Sandy Munro Talks Battery Battles, Calls Solid State “Kiss of Death” for Gas
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Issues are the same as always, though: up-front sticker shock, and even at the too-high up-front prices, they just can't manufacture enough of them to meet demand. That type of incentive can help with the former, but have a limited effect on the latter. This is why some of these new battery technologies are so exciting, even though we all know most of them won't pan out.
People buy long range cars not for commutes but because they want to be able to go on trips. If we can right-size EV's for commercial usage, the up front expense might be lessened even more.
https://youtu.be/T71cVhxG_v4 https://youtu.be/5r-yN8SugWM https://youtu.be/_8YClwsWTyU https://youtu.be/tnNqBgOeCUQ
Might be a few things to iron out...
Batteries that store vast amounts of potential energy are a fire risk, duh!
Just like tanks of petroleum.
https://www.kbb.com/car-news/study-electric-vehicles-involve...
https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/what-so-many-people-get-wrong...
They also cite the Jevons paradox in a discussion of the possible counterintuitive outcomes:
Most of the lithium needed for electric vehicles is going to be mined and that is not an environmental friendly process.
No one's talking about how they're going to power electric vehicles in the United States... It's a ticking time bomb for energy infrastructure in the United States. They should be pursuing everything all at once,not reducing because you always need a backup.
Coal is a minor component of Germany's power, and even if it were bigger, EVs are a big win on pollution even when largely powered by coal.
And as for lithium being "dirty" have you bothered to even compare it to other sources of mining? Such as for the massive amount of stew that goes into cars? Or the absolutely massive amounts of waste and destruction that happens to extract oil to power cars?
Citing "environmental damage" but not acknowledging right away that it's far far far less than the alternatives is simply playing rhetorical games.
We must be far more logical and realistic and pragmatic if we want to take care of the environment. Above all, factuality is important.
Yeah, I suggest you start posting some facts because that's quite a claim. Lithium uses a f** load of water to be mined, more so than copper more so than gold or zinc.
(Water Use in Industries of the Future: Mining Industry" by the U.S. Department of Energy)
The water footprint of lithium production" by M. Northey, T. Mudd, and D. Werner, published in ScienceDirect: This research article provides a detailed analysis of the water requirements for various forms of lithium mining, including both brine-based and hard rock mining. The authors estimate that the water footprint of lithium production can range from 100 to 20,000 liters of water per kilogram of lithium, depending on the specific extraction method used.
"EVs are a big win on pollution even when largely powered by coal." This is a common misconception because the power generation for these cars has to come from somewhere... If the power generation for these cars is coal or oil where that energy is being generated is polluting those people. You are correct that it is way better for the environment in terms of driving emissions, but the emissions used to generate the power are often ignored and unless it's done, the healthy mix of alternatives such as wind, hydro, solar geothermal and nuclear, it's absolutely Ludacris suggest that EVs are cleaner without taking into account where the power is being generated.
> More than a third (36.3%) of the electricity produced and fed into the grid in Germany in the third quarter of 2022 came from coal-fired power plants (third quarter of 2021: 31.9%).
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/12/PE22_518_433.html
And that number is from before the last nuclear reactors were turned off.
The only valid argument is a quantitative one, and in that regime, EVs powered with a tiny fraction of coal, like the grid in Germany, are a massive win.
But I will say that I'm not surprised to see yet another pro-nuclear, anti-other-clean-tech take. These two things seem to go hand in hand.
So prices currently look set to rise. Higher oil prices make renewables look relatively more attractive though, so its a bit reflexive
As (if?) likelihood of a demand collapse increases, I imagine some fraction of potential suppliers with ~easy/cheap oil left would have a healthy incentive to open up the supply for as long as it takes to force everyone with ~hard sources to wind down, leaving them to price-set the long-tail?
Hopefully the price of any PoW crypto is sufficiently low that it doesn't make marginal economic sense for any players to extract-and-mine?
This is of course assuming the current price is somewhat competitive.
(Instead, right now that oil is just more profitable to extract as the consumer price pays for extracting even the more expensive oil.)
As EVs get cheaper to buy, and more importantly, to run, the petrol-fueled vehicles start to become uneconomical. As use declines, availability of fuel declines, as petrol stations become more unprofitable. Further encourages EV adoption. Range anxiety now comes to petrol-powered vehicle owners as it is now for EV owners, further incentivizing the switch.
While the general impression is that this will be gradual, I think it will be a gradual decline, then sudden, as the overall inconvenience and cost levels cross. Then some minor precipitating event changes the overall mindset, and petrol-powered cars become a perceived liability, and those still stuck with them will barely be able to unload them.
As the decline happens, OPEC will surely try to manage the price of oil, but with demand declining, one of two things will happen. To the extent that they keep the price high, they speed the transition away from oil. They are also much more likely to fail, as the US is now a major producer, and has every incentive to work against OPEC. Plus, their friends are gone. Teh car companies figured out in the 2008 price spike that the oil industry is NOT their friend as that economic crash and oil price spike forced them to look over the cliff of doom as auto sales nearly stopped dead. Then we saw Russia's blatant attempt to use their oil & gas supply to blackmail the world into yielding to their genocidal invasion of Ukraine. No rational businessman now thinks that the oil industry is a reliable supply partner, and will cut them out of the equation at the first opportunity. The oil industry and countries may have some good days ahead, but beyond the intermediate term, they are absolutely screwed.
2) Public Transit will benefit immensely from car electrification. Batteries for busses will get better because of investments and economies of scale made for car battery manufacturing.
3) Buildings and cultural habits have generations-long duration. Even the shittiest houses last 100 years. Cars last 10-15 years, so the vehicle stock will be renewed many many times faster than memes like "rebuild our cities"
4) Autonomous EVs will likewise also arrive far sooner than "rebuilding cities". Cruise operates 24/7 in SF. Their "Origin" EV will be the basis for surface-level public transit in the future.
It seems like small changes in regulations should be easy to accomplish, but it's actually far far harder than inventing entirely new technology and building entire industries around it.
Social change is the hardest change to accomplish, despite it getting the most attention from so many.
I also worry about the pace that you mention, it's unfortunate that social change is so slow. It's also good that we have potential solutions that do not require it.
I think the right framing on this might be to treat it as a "friendly competition". Can urban planning enthusiasts beat the electric car industry at reducing carbon by 2050? Or something like that.
Our system is set up for maximum local control to prevent any non-car infrastructure, but with top-down enforced car infrastructure that's unstoppable.
Local advocacy has been pointless, instead, state level laws that limit cities, and pull back undemocratic local control processes is the way to go.
Nobody pays attention to local politics except a few wealthy homeowners, and so politicians only respond to these very few opinion makers. It's a losing game unless you're in your 60s, retired, and loaded with money. State level legislators have broader constituencies that try to serve every one.
Rapidly changing now
s/halt/slow/
For the fuel maybe. Probably not as easy on other components.
So if Jevon's Paradox holds true for transportation as it did for steam power, we may need lots of fossil-fuel electric plants just to meet demand. Maybe that's "temporary", but so was coal.
20% of EV sales in California this year, so far, are EVs. They are the 4th-5th largest economy in the world. Extrapolate accordingly.
My previous comment on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463224
https://electrek.co/2023/04/06/walmart-to-launch-coast-to-co...
> Walmart already has nearly 1,300 EV fast-charging stations through a partnership with Electrify America installed across over 280 US retail locations. The new initiative will promote a coast-to-coast network across thousands of Walmart and Sams Club Stores by 2030, according to the retailer.
> With a Walmart store or club located within 10 miles of roughly 90% of Americans, the EV fast-charging network will help increase access to affordable charging solutions as demand grows.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-07-29/biden-has... (Biden Has a $5 Billion Plan to Eliminate America's EV Charging Deserts)
(scope to your location on above maps)
Charging is slower than gas but the charging locations also seem to be more abundant which maybe balances out the time spent.
