Solid-state EV batteries now face "production hell"
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
To geeks, "production hell" sounds like "they're in the process of mass producing, and they're running into all sorts of problèms, but we'll see something any time soon." Kinda like the 6 months of crunch before a AAA game is released after 3 years of production.
Except, the rest of the article makes it very clear that as far as production grade, mass marketable models of solid state batteries, we're more in the Hollywood version of "production hell", where no one has anything good to show, everybody is making press release, and we're rewriting the script until it barely looks like anything.
But, hey, we'll get more "breakthroughs" headlines any time now, so that's what matters ?
Essentially your description of Hollywood but with things
Basically our Error Budget is approaching 0, fast.
The energy density of gasoline is higher than liquid hydrogen! It does not need to be super cooled and is liquid state at atmospheric pressure and ambient temperature.
Gasoline is an absolute miracle fuel. Sort of feels under appreciated to casually pump it at the gas station ha.
You would need a tank 4 times the size of a gasoline tank for liquid hydrogen, not to mention the high pressure tank that is needed to store the liquid hydrogen .
Only problem with ethanol is that it directly competes with human food production.
- If large areas are deforested for sugar cane plantation, not only CO2 is released but the capacity of fixing future CO2 as well. - Large scale sugar cane plantations demand synthetic fertilisers, which come from fossil fuels. - Ethanol burning still produces toxic gases like NOX.
Personally I'm principally nerding out about energy storage for sailing cruising yachts. But I have by no means done an exhaustive search of the space.
The energy density of a gasoline power train is a different measurement taking into account chemistry and physics.
Specifically car engines can only turn 33% of gasoline’s stored energy into motion. Which still puts gasoline ahead in terms of efficiency relative to hydrogen or battery powertrains but reduces the difference a lot.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a1832081/atkinson-c...
Basically with that cycle they can get massive compression ratios. As an example newer Toyotas are at 14:1 ratio with 41% thermal efficiency. That’s close to diesel territory on a gasoline car.
Naturally when you floor it it goes to Otto cycle and efficiