would be easier to address than the abundance and types of cars and possibly the lack of proper public transportation?
I don't think that one can even make the argument that we should look for easy wins when change is necessary everywhere, unless we want climate catastrophe - because of people working against improvements due to their personal interests, inefficiencies in regulation and enforcement, as well as any number of other factors.
The second reason is that hydrogen is 1/10th the density of diesel even when liquid (which is as dense as it gets). Maintaining hydrogen in its liquid form is energy intensive. Hydrogen tends to leak through the smallest cracks and also because the atoms are so small tends to leak even through solid metal. To sustain the high pressures and degradation by hydrogen you need a very expensive tanks. You also need to handle the case, when the car crashes/ catches fire releasing all of the hydrogen somewhat safely. This tends to be a 6 MW flame upward of the car. Too bad if it crashed under a bridge or garage. This is much worse than a burning ICE/ BEV car.
Hydrogen gas stations have all of the problems with the tanks as well. That makes them very expensive. Battery charging stations are somewhat easier - everywhere you have higher voltage you can build a decent charging station. Big parking lots can have solar roofs fulfilling a part of the charging demand and keeping the cars colder in the summer.
At the same time you don't have any of the advantages of batteries - such as that you can charge them almost everywhere or when breaking. Hydrogen cars would need to be hybrids basically to improve on these, in this regard they are more similar to classical ICE cars.
Finally, making hydrogen ecologically and economically is not that easy in big quantities. In the end, you realize it is means to a longer operation of the infrastructure of classical fossil fuel companies. Unrelated to cars, you can put some hydrogen (up to about 8% it seems) into natural gas without noticeable change in properties when used for heating. But you can probably slap a green or at least "blue" stamp on the solution. In the end, all of this is just as damaging as the production/ burning of bio diesel/ gasoline spiked with ethanol. Putting hydrogen into cars would just make support this fossil fuel agenda without actually helping the environment much and quite possibly enable decades of even more damage to the environment and public health with profits mostly for just a few already filthy rich people.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Can-I-create-a-Hydrogen-fuel-cell-with...
It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
The best I found was this:
https://www.speakev.com/threads/energy-required-to-refine-oi...
Does anyone have better numbers?
https://sustainability.equinor.com/climate-tables
The headline figure is maybe to compare 11.4 mill. tonnes CO2e emissions from "Scope 1 + Scope 2" (direct emissions from the company plus indirect emissions because they buy electricity and stuff), versus 243 mill. tonnes CO2e from Scope 3 (emissions from people burning the hydrocarbons sold).
If that figure is correct, you can add 1.6 percent to the car tailpipe emissions figures to account for production and refining etc.
But this is an oil & gas company that tries very hard and is among the best in the world for minimising emissions from production and refining. I would not be surprised if gasoline from US shale oil is more than an order of magnitude worse.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Whereas if you compare CO2 emissions, you can do these things and in theory get down to zero emissions from production and refining of gasoline.
Damn, I've never thought about that before. In hindsight that feels like an obvious thing to consider but this is the first time I'm aware of that thought entering my brain. Thank you for provoking the thought.
What would be the equivalent consideration on the other side? Would it be something like inquiring into the energy requirements of creating and maintaining the electrical grid, especially given the increased load of wide-scale vehicle electrification, instead of assuming we get that for free?
Anyway maintaining a more robust grid should be much cheaper than maintaining thousands of gas stations and the trucking routes used to keep them filled up.
ChatGPT summary:
In 2019, the world seaborne trade volume reached about 11.08 billion tons. Out of this, crude oil, oil products, and gas accounted for approximately 32.5% (3.6 billion tons) of the total volume. Coal made up another 8.4% (935 million tons). In total, energy products represented around 40.9% of the global seaborne trade volume.
It's important to note that these figures are from 2019, and the percentages may have changed since then due to various factors, including evolving global energy markets, fluctuations in demand, and the transition to renewable energy sources. The percentage may also vary depending on how you define "energy products."
Sources: https://unctad.org/webflyer/review-maritime-transport-2020
But yeah, no one then goes on to give equivalent numbers for petroleum.
Not to mention the socialized costs of all the wars, military spending and human lives spent to secure stable sources of fossil fuels. If you actually break down the numbers and applied some basic ethics, I doubt fossil fuels have been cost competitive for decades.
<snark, i'm totally against military aggression>
It's almost as if they want an excuse for running a massive military.
It's not like renewable energy doesn't take resources/energy to produce as well. It's just borderline impossible to get real numbers because you'd pretty much need perfect information on the supply chains.
Not saying that renewables don't still win in such a comparison.
There must be small impact of that as well to the CO2 calculations.
If your car gets 30 mpg, has a 16 gallon tank (that you refill at 1/4 tank, so you're buying 12 gallons), and you drive an extra 5 miles to pay $3.93/gallon instead of $4.00/gallon, how much did you really save?
I'll give you a hint: It's less than a nickel.
Meanwhile, you've probably driven at least 10 minutes that you didn't need to drive. 10 minutes to save a few pennies.
The math only gets worse as the gas prices go up and your fuel economy goes down. You need a greater delta to make the drive worth it.
Siting a gasoline station is highly strategic. They know exactly where to put them and how much to charge on the real estate and vendor sides.
On the way to the charging station, we probably pass a dozen gas stations.
I love my EV but let's not pretend it's always more convenient. If you have the opportunity to charge at home/work then yes it's great, but you're still reliant on public charging infrastructure if you decide to drive outside your normal range, and it takes a lot longer to charge than it takes to fill up a tank of gas, even considering the speed of Tesla Superchargers.
(1) Alberta tar sands production, which relies on imports of natural gas to melt and process the tar sand into a crude oil equivalent, called syncrude. If the syncrude is shipped to San Francisco Bay for refining at Chevron's Richmond Refinery, then you have to tag on the shipping fuel used, the gas used in the refinery, and finally the tanker fuel used to move the fuel to a gas station in San Francisco. Finding all these numbers is not easy, it's often proprietary, but you can find that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries (bulk numbers):
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_capfuel_dcu_nus_a.htm
(2) Sweet light crude from a pressurized reservoir that's refined a few miles away from the oil field and used in a nearby city.
The end-product, refined gasoline, has the same state property (energy density) regardless of how it was manufactured, but that's irrelevant for getting the energy that it cost to make it. I imagine the spread can be pretty wide indeed, as the above examples show.
Generation can be from clean sources and is already happening in some jurisdictions.
Even if a clean source is not available, the pollution can best be controlled at the source. In this period of history, hundreds of millions of people make billions of polluting trips every day in their communities.
Although owning any car is the poorest choice of all for the environment, there are two ecological benefits to driving a BEV or a PHEV.
* better efficiency than ICE
* zero emissions in the case of BEV, zero emissions *for most trips* in the case of PHEVYou mean thermal energy?
Both cars are converting chemical energy to kinetic. The theoretical maximum for this is 100%. But one uses a thermal intermediate step, that reduces that maximum.
How close/far would you say we are as a society on "having significant renewable generation"?