The Nissan Leaf owners get longer range than that here I think.
Here has 240v
The US is so backward on EVs it can't even agree on a plug standard for fast charging and there's nothing convenient about incompatible chargers.
If the US wants to be serious about EVs then all chargers must charge all brands all the time on a common plug standard. Tesla's goofy "magic dock" is a half step available on some US Tesla chargers. It would be much better if Tesla switched to CCS type 1 Combo altogether in the US.
The European Teslas are better cars purely because they're on the common plug standard and can charge on any charger with no adapters.
I bet it's a lot closer to 100%.
There will be edge cases not covered. Fortunately, society and the economy are very good at adjusting to them. Buildings that don't offer charging stations will eventually be unable to find tenants unless they do something about it. They will find options.
We're lucky ("lucky") that the bar for affordable changed a whole bunch in the last few years. Used ICE cars getting wildly more expensive has made EVs seem like a less-terrible deal.
This exists on my street (residential neighbourhood in London) right now! Some of them are coming out of lampposts, others sprout from the floor. It's just a pilot scheme, so this doesn't exist in many places in the UK yet, but it seems to work pretty well. And the works to put them in didn't take very long.
"The record high level of finished motor gasoline consumption was about 392 million gallons per day in 2018."[1]
"Petroleum liquids–12.69 kWh/gallon"[2]
So, that's 12.96 * 392 Million kWh/day --> 5.08 Billion kWh/day
Smoothed out to the same rate every hour --> 211 Million kW
"At the end of 2021, the United States had 1,143,757 MW—or about 1.14 billion kW—of total utility-scale electricity generating capacity"[3]
So, in theory, we could run everything, and charge the cars when the demand was lower, at night.
---
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10#:~:text=In...).
[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=6#:~:text=Co...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
That's a lot of batteries, and that's only if they were perfectly sized, in reality it's going to be 2-10 times as much.
---
https://www.electrive.com/tag/solid-state-batteries/
In particular, more on the sodium-ion battery discussed by Munro:
https://www.electrive.com/2023/02/23/hina-launches-sodium-io...
The ICE will probably go the way of the Stanley Steamer for cars and trucks in the relatively near future. Those fossil-fueled steam engines were surprisingly capable, incidentally:
> "A Stanley Steamer set the world record for the fastest mile in an automobile (28.2 seconds) in 1906. This record (127 mph or 204 km/h) was not broken by any automobile until 1911" (wiki)
No personal bias against EVs, but there are still issues with range for towing/hauling, and longer duration "road trip" style commutes that make it impossible to be "pure EV" on the roads any time soon.
Also, the marine and aviation industries don't have viable EV options in the short term (10 years), same with heavy equipment (CAT, Deere, etc.), this will keep at least enough of a market for gas/diesel engine production that they won't go away.
That said, the auto market at 50% or 70% EV adoption will still be a big deal! And we might find out that some of the issues that folks see with EVs are solvable and/or aren't that important anyway. For example: the average American summer road trip is under 300 miles, so the range anxiety might be ameliorated by wider availability of faster chargers than are available today. Similarly, we might learn that users of heavy equipment are in the habit of taking breaks during which they could charge their equipment, etc.
Probably what would happen if this was a real concern is they'd just make the gas tanks bigger. It's not that hard to do so.
I'm not sure how to reconcile these figures with the apparently growing average age of the fleet. I suppose it means there are a lot of early deaths for relatively new cars due to accidents and other calamity.
But this don't mean that average Joe transportation (which incidentally makes up 99%ofprivate vehicle travel) cannot be realistically electrified.
Sure, even there people will keep running their classic cars and probably even some sports and muscle cars but for the biggest majority of casual commuters the writing is on the wall. There just is no real upside to sticking with ICEs even today.
An analogy might be ethanol-free gas. Many motors out there still require it, and you have to go out of your way to find it, and you will pay a premium for it. But it is at least there if you need it.