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960
They're still pretty close to each other right now. Renewables are at 21%, coal 20%, nuclear 19%. However, nuclear is flat and coal is declining. Renewables are still growing rapidly and will widen their lead significantly in a few more years. See the first embedded chart in the article, showing output trends since 2010. Also see the short term forecast at the end of the article:
"In our March Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast the wind share of the U.S. generation mix will increase from 11% last year to 12% this year. We forecast that the solar share will grow to 5% in 2023, up from 4% last year. The natural gas share of generation is forecast to remain unchanged from last year (39%); the coal share of generation is forecast to decline from 20% last year to 17% in 2023."
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_sta...
Just to expound on this. Power stations turn fuel to heat, and heat to electricity via steam turbines.
In ICE cars, that heat is the main loss of power. Whole systems in cars are built to get rid of that excess heat in the engine.
ICEs are most efficient under medium-low RPMs and high load. The electric motors can sustain low speed cruising, letting the engine shut off entirely if it wouldn't be well utilized, and also fill in for high torque demand to keep engine power output lower.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15341744/the-prince-of-pa...
Having said that, my 13-year-old normal sized diesel car does 60mpg in normal use.
Luckily, most people don't charge their teslas with coal power.
The problem is that at that point liquid hydrogen already spent 70% of the energy stored in it (80% efficiency of electrolysis * 40% liquefying efficiency) .
This of course doesn't include losses in transmission from the power station and in electricity production.
- AC converted to DC (with power factor correction, usually means AC stepped up 1st)
- DC converted back to AC (but higher voltage) and MUCH higher frequency
- AC transformed to lower AC voltage (still higher frequence)
- AC rectified to DC (filtered and stabilized), DC voltage lower
That's it. A pretty simple system.
That's not very good, my LPG car runs on average around 25km/l and around 30km/l on gas, albeit being a 10 years old model.
Modern diesel cars run on average at over 20km/l, the Citroen C3 does ~30km/l.
This is because you're not comparing the same things: going from thermal energy to mechanical energy has a much lower efficiency than going from electricity to mechanical energy. But that electricity has to come from somewhere, and most of the losses happen at the electricity generation place instead of in the car.
> It just wouldn't have been possible to run cars on batteries without this efficiency bump.
Electric motor have always been far more efficient than ICE ones, even in the 19th. In fact, the difference was even bigger, because combustion engine sucked hard back then, whereas electric engine didn't make as much progress as combustion engine ones (that doesn't mean that they didn't make progress, they did, but there's far less of a difference between an electric engine of 1920 and the one in a Tesla, than between an ICE engine then and now).
The difference is like the difference between carburetor engines and direct fuel injection.
And these are still more efficient than most combustion engines *today*, that's exactly my point.
Are American diesels this inefficient?? Looking at pictures online the Chevy cruze doesn't seem like a bigger/heavier car than a Passat, so what gives??
Although I completely forgot it existed. There are not many diesel passenger cars on US roads. Diesel is consistently more expensive than petrol here.
Even my 15 year old diesel car had an efficiency of 1/22. Adjust you driving style and I'd get 1/25. Range: 1000km, with an ordinary sized tank.
It seems Americans haven't even started with efficiency, quite likely because there was no pressure to do so due to low fuel prices. Not in their homes, not in their cars, not anywhere.
Do you realize that other brands and models exist in the USA? Do you realize Tesla is and American company? Did you even check look into Chevy Cruze's mileage? Here's a guy getting 70mpg in a Chevy Cruze by driving 55mph on the highway. That's 30km/l.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15341744/the-prince-of-pa...
It's not even the fact that most of those generalizations are factually false, it's mostly just that it leads to every. single. discussion circling back to be about the USA.
(It reminds me of the super patriotic american circlejerk on the internet a decade+ ago, that had tons of europe bashing/america exceptionalism. But with the sides reversed and the delusional misplaced self-praise mostly coming from Europeans.)
For diesel, this is really really bad. Most gasoline cars will run more economic than this, let alone diesel. If your diesel runs less then 17 to 18 km/l something is wrong.
(my opinion is based on how things are in .nl, other parts of the world can and will be different of course)
We should measure efficiency based on that number.
Still, your point stands.
The measurements outside North America are reciprocal, e.g. 7.7L/100km (which is awfully inefficient for a diesel, normally it should be around 5L)
So converting gallon to liter, and mile to kilometer is the wrong way to present it.
As for the efficiency in general - of course electric engines have a very high efficiency (in the 90s), unlikely diesel which can barely hit 35%.
Meanwhile, fairly common cycling parameters lead to well under 10 Wh/km at comfortable cruising speeds, and with things like velomobiles you kinda start around 5 Wh/km, and 3 Wh/km is possible without significantly compromising the practicality of the vehicle.
Sure, sure, lower speeds, lower cargo capacity, lower safety, &c. &c.
But it’s still a useful comparison to contemplate, especially when considering the nascent category Lightweight Electric Vehicles, which in its most interesting form isn’t far off “ebike minus pedals”. Cars are still pretty power-inefficient as a general concept.
On top of that, they have more efficient components. When you compare a model S to a lightweight Carbon Fiber BMW i3, with a much smaller pack, you’ll see that the modelS still squeezes out a higher mpgE rating.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=46207&...
It's better to use real world highway range which is 300 miles (482 km) in a Model S:
It would be slightly worse in colder climates. I wish car manufactures would allow for easy installation for range extenders in the front trunk. I'd be a great source of heat for the heat pump. Range anxiety would be gone. No carbon tax since it would be an aftermarket solution.
It seems Mazda MX-30 r-ev is the only thing you can buy.
Range anxiety is an affliction more common among those who do not drive an EV than those who do.
That is a tautology... "Those who weigh the downside more remain in the alternative option." What did you want to mean?
A lot of people with range anxiety probably use an EV with little to no impact in their driving habits other than plugging in when they get home. But they're so concerned with "what if's" that rarely ever come up in their lives. "But what if I suddenly need to drive across the country taking only back country roads and avoiding all highways across the furthest north roads in the coldest of winter?? Can't do that in an EV!"
The most common reactions I get to people asking about my EV are along the lines of "But how do you charge it? Don't you have to wait at public chargers all the time? It must be so challenging driving an EV with so many broken chargers all the time! You must have to wait so long all the time for all that charging, its so slow!" Which is quite strange, because the vast majority of charging sessions most EVs would probably experience are plugging in at their home entirely negating these concerns.
For a lot of those people asking me those questions (often friends and family), I know they'd be able to replace a car with an EV and have only positive impacts other than the costs of buying a new car (something they do on some schedule regularly). But the talking heads on the TV tell them EVs == slow, unreliable, expensive charging so clearly all EV owners must be dealing with largely unavailable, unreliable, expensive, slow charging all the time. When in reality I spend more time pumping gas in my ICE than I do waiting on my EV to charge, I've encountered more broken gas pumps than charging dispensers in the last year, and it costs me almost 10x less in energy cost than my ICE per mile.