1: https://www.archpaper.com/2018/08/gas-stations-steroids-tota...
Very heavy construction and marine equipment is already electric propulsion. The question is what will be the source for that electric. Even if diesel fuel is much more energy dense, IC engines thermodynamically lose a majority of that energy. So the gap to make up is smaller than a superficial look.
Additionally, solar charging is far easier to get out to a remote jobsite than is diesel. If you've never seen diesel logistics for e.g. remote mines, you'd have no idea. And even for the far north (or far south) where solar is not an option, often they'll have provisions for electricity or alternative methods of generating it on site.
Not at the size/scale you need to recharge and power a fleet of earthmovers and dump trucks. The energy density of diesel fuel is pretty high.
With high enough energy density, I suppose it's possible for short haul aviation to go electric. If they can overcome the energy density difficulties, I'm sure it'll be great for reliability and cost. And maybe even noise.
I have serious doubts that it'll ever be feasible for long haul aviation to run on anything but hydrocarbons. Although I suppose it's theoretically possible.
I don't think production will ever go away. But I do think that if you hit densities 500wh-1kwh and at a cheaper price, it will be relegated to niches. Maybe that will take 20 years.
For marine, it seems that cargo ships could have large solar arrays for energy regeneration, perhaps strapped to their top layer of containers? I think aviation will lean towards hydrogen cells given the need to rapidly refuel and energy density.
I do not think there is any practical scenario where a vehicle can be self-solar powered for long distance journeys. The energy demand scales up with the size of the vehicle. This is why you don't see EV's with solar panels for primary power (I am aware of some like Fisker that have essentially novelty solar panels). A cargo ship loaded with solar panels would be highly impractical on a number of levels, and would not be able to gather enough energy to make it worthwhile without a massive increase in panel efficiency.
Using wind power on the other hand seems like a better fit in this case.
https://twitter.com/TheSmokingTire/status/138849456233148416...
So whatever this guy says can be put into ballpark of other Tesla fan-fic videos on YouTube.
It just seems like batteries aren't the bottle neck. It's our efficiency to produce and distribute this electricity.
ICE isn't perfect, but it's an extreme dense form of energy and the output of it rotational energy. Which is exactly what our end goal is.
In electricity production we outsource it, then store it. Basically the same concept as winding up a spring loaded toy then letting it go when we want to use it. The spring isn't the source of power, it's just the energy storage. Just because we made the spring bigger and output more doesn't make it more efficient. Simply mean we need to spin it more, and with more energy.
We cannot even make the electric motors more efficient, we already run at 80-90% efficiency. What will we see? 1% more? 2% more?
It really depends where your energy comes from. If your energy comes from dams/solar/wind, those have low impacts and can be an efficient way to "wind up your spring" but they generally aren't extremely reliable and cannot power an entire city of EVs. If your energy is from coal, those are horribly inefficient. They run around 33% efficency [0].
All this electricity needs to transported but the power lines waste power, the charger wastes power, the AC-DC converters waste power, the EV motor wastes power. It's so many little losses outsourced to someone else.
I like the idea of EV. There's many pros, but far too many cons still. And it's not the cars fault. It's already maximizing what it can do with what it can get.
Personally, the battery pack prices are the biggest killer for me. I drive a 90s Toyota pickup. It's been problem free. I've driven it for years. Unless it rots to the ground, I'll never see a surprise bill in 10-20 years saying I need a new battery pack. My motor could entirely fail and it would be a $500 fix. Not to mention, it's entirely recyclable. People will give me money just for the metal.
It seems like EV is a nice option for rich people at the moment but if the majority switch over, the concept really falls on its face.
Although, high capacity cell phone/laptop batteries would be pretty sweet. However, we already have problems with phones being pretty dangerous.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/fecm/transformative-power-systems#:~:....
An EV city would probably flip to high draw at night, when everyone charges. It would be like your whole neighborhood turning on a welder on max settings for 2 hours. You could probably turn down the fast charging to slow charging over night (so you can spare the grid) if you only commute 40mi but if they're talking about high density batteries you won't be doing a slow charge when you drain it. Especially in the case of semis/work equipment/planes, you will need that fast-fast-fast charger to charge your new high density batteries at the same rate.
People who commute longer can still easily charge their cars overnight. Since most commutes are less than 40mi, we don't need to design the grid for an average over 40mi.
We don't need to design for the draw for fast-charging for everyone, just for those that need it. What we will likely find is that temporary storage at sites to allow for short, super high power draw will solve that problem.
And along interstates, if we build new, necessary transmission along that existing right or way, we will be able to tap into massive power easily.
What's more likely is that these sites with fleets of vehicles will become fleets of batteries, that can be charged when energy is cheap, and perhaps even feed back into the grid when it's profitable to do so.
That being said, it's not great how gas is very expensive. It's a much better conversion, and wastes less in the whole grand scheme.
Anecdote alert: The solar panels on my roof generate more power than I use driving my EV. Maybe the future is distributed.
But that price tag is brutal. I assume to solar panel your roof would be around $20k+. Plus the price of an EV. These aren't items you can really buy used either. Old/weak EV batteries aren't "repairable" like an old car is.
It just comes back to my point of it being a nice luxury for rich people. I keep my budget for my vehicles at $5k max. I will never see a new/used EV & solar panel system for that price.
I found at 1200W panel on Amazon for less than $400.
Various realities will substantially increase that number, but it's still not too expensive just to solar charge your car at home if you don't have a substantial commute.
Instability seems to happen at times of peak demand. Which is notable in that it pretty much never overlaps with times I charge my car.
You should consider upgrading your car solely for the fact that newer cars are significantly safer in crashes.
[0]https://apnews.com/article/health-california-heat-waves-stre... [1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-heat-blackout-risk-p...
Numbers get even better if you use kW per neighborhood rather than kWh, since charging is well distributed and mostly happens off-peak and AC use is concentrated during peak periods.
No, you can use a standard clothes dryer hookup and charge overnight. You can even arrange it so that the car charger only consumes power when other high-powered appliances are not (e.g. water heater, dryer, stove).
> It just seems like batteries aren't the bottle neck. It's our efficiency to produce and distribute this electricity.
They may not be "the" bottleneck, but they definitely are one of them. With increased density comes either longer range or lighter vehicles. The lighter the vehicle, the more efficient it becomes.
> ICE isn't perfect, but it's an extreme dense form of energy and the output of it rotational energy. Which is exactly what our end goal is.
So you do understand why denser battery packs are useful then? Also, ICE is not a "rotational energy" and more or less than "EV" is. I don't understand why this is included.
> In electricity production we outsource it, then store it. Basically the same concept as winding up a spring loaded toy then letting it go when we want to use it. The spring isn't the source of power, it's just the energy storage. Just because we made the spring bigger and output more doesn't make it more efficient.
We didn't make the spring bigger. We made it smaller and lighter and got the same output. That is more efficient.
> We cannot even make the electric motors more efficient, we already run at 80-90% efficiency. What will we see? 1% more? 2% more?
Yes, we no longer have to improve efficiency in the motor itself. It's already many times more efficient than an ICE.
> All this electricity needs to transported but the power lines waste power, the charger wastes power, the AC-DC converters waste power, the EV motor wastes power. It's so many little losses outsourced to someone else.
And yet, after all those transformations and power losses, an EV is still a net gain in efficiency in most cases. An ICE sends about 20% of the energy to the wheels. An EV triples that in the worst case. This means the infrastructure that you get your energy from can lose a lot along the way and you still end up net positive. And it concentrates further efficiency improvements. That abstraction is huge.
> Personally, the battery pack prices are the biggest killer for me. I drive a 90s Toyota pickup. It's been problem free. I've driven it for years. Unless it rots to the ground, I'll never see a surprise bill in 10-20 years saying I need a new battery pack. My motor could entirely fail and it would be a $500 fix. Not to mention, it's entirely recyclable. People will give me money just for the metal.