All that extra energy ICE cars carry isn't actually being put to use very well. They don't have more powerful engines. They don't have more torque. They don't have more acceleration. And even their range isn't that much better. You can of course get models that take something like 100+ liters of petrol. But the per liter performance only gets worse if you do that (heavier cars are less efficient).
The reality is that yes, fuel is very energy dense but sadly most of that isn't transformed into motion when you use it. You are instead making lots of noise (vibrations) and heat. Both are actually bad for your car. So, you use most of the energy to wear out your car faster. The more powerful the car, the less efficient they are. And the faster they break down.
Earth's Lithium deposits.................. 88,000,000,000 Kilograms [2], [3]
@25% Viable for mining.................... 22,000,000,000 Kilograms [2], [3]
Tesla S battery weight.................... 540 Kilograms per car [4]
Lithium weight per Tesla S battery........ 63 Kilograms per battery [4]
Max Tesla S (global) production possible.. 349,206,349 units (See Edit below)
Number of automobiles running in the USA.. 102,000,000 units [1]
Number of automobiles running in the World 1,500,000,000 units [5]
So, even if we theoretically assume that the earth's entire known Li reserves are used for EV usage, we cannot replace more than 25% of the currently running cars in the world.
So, we have a bigger problem ahead of us (over the next decade) that will act as an opposing force against EV penetration and replacement of the IC engine.
Solutions possibly lie in exploring other battery chemistries while improving the efficiency of Li extraction.
Edit: As some of the comments below point out, the Li content in a Tesla Model S battery is approx. 63 Kg. That makes the Max Tesla S (production) possible to 349 million units. So, in theory, one could replace all IC engines in automobiles plying in the USA. That then leaves the rest of the world. So, the problem still remains.
[1]: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2021/m...
[2]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42417327/li...
[3]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
[4]: https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-weight
[5]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/the-number-of-cars-wo...
Remember peak oil, which was a big panic of some in the 2000s? It turns out that peak production didn't happen overall, but if you look at the original set of "known resources", the peak oil predictions were spot on. Yet we didn't experience huge oil supply shortages because huge expenditures into new fracking tech enables far more resources to be accessed.
We have always loved in a complete abundance of lithium, so we never bothered to look for more resources. Now that we need more, we will find it. It's not a particularly rare element.
A quick google returned this ~63KG
https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla....
I'm also going to say that all the car companies, battery companies, and governments in the world probably took six seconds to do basic math before investing trillions of dollars in it.
It doesn't, because that 88,000,000,000 is a lower bound amount of lithium on the planet not an upper bound.
If I count all the apples on the apple tree in my yard, I haven't counted all the apples on the planet. Only the applies I know about. There's probably still more apple trees out there!
That 88,000,000,000 figure also doesn't count any lithium in the oceans. Taking even a small fraction from there would make that 88,000,000,000 seem tiny.
More broadly, this is a class of complaint that you can't see every detail of path and the destination from the very beginning of the road. The solution to that isn't to stand around and complain about it, but _start moving towards the destination_.
Even if they couldn't, why would you limit your analysis to Li-based batteries? It's basic economics that when a resource becomes rarer, it becomes more costly and alternatives spring up. EVs with Sodium batteries are already on the market in China. This whole Lithium fear mongering is such a red herring.
> Solutions possibly lie in exploring other battery chemistries while improving the efficiency of Li extraction.
Emphasis added from your [3].
Ever think maybe your 88,000,000,000 Kilograms number isn't actually all the lithium on the planet, and maybe there's more undiscovered under the ground? Or do you think all the lithium on the planet was discovered in 2023, and now there won't be any more reserves found?
Strange how this maximum amount of lithium reserves keeps magically growing year over year over year over year. I wonder how it magically appears.
mpg = miles per gallon
Gasoline is rather energy dense, but the ICE is rather wasteful. There is a certain base load of energy being generated by an ICE engine, regardless of if you are moving or how slow you go. This is why carmakers experimented with things like rapid stop/start engines, regen batteries&motors, etc.
ICE becomes more efficient as you reach highway speeds, which is why highway mpg is better than city mpg.
Batteries by contrast are not very energy dense, while EV motors are extremely efficient. The only energy being consumed is that which is needed to move the car, plus fight rolling & wind resistance, and power AC/heat. Wind resistance increases with the square of speed.
EVs as a result are most efficient at low speed, and at highway speeds become noticeably less efficient as you go from 55->65->75mph. This is also why running AC/heat has a noticeable impact on range in EVs.
An ICE car traveling at a constant 30mph is going to get much better fuel economy than an ICE car traveling at a constant 75mph. The difference is that <=30mph roads usually have a lot of stop-and-go.
ICE peak efficiency tends to be more around 45mph than 30mph.
But yes, the less you brake in an ICE, the more efficient. Hybrids give you a bit of the ICE range/highway efficiency with the EV city driving efficiency, with the added complexity of having ICE & EV under one hood.
If we really cared about efficiency, we'd have smaller motors. Throttling decreases efficiency, so the best mileage is going to be cruising at WOT (naively assuming no fuel mixture enrichment, which isn't always true). A classic example of this strategy is an old Geo Metro. Light, tiny motor, and barely capable of maintaining highway speed using peak horsepower.
You can make an EV that is as fast as a Porsche but highway cruises like a Prius. It's up to the idiot behind the wheel if they prefer to go fast or go far.
I remember in high school my "fast for a regular car" Pontiac did 0-60 in about 7sec. This is achievable in a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt now. The most low price, vanilla and dated tech in EVs you can buy.
EV buyers will quibble about 0-60s in the 4 second range that aren't even sold as "performance". You used to have to buy a BMW of M designation to achieve these types of numbers in a 4 door sedan, and get the horrible MPG along with it.
The chunky hatchback crossover MachE GT Mustang EV is faster than an ICE Mustang Mach 1 which gets a mid-teens MPG..
Teslabjørn has a video where he turned his Model X into a sauna getting 40⁰C inside while it was -10⁰C outside.
But being in Northeast US with constant traffic.. I used to have to park outdoors so the car would get cold soaked down to 20F in winter, and never really have sufficient time to warm up unless I was going for a 1hr+ drive.
Winter driving local roads, below-25mph stop&go, 2-5mi trips running errands.. Could see some really crazy consumption numbers pop up like 500-800Wh/mi+ versus the rated 250Wh/mi. Now it doesn't necessarily amount to much because it's on short single-digit mile trips, but it does happen. This stacks with the general cold weather efficiency losses of EVs..
That's true. But I've never had anything like 800 Wh/mile in my Model S 70D not even pottering around at -20°C
Not a mark against EVs of course - it kind of just makes sense. I'm sure future generations will laugh that every vehicle used to have its own on-board power generation facility. It's too bad the dumb power-plant-under-hood way is still so much cheaper than the EV approach of course.
Porsche Taycan: 2 miles per kWh
Tesla Model 3: 5 miles per kWh
Lightyear Zero: 7 miles per kWh
Aptera: 10 miles per kWh
The Aptera gets 0 miles on a 0 kWh battery because they've shipped 0 cars, right? Can I go buy one and drive it today?
Sure, they failed in the past but they have the money now and they've certainly shown they won't give up.
Gets, as in present tense. A theoretical car made sometime in the future shouldn't use present tense terminology. No consumer on the road today is getting 1,000mi on a 100kWh battery in an Aptera. If Aptera manages to actually ship cars, then the word "gets" is accurate.
> What makes you think it won't get to market?
See:
> Sure, they failed in the past
Building cars has extremely high barriers to entry. Getting things approved costs tons of money. Spinning up factories is no small challenge. Actually making more than one or two cars is incredibly challenging. Meanwhile, in order to spread those costs out you'll hopefully want to make a lot of them otherwise a good chunk of your value proposition goes away as the costs for the car would quickly get out of hand.
Then comes the challenges of actually selling them at any volume. I legally can't buy one in my state if they don't create a franchise dealer network. Its hard to get shoppers to compare your vehicles if you don't have a way for them to actually buy the cars. Tesla manages because they spent a ton on "galleries", they were the only real EV option for a while, and have massive brand presence. Ask any random average car buyer if they've thought of buying an Tesla, and they'll probably have an opinion. Ask anyone if they've thought of buying an Aptera, and they'll probably have no clue what you're talking about.
If Aptera manages to actually make some cars, that's great! Even better if they manage to sell them for profit. Its good to have more competition. But I'm not holding my breath.
There are other approaches to Li-S (and Al-S and Mn-S) which will be less expensive. Grats to CATL for bringing this to market, but the race for sure isn't over yet.
It would weigh 1/3, not 1/3 less.
Get ready for passenger drones[0], delivery drones[1] and just drones in general, because this is what this breakthrough means really.
- cost?
- what new chemicals are involved and what is the environmental impact?
- how many cycles can the new battery take?
- volume? (density is always shown as weight/mass, it's not the only thing that matters)?
- how does it behave under environmental changes (temp / pressure / etc ...)The claims about new battery chemistry are rarely farfetched or inaccurate, but we as a society (and especially the reporters) don't do a good job of interpreting the claims, focusing on one promising sounding parameter and neglecting all others.
The manufacturers are also not helping by omitting this sort of critically important information that you have highlighted (lying by omission).
Seems like it would still annihilate the payload/range.
These batteries, if they deliver on the advertised specs and aren’t too expensive should make short-range electric aviation possible.
The electric air taxis that Joby and others are working on suddenly have a lot bigger margin to work with, as do electric regional airliners.
For the first years it will probably only be a few wierd, short routes in rich countries like Norway with 110% financial support from the state. But when they can safely fly 5-600km there is a actually quite a number of routes with a lot of passengers out there.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_ai...
(They actually planned to go all the way to 350MW, which could theoretically run a transatlantic passenger jet with 2,000 passengers, assuming it’s even possible to build such an airframe.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-specific_fuel_consumptio...
Where did you read that kerosene is at 3000Wh/kg? My googling says 12,000Wh/kg
The tweet thread from TFA and its replies just says that for aircraft, weight impact is important. See https://twitter.com/__bdimitrov__/status/1298753593638440960:
"260 to 400 Wh/kg should lengthen flight time by 90.8% --- assuming that 100% of the drone weight is from the battery."
But going from 400 to 500 Wh/kg adds another 39% on top of that, so 2.6x longer total
- 130 kW engine, Lycoming_O-360 that weighs 117 kg. For comparison, an electric motor of this range would weigh 11-13 kg (at 10-12 kW/kg, [2]). That saves 100+ kg weight immediately and we can put 50+ kWh batteries instead.
- It carries up to 200 liters of kerosene ([3]), which weighs 164 kg. We can place 82 kWh of batteries instead.
- The engine consumes around 30 liters/hour ([1]), which gives us ~6.7 hours of flight time or the equivalent of 6.7*130=871 kWh for an electric-power plane.
- The fuel tank weighs about ~14 kg (source: an LLM, sorry) and gives us another 7 kWh.
So, we can put 50+82+7=139 kWh. By using modern materials, we can probably increase it to ~180 kWh, which will give us about 1.5 hours of flight time / 300 km range. This is much less than 6.7 hours, but quite practical for recreation and short flights. And it would be much cheaper to run too.
That said, still not practical for medium and long flights.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_O-360
2. https://cleantechnica.com/2021/03/25/groundbreaking-h3x-moto...
3. https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/specifications?s...
I also think taking out the weight of the tank is unfair if you don’t add weight for the structures for holding the batteries.
But yes, for many smaller planes, we’re close to flying electric on shorter flights being economically feasible.
But the point that CATL makes with this announce is that before this capacity boost, electric planes were a complete joke. Now, they are only somewhat funny.
What I am more excited about is that electrically pumped rockets are now a lot more practical. As an example, Electron is such a rocket ([1]). It can now reduce the weight of the battery pack and increase payload.
Ha! Well put.
Silly as it sounds just thinking :)
Perfectly agree with everything, but 1.5hr may be very short if you need to have 30 minutes of reserve at landing. On the saving side, you don’t have to have an alternator to transform ICE energy into energy for the dashboard instruments. On the downside, you now need to heat the cabin manually, rather than reusing the ICE heat.
Interestingly, the Boeing 787 has already dispensed with bleed air. It uses compressors for heat and electric pumps for hydraulics.
Most modern airliners do not use bleed air for climate control in the cabin anymore.
Electric aircraft of the future will have half the drag or less. High aspect ratios, flush fairings, streamlined cockpits etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipistrel_Alpha_Trainer#Alpha_...
324 nmi range for the regular variant. Around 65 nmi for the electric version.
This is with older batteries, probably with very bad pack-level energy density. The battery pack can even be swapped. Great to avoid having to wait for charging, but probably terrible for weight.
If you design the aircraft for electric flight from the ground up (see Maxwell X-57 for how you could do that), with a structural battery pack, and with 300-500wh/kg batteries, I'm willing to bet a 2-5 times increase in range is viable.
But. Turbine engine is actually very reliable and doesn't need overhaul for 20,000 flight hours.
Recharging multiple airliners will take a nuclear reactor at the airport.
The challenge would be getting the right amount at the right time, like now with quick charging. Like there, you'd probably have buffer storage at the airport so that it consumes electricity when available (e.g. during the day from solar) and dispenses it to aircrafts when needed. Luckily, most airports in the world have nearly all take offs and landings during the day, so there's a big overlap. Dubai would be an example where likely all would come from solar but a lot is needed over night (if we ever get electric long-haul flights).
So overall I don't think that this would be the limiting factor. But I guess larger airliners are more likely to run on synthetic fuels than electricity for a long time. And I guess that's fine, we have a lot of areas where cheap and/or dense batteries can help us much more in the short term (grid storage, cars, trucks).
Those are pipe dreams :-)))
Solar recharging for electric cars is not realistic, let alone for electric planes.
Wind charger... maybe there's something there, but the fact that nobody has tried it probably means it's not good enough.
https://www.arenaev.com/why_solar_panels_on_cars_are_beyond_...