This is also something we all need to keep in mind. You continuing to drive that truck is a benefit to the environment. I'm not trying to say you should scrap it and go get an EV. But for someone who doesn't own any vehicle, choosing an EV today is better than going with a new combustion car.
These are also high power, special circuits. The outlet your TV is plugged into isn't near that power level. Most appliances run off 110v.
>With increased density comes either longer range or lighter vehicles. The lighter the vehicle, the more efficient it becomes.
Yeah, that's certainly an inefficiency. Not as big of an issue to its power source inefficiency. Heavy EVs aren't it's main flaw.
>So you do understand why denser battery packs are useful then? Also, ICE is not a "rotational energy" and more or less than "EV" is. I don't understand why this is included.
I should have said "it uses an extreme dense form of energy". You can make bigger springs on a wind up car, but you need a better source of energy to wind it up. Gas goes from, "fuel -> combustion -> rotational energy". There's too many steps to go from "coal -> rotational energy" to even list. All of which, have losses.
>We didn't make the spring bigger. We made it smaller and lighter and got the same output. That is more efficient.
Sure, but doesn't fix the real issue of production and transportation. The weight is a lesser issue.
>Yes, we no longer have to improve efficiency in the motor itself. It's already many times more efficient than an ICE.
In a small scope, yes. In the whole picture, no. There's no more efficiency gain on the EV. That's it. It's at it's max efficiency and the only way to improve its efficiency is to redesign the entire system and create new technology to produce and transport electricity. Mean while, ICE is still getting improvements such as the Freevalve [0]. Not to mention how much more efficient diesel is compared to gas.
>And yet, after all those transformations and power losses, an EV is still a net gain in efficiency in most cases. An ICE sends about 20% of the energy to the wheels. An EV triples that in the worst case. This means the infrastructure that you get your energy from can lose a lot along the way and you still end up net positive. And it concentrates further efficiency improvements. That abstraction is huge.
Depends on your source. If you have wind powering your EV from a turbine, you generally don't care about the losses as much since it's all "free" anyways. Your EV is still wind powered though, it's no different than compacting that wind and using it to blow you down the street. It would take A LOT of wind to do that, so does generating electricity out of it. If your source of power is coal, you start at 66% loss, then 8-15% for powerlines, then you got charger losses, DC-AC losses, drive train losses. It's not as efficient as you think. You cannot create more power than you put in, no matter how much you try. Don't forget how much more efficient diesel is as well.
I'm focused here on tons of CO₂ per mile driven. After a century of eeking out improvements in ICE efficiency, it's still far below what we're doing with EVs. Unless you think the Freevalve is going to literally double efficiency, it's not a replacement for electric cars.
Only in the most extreme places in the US (West Virginia, Wyoming, Missouri) does the EV advantage start to wane. And even in those places, it still beats gasoline!
Burning coal for the electricity gets you 66%. Line losses and charging losses can cut that in half, and you're still beating the gasoline by a huge margin. Especially if you also ignore the costs of extracting, refining, and transporting all that fuel.
No no, it's 33%. 66% gets wasted as heat.
I plugged in an old EV (2012 Model S) and a Wyoming ZIP code to the DOE's calculator¹, and I'm getting half the CO₂. 220 g/mi for the Tesla, and 410 g/mi for the new gasoline car.
I'm sure you can find an electrical outlet somewhere in the heart of coal country that fares worse for the EV, but that's not really helpful for the general analysis here. If you find yourself reliant on pure coal for your electricity, then you have a good individual use-case to remain on ICE. But for the vast majority of drivers in the U.S., EVs are tremendously more efficient than ICE when weighing CO₂ emissions per mile.
[1]: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?year=2012&vehicleId=...
Lithium-ion batteries were invented by M. Stanley Whittingham [1] and John B. Goodenough [2] who are both still alive (81 and 100 years old, respectively).