> So under optimal conditions the Hyundai solar roof would yield 280kWh *yearly*. In London you'd get 164kWh.
Wind charging is more of a pipe dream, but there's no reason a plane couldn't glide for a period of time to get some energy back, similar to regenerative breaking.
There have been experiments in both areas, and while it's certainly unfeasible today for any large aircraft, the technology and efficiency will only improve. It would be wrong to discard these as an impossibility.
And the energy they require for flying is an order of magnitude than that required to drive stuff on the ground.
Take off requires a lot of resources, but maintaining altitude and speed are likely minimal additional energy.
The extra weight and structural challenges imposed by solar panels on aircraft don't seem worth it. The math on (174 sqft) * ideal theoretical power (250 W /m2) yields an optimistic ideal 4000 Watts. A conservative 75% power usage of a 172 engine is around 100kW. 4% under ideal circumstances.
Solar and wind are in many areas a) only available during certain hours b) expensive.
To ensure you have a stable power cost, and stable power availability, you as a large consumer (In the EU) make PPA agreements with power producers for specific KW rates, for specific KWh amounts, for specific times. These are complicated agreements.
A few panels on some warehouses and hangers close to an airport could keep the lights and the A/C on in the terminal, but that's about it. No one is putting up wind turbines anywhere close to an airport.
You can also do this on regular flights just to save weight. It's SpaceX style reusability but on a commercial aviation scale.
As they scale production of these, hopefully they can get 20% additional improvements at the cell/pack level, reaching potential to replace the most common flights.
They don't make sense for general aviation planes that are usually a fifty year-old engine design that requires expensive overhauls and guzzles expensive fuel wrapped in a bit of aluminum.
This is simply not true with electrical planes. A mega watt hour of power is about 60-100$. And much cheaper than that with renewables. Not at retail prices of course. But if you consume power by the mwh, you'd be investing in your own generation (solar + storage) pretty soon. A mwh is about what you need to move a small electrical plane a few hundred miles. The kerosene cost for a similar journey in a small jet is going to be hundreds of dollars, even for a small jet. The smallest jets burn 50-100 gallons of fuel per hour (in cruise). Depending where you get your fuel, that ranges from 3-5$ per gallon. That's why small jets are only for rich people. Even a very short flight sets you back hundreds of dollars. A simple propeller plane is cheaper. But we're still talking 5-10 gallons per hour. That's why people talk about 100$ hamburgers. Because that's what it costs to take your tiny plane out to grab a burger somewhere.
Big big jets are a bit more economical with fuel than small ones. But they only makes sense if you can distribute fuel cost among many passengers.
With electrical, you can use lots of smaller planes cost effectively rather than having to put lots of people in a few bigger ones. For the same reason, you don't need big airports either. Or worry about pollution. And even the noise of small electrical planes is not as much of a problem. And with autonomous flight, we won't even need pilots long term. Small electrical planes are good enough and much nicer for passengers, more flexible to operate, etc.
Airliners have already moved away from the hub-and-spoke model to a point-to-point model where smaller narrowbodies fly direct from small airport to small airport (E.g. Southwest in the US). They do this specifically because of the increased efficiencies of smaller aircraft.
If you can further lower the per passanger cost of small planes, you can make smaller airports more viable, and fly point-to-point from more odd routes. Think Oxford, UK (OXF), to Gothenburg, Sweden (GSE).
The third expensive component is staffing. Pilots are expensive and for complex aircraft they need lots of training. So, simple electrical airplanes lower the training cost and make it easier to train and find new pilots. And complexity is also a reason you often need two pilots. Smaller/simpler airplanes can be one pilot operations. And of course replacing pilots entirely when these things become autonomous brings further cost savings. The flip side is that lots of small planes require more pilots.
Finally, big airports are expensive. You have to pay landing fees in lots of places. And service fees. And missing your assigned slot because of delays is expensive. That too goes away if you start flying from less busy/cheaper airports.
So, there a few additional savings here beyond fuel. But that is the biggest one.
IMHO this is going to be a repeat of the EV revolution a decade ago. But minus a lot of the emotional bickering about range anxiety, etc. Most planes are operated by for profit businesses. The second something cheap becomes available, they'll be all over it. In the same way using electrical vans vs. ice vans is not a topic of debate in the industry. You get the electrical van if you can. They are cheaper to operate. There's zero uncertainty on that front so you see essentially all large fleets transitioning to electrical vans as soon as they can get it done.
With electrical flight, a lot of this stuff is bottle necked on product development (happening), certification (starting to happen), and volume production (not happening yet). Better batteries increase the demand further. But without volume production, demand is not the issue. Supply is. This is and will be supply constrained for a long time.
Consider the Eviation Alice, one of the 9 passenger prototype electrical planes that is currently undergoing test flights (i.e. it definitely works). The advertised range is 250nm. Not amazing. But far enough for a lot of regional flights.
What would happen if you double the battery capacity without increasing the weight? You more than double that range. This is counter intuitive until you realize that you are not going to need more energy for taking off, or reserves. All that extra energy goes into extending cruise range. So you get more than 250nm extra. Basically, it's probably getting closer to 600nm. That's still not amazing but there are a lot of flights every day that are much shorter than that. All of those are now doable with electrical planes. At a fraction of the fuel cost.
Most flights are short haul. And they are, well, short. Which means, all of those are in scope for electrical planes. Small planes work well for these too. You don't have to cram hundreds of people in a plane if you eliminate fuel cost as a major cost factor. That's the only reason we do that. It's not like it's pleasant or comfortable. 20 ten passenger planes can do the work of one passenger jet. But it can do it more flexible and cover more destinations too.
Electrical planes are not about doing exactly the same things that we do with traditional planes but about doing a lot more than that. Basically, less noise, less pollution, less cost, means that a whole lot of flights that would be considered decadent and obscene right now become perfectly feasible and reasonable. A ten minute hop across town. Why not? Live 70 miles from your office? Not a problem, you commute there in under 15 minutes. For the price of a few cups of coffee.
Exactly. In the EU, Eurocontrol (European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation) says 30.6% of flights in 2020 were 0-500km, roughly within the range of the Eviation Alice currently. A further 43.6% of flights in the EU are between 500 and 1500km.
Source [1]
> You don't have to cram hundreds of people in a plane if you eliminate fuel cost as a major cost factor. That's the only reason we do that.
Not only. Gate capacity and runway capacity is an issue too. But that might also be easier to resolve with smaller electric planes. E.g. there's Liliums approach of vertical takeoff from little more than a helipad-sized platform, but even non VTOL planes capable of taking off from short runways would be helpful.
[1] https://www.eurocontrol.int/publication/eurocontrol-data-sna...
We may also see a return to more of a hub-and-spoke model. Fly from a smaller, local airport close to you. Fly to some hub near the half-way point, switch to a plane that takes you to a small airport close to your destination. If planes are smaller maybe security can be relaxed too. Total time spent travelling could be comparable to taking a direct flight with a large international airport further from your origin and destination. Then the aircraft doesn't need to be very long range.
OTOH, security costs and airport fees could be cut I guess?
That paper also sketches out the argument for electric flight at close to current battery densities rather than close to kerosene energy densities. It goes:
Jet fuel gets roughly 28% final efficiency while electric gets roughly 90%, so divide jet fuel by 3 to get 4,000 effective Wh/kg.
Alternate aerodynamic designs and especially distributed propulsion are much more achievable with electric engines. Imagine the difficulty of making a 14-, 24-, or even 36-turbine aircraft, yet all of those have been built and flown with electric engines already (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-57_Maxwell, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_XV-24_LightningStrike, and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilium_Jet respectively). Gains of 3-5x have been observed here and higher is predicted, the conservative mean is 4x, so divide again by 4 to get jet fuel to 1,000 effective Wh/kg.
That is getting close to current energy densities of batteries. You only need to find one more ~2x improvement that electric flight can obtain over jet fuel to bring it into the range of 500Wh/kg, which CATL is saying they have in production right now.
(Presumably Musk’s magic 400Wh/kg number involved another 2.5x improvement, though I don’t know where specifically he thought it would come from. The internet seems to think he said you can go higher because you don’t need oxidizer from the air to burn jet fuel, but that doesn’t sound right since you still need to push on the air with your fans and you’ll run out of that at high altitude before you run out of oxygen, so it must be coming from somewhere else. Regardless, the point is that jet fuel imposes design constraints that trap you in a local maximum of aircraft efficiency, and electric engines allow you to explore a wider space which may have much much higher maximums.)
90% likely doesn't include the efficieny of the prop?
Planes tend to be very expensive to operate, due to maintenance and fuel costs. Some people would be happy to trade range for dramatically lower operating costs.
[1] https://www.alexander-schleicher.de/en/flugzeuge/as-34-me/
[2] https://www.lange-aviation.com/antares-serie/antares-21e/
tl;dr for their small kit aircraft the weight of batteries they would need to match the stored energy of equivalent fuel (even with a battery at 500wh/kg) would be 5-10x heavier, and also not get lighter during the flight. They said for long range it doesn't make sense, but that there are lots of companies iterating in the short range electric space.
Still, an announcement from a big company like this is a lot more credible than from research labs or small start-ups, IMO.
However the prices seem to have come down a bit despite all the inflation since then.
Their main energy density boost is a silicone anode, which we've known "for ages" that it leads to higher energy density, but soaking it with lithium degrades the material very quickly, leading to cracks and thus damage after just a few charge cycles. The main innovation is some kind of nano-structuring of the anode, and that technique was published in the scientific literature in 2006.
I'm sure it was hyped as a battery break-through in 2006, and it has taken 17 years to get to market.
So, maybe we shouldn't go back 5 years, more like 20 years (OK, no HN back then :D).
Batteries do get better over time, fairly consistently so. The development lifecycle is just soooo much longer than in software.
The hybrid area is among us, and the technology used is so well thought out and advanced.
Hybrid as in “go incredibly fast”, and not “save gas” like as with a Prius.
Currently in F1 and the new prototype classes, they are using electrification in conjunction with the internal combustion engine to create more instantly available horsepower.
They are using twin turbo 6 cylinder engines, and anything that has large rotational mass has been electrified with motors. The turbos, crankshaft, and camshafts all have hybrid electric assist motors built into them to combat inertia. They then have incredibly engineered heat recovery systems built into the brakes and turbos. They collect the heat and convert it into electric to recharge the battery. Additionally, when the electric assist motors aren’t providing power to their components, their function is reversed and they become generators that also feed to the battery.
I don’t believe the streets have ever really even seen electric assist turbos and crankshafts lol. Ford only recently realized that you could make more fuel efficient and reliable power with less displacement using forced induction.
Pretty sure Ford and GM have an entire lineup of fuel efficient turbo cars out right now. Ford has the ecoboost engine line, so I’m confused on what data you are looking at?
The two technologies of electric and combustion are going to coexist with each other.
The rebirth of F1 into this new hybrid generation, as well as the new dPi hybrid prototype class will prove to you that Maxwells Equation is not close, and we breaking a new era of acceleration, braking, downforce, top speed, and fuel efficiency.
So if a hybrid engine that significantly increases ICE efficiency (already the case, F1 engines are 40% more efficient than normal cars) can become mainstream and be a better fit for particular use cases, it could extend the life of gasoline-powered vehicles for a while.
I think the reality is the ICE is a technology whose time has come. It’s overly complex and has to be close to optimal given the sheer time and energy spent perfecting it. The EV is far from optimality and it’s improvement rates will likely be staggering over the next 20 years. It’s ok. The ICE had its day, and it was cool. Now it’s time for flying drone cars.
The most advanced hybrid hypercar to hit the streets. Complete with the same MGU-MGK electric hybrid assist and energy recovery systems used in F1.
Edit: apparently they now have more airbags than motorcycles, as well as more roll cages and other safety features.
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Manufacturing and innovation is inherently intervened and the West's decision to outsource manufacturing has stagnated our ability to innovate in many fields.
The real problem is that many countries don't want to do innovation because it's expensive and/or they don't want to invest in the education necessary.
China is able to do China things because they produce an absolutely staggering number of STEM grads and have jobs for them to fill. Everything from high energy particle physics to industrial chemistry, if you have a hard science degree in China your employment is pretty much gauranteed. This is a self perpetuating cycle too because as you provide more and more STEM labour more and more innovation occurs which spawns new industry which employs more STEM labour, etc.
Conversely China is struggling with the opposite end of the scale where most Western countries excel at which is finding jobs for people without hard skills. China youth unemployment rate is very high among those without STEM degrees.
oah, what batst nonsense is this? CATL and BYD's battery production output/capacity, or whatever innovation you claim China has achieved, is a function of the CCP's protectionist policy to prevent foreign competition and nurture domestic battery industry since 2016 -- ie, China's refusal to grant license to operate battery business in China to South Korean and Japanese battery makers such as LG Chem, Samsung SDI, and Panasonic unless they gave up their core battery technology in exchange (forced tech transfer); or blatant discrimination in EV battery maker subsides or later outright no subsidy for EVs equipped with foreign companies' batteries (illegal subsidies). Ever heard of Make-In-China 2025? Wonder where Biden got inspiration for the IRA which excludes all things sourced or made in China? BYD and CATL are #1, #2 in China, but, outside China, they have to deal with the South Korean trio, LG Chem #1, SK Innovation #2, Samsung SDI + Panasonic (Japanese) -- and they are likewise leaders in their respective battery tech: for instance, LG Chem and SK Innovation in NCM, Panasonic and Samsung SDI in NCA.
>> China is able to do China things because they produce an absolutely staggering number of STEM grads ... <<
Stop, stop, stop. That's not how it works. If we assume your fallacious theory to be true, China would have won the World's most popular sport contest, the World Cup several times over. We all know how China poured billions into training millions of their youths and spent boatload of money recruiting the World's best soccer players only to see their national team getting beaten by small South East nations like Vietnam, and certainly no match for soccer powerhouses like Honduras with 1/150 of China's population or budget.
NCM, NCMA, LFP, sure chemistries are cool to talk about but all that actually matters is batteries that are actually shipping.
LG Chem is claiming they can catch up, claiming they can start building LFP by 2026... only over a decade too late. CATL didn't develop LFP but they developed all the mass production techniques which is what counts in the market. No one cares how good you can theoretically produce cells if you never do.
Right now all I see is the Koreans claiming they can make up lost ground, not today mind you, by 2026+ and somehow then they will then become the dominant producers.
They do this based on projections of CATL not growing at all which makes no fucking sense given they are entirely supply constrained right now. People end up buying EVE and other second tier cells because of how hard it is to buy from CATL right now.
Sorry but it's fantasy.
If Korea/Japan/US want to beat CATL it's going to take more than hopes and dreams. It's going to take factories, lots of them. Not just the ~1-3 plants a piece that are currently on the roadmap.
Protectionism doesn't and can't explain the sheer capacity of CATL/BYD. Protectionism 101 is that by adopting protectionism you increase the local cost of the goods as a result by disallowing other competitors. That clearly isn't the case as CATL is the best price/performance cell anyone can buy for LFP friendly workloads anywhere in the world. It's not subsidy either as they are wildly profitable at the same time, even having enough margin to eat increases in lithium costs (partially because they are big enough to own their own mines) keeping themselves competitive as others are priced out.
Korea/Japan/US dropped the ball, it's simple as that. They had the lead but choose not to pursue it. Same with EVs until Tesla came long. GM should have been dominant but again they didn't have the balls.
When push came to shove they didn't want to put the money down and that is what counts in the end. China said they were going to build EVs and that was going to need batteries. That created the appropriate conditions for battery companies to invest heavily in China. LG Chem was late to the party, their first plant in Nanjing was nearly 10 years too late, that isn't protectionism that is just missing the boat. That and they were building NCM at a time that CATL was already producing LFP at good enough energy densities to displace NCM for EVs and storage applications. NCM is a "better" chemistry sure, but it's too damn expensive for cheap ass EVs that dominate the Chinese market.
This entire debacle is entirely one of mismanaged leads and it repeats across most modern tech that China is now doing well in.
Solar? Should have been won by US/Germany/Australia. Wind? US/Germany. Batteries? Korea/Japan. Nuclear? US/France/Germany/Japan. EVs? US. Telecom? Canada/Sweden. The pattern here is China invests and doesn't let new technology get fucked over by entrenched special interest groups. It's a political advantage at it's core, something the West might find very hard to replicate.
Also your soccer comparison is beyond dumb so I'm not even going to bother addressing that.
sounds like something I hear from very misguided wumaos all the time. It's fairly apparent that you know nothing about the industry or the "shipping" numbers, much less the chemistries. You've been drinking too much CCP Kool-aid.
>> NCM, NCMA, LFP, sure chemistries are cool to talk about but all that actually matters is batteries that are actually shipping. <<
Wrong, NCM/NCA, not LFP, are the most popular/manufactured/shipped with 70% of the global EV market share. The majority of EVs in China for instance are running on NCM -- only last year China achieved almost 50/50 between NCM and LFP on new EVs. Most LDVs outside China are also NCM/NCA. Even in ESS market, NCM still dominates today; though LFP will take over since LFP is suitable for stationary, low-density use cases. I also already commented earlier that the majority of CATL's output is still NCM, which is based on LG Chem tech, not LFP.
>> LG Chem is claiming they can catch up, claiming they can start building LFP by 2026. CATL didn't develop LFP but they deve... Right now all I see is the Koreans claiming they can make up lost ground, <<
Wrong. There is nothing to catch up -- LG Chem has no plan to use LFPs for EVs; nor did they ever have any "ground" in LFPs. They are not really interested in doing LFPs because of their low margin (and absurd LFP licensing fees; though they are now all, but expired). The Japanese/Koreans stayed away from LFP b/c of their low density and weight which in turn makes it unsuitable beyond stationary energy storage. LFP is far easier to manufacturer than NCM/A and subsequently cheaper, which is the main market driver for it, but the cost advantage of LFP isn't necessarily true anymore either: LFP is 20%-30% cheaper per Wh/kg compared to much older, least densest NCM532, but not against the recent high-nickel (811), most commonly used today on new EVs, or ultra-nickel (955) batteries, the emerging de facto industry standard; notwithstanding recent wild fluation in lithium/nickel price. LFP today is largely still limited to entry-level, non-performant, low-range EVs. Tesla uses NCMs from LG Chem for high-end models even in China and LFPs from CATL for lower, entry-level EVs.
>> ... by 2026+ and somehow then they will then become the dominant producers. ... <<
No worries, it's widely expected that the Korean trio would dominate 70% of the North American market. Biden's IRA and the EU's CRMA no longer promises exclusive subsidies or ban against Japanese or South Koreans competition. LG Chem also announced last month that they are going to start enforcing patent rights on high-nickle NCM batteriese against Chinese battery makers (which is one of the main reasons why China has been aggressively moving towards LFP in and outside China).
>> ... They do this based on projections of CATL not growing at all which makes no fucking sense given they are entirely supply constrained right now ...<<
Biden's IRA also takes a few steps further limits subsides on EVs made in China or EVs with batteries/material sourced from China. As of last week, even Tesla's entry-level EVs with Chinese LFP sold in the US are now partially excluded from receivign EV credits -- which explains why Tesla is now instead offering them in Canada. You should be familliar with this, since this is exactly China used to do to promote their own domestic makers CATL/BYD over foreign ones.
As for supply-constraint, it seems you are also quite slow to realize that battery constraints has easied substantially since the end of China's EV subsidies on Jan 1, 2023. The price of Lithium has more than halved since, for instance, and some Chinese processors are idling their factories to prevent further price drop (yes, they are still falling like a rock).
The only other bottleneck in EV battery supply-chain is the new "No China" constraints for battery and raw materials under Biden's new policies -- which in turns require severing ties with Chinese material suppliers, or pulling factories out of China -- will need at leat a year or two to build new domestic supply-chain in the US or its allies.
>> Protectionism doesn't and can't explain the sheer capacity of CATL/BYD. <<
Sure, it does. You combine that with blatant IP theft, forced tech transfer, and generous subsidies, it works out. The inefficiencies born by China's protectionism are ameliorated by huge subsides that accounts for as much as 40% of the purchase cost in some Chinese EV models. Ditto, watch the US EV supply-chain and market develop under Biden's IRA over next couple of years.
I will believe the batteries are truly ready for prime-time after approx. 5 years of real world service. That's enough time to see the creeping, unforeseen issues that tend to crop up with batteries. Dendrite growth, structural failure, etc etc. They could be shipping millions of cars in 2025 with these and I would, rightly, still have my doubts.
A breakthrough based on solid state electrolyte sounds very plausible. But look at the presentation graphic. They get the translation of "energy density" wrong.
For reference hobby lipo batteries used in small quadcopters are around 155-160 Wh/kg.
Lithium ion battery packs built from the very best Sony and Panasonic high-C rate cells for UAV applications are right around 250Wh/kg.
Means expensive chemistry.
>targeting aircraft first
Means expensive chemistry
>no mention of durability
If they were highly durable this would be an important feature so they're likely not.
Sounds like these are going to be expensive special application batteries.
You've got to balance so many factors to commercially release a battery: safety, durability, reliability, weight, energy density, cost. You can build cheap batteries, they just have some terrible characteristics.
That was CATL's other announcement, two years ago: sodium-ion batteries. Now being incorporated into a model of car by Chery, one of the second tier Chinese EV manufacturers, and another by BYD, the biggest.
1. https://www.notebookcheck.net/First-electric-cars-with-BYD-a...
> the condensed battery integrates a range of innovative technologies, including the ultra-high energy density cathode materials, innovative anode materials, separators, and manufacturing processes
Are these all things that are common knowledge now, and they're just the first ones to slap them all together, and that it's a short matter of time before all battery manufacturers start providing much better density? Or is there something more to it?
I assume that thinking about battery capacity form first principles, the theoretical limit is reached when the charged battery consists of 50% matter and 50% antimatter, right?
Then during discharge, the reaction between the two would turn the matter/antimatter into energy.
How would that stack up against the 500Wh/kg stated here?
Update:
Did a bit of googling (Note to my future self: AI was still bad at math in 2023): Looks like 1kg of mass cointains about 25x10^9 Wh.
So if the above assumptions are right, we still have 8 orders of magnitude to go. An electric car with an optimal battery could go 100,000,000 times further on a single charge than the current ones.
But it would deliver 24 trillion wh/kg… so by that metric at least we’ve room to progress :-)
Maybe a slightly closer but still very different example would be a core of weapons grade plutonium. But what you’ve described would be far more powerful than that.
Or, just tap into the zero point energy of empty space.
Hopefully not more than 2x the cost...
Is that around the expected range, presuming a new battery is a drop-in replacement?
Lithium-air has an energy density of 11,140 Wh/kg, yielding 32,639 km, which doesn't seem possible.
If it's twice the density and the same number of cycles, a BEV will have a lifetime of 4 ICE vehicles.
Energy density is energy per volume (in GJ/m^3, for example, or Wh/litre, or whatever).
-> "X density" = X per volume
What's discussed here is specific energy, ie energy per mass (in Wh/kg, or whatever).
-> "specific X" = X per mass
The latter is particularly relevant for aviation, needless to say.
They even refer to "energy intensity", which as far as I am concerned doesn't refer to anything.
> Half the weight and double the range would be great
You don't need to quadruple energy density to achieve that. If you just half the weight (without increasing the total amount of energy in the battery), you're going to significantly increase range. The less weight you have, the less energy you need to move the vehicle.
> Plus, electrified ultralight "aircraft" start to have numerous advantages over the traditional 2 stoke engines.
I think you'll have plenty of benefits with ~300wh/kg (that's the target for many useful eVTOL aircraft).
The key challenge is you should redesign the whole aircraft around electric flight to get the full benefits. Look at NASAs Maxwell X-57 for an example of how that could look.
With 500wh/kg you can start taking over most regional flights. Yes, the range won't be as good as jet planes. But jet planes have FAR more range than they need because they don't design a special purpose aircraft for shorter range. They just put less fuel in.
But it'll probably take 10-20 years regardless of when we get good batteries because it'll take a long time to design and certify the aircrafts.
Another point is that it won't take very long for ultralight since they aren't technically defined as an aircraft but as an air vehicle. You can home build them.
Yes, you might see a 10% increase in range with half the vehicle weight. If you tow or take long trips, you want double the range. At that density, you're choosing one or the other, or an "eh" compromise. I want 800 miles and less weight/size. This can especially be useful for retrofit kits for existing vehicles for people who hate all the tech in the EVs.
I'm wondering if large aircraft companies are actually already designing the next aircraft based on assumed battery densities? I know they put out press releases with nice looking renderings, but I am talking about serious development?
If you wait until you have the batteries on hand, and then spend 20 years to design a plane (and 20 years might be conservative, since arppovals will be harder to get for a brand new concept), you might be left behind. Instead, they could be already designing the plane and when 500Wh/Kg is available, boom, they are 15 years ahead.
Unlike the mass in-flux of low effort GPT-laden BS promoted by the generative AI grifters.
We need more of these foundational breakthroughs and less from the generative AI hype squad.
Also, this could be interesting already for existing small and/or short range airplanes like Pipistrel‘s training aircraft or Eviation‘s Alice. I don‘t know the energy density of their current batteries, but this could give them a boost very soon.
Hopefully gpt-level progress over existing tech :)
I like this meme.
Some negatives can be mitigated.
"EXCELLENT density" "EXCELLENT performance" "good safety"
Does this mean it's more likely to explode than current-gen NMC batteries?
Unless, of course, the battery manufacturer has a very long warranty and the resources to back it up.
Otherwise: noise :)
It must be quite the threat to get so many paid Tesla shills commenting on this.
That would of course be equivalent of deploying an air brake almost the size of the rotor/propeller disk. So descend rates would be pretty fast, and aerodynamic stability not necessarily guaranteed.
In the end you probably have to design the aircraft for it. Might be worth it for applications like sky-diving planes or heli-sking helicopters.
https://group14.technology/en/news/group14-enters-production...
CATL is a spinoff from ATL, so it's possible that there's some cross-pollination going on.
This company is fascinating to me, because until recently they had no media presence.
During their reign:
- solar industry: gone (in the 2000s germany had everything, domestically produced)
- wind energy: gone (well, Siemens did it themselves too)
- existing domestic electronics production: gone (Siemens had highly automated facilities producing state of the art mainboards...)
- in the pandemic masks were bought in China for billions. All the while the automation companies newly taken over by their Chinese joint venture partner were happy to show people how they built those in their chinese factories...
They call it responsible, I call it Seppuku...
Oh and of course they now want to build nuclear plants after they've shown for the last 30years that we have reached a state of more dysfunctional oligarchy than the Soviet Union ever was (they changed their system! Here the mantra is "There Is No Alternative"). I congratulate the chinese oligarchy for somehow keeping an interest in the physical world and fleecing two continents of 1200 million people for all they built and some more while their people are infighting on idiotic frontlines.
I can't express how much I hate this. In terms of technology and engineering, nuclear is now so mature that it should be used everywhere solar doesn't make sense. Yet, in terms of politics, society and governance, we are still stuck in the state of 1970s. Putting nuclear in their hands is just irresponsible
We had a giant first mover advantage and didn't just squander it but fell behind the Chinese by a full generation.
We should be living in a post-scarcity era for energy. Instead we are contending with $80 crude prices and a future of trying to build a grid out of itermittent sources a lots of storage. None of that would have been necessary had we not dropped the ball.
Anything less than a ~400x increase is a minor breakthrough based on my expectations. I would like to charge my phone once a year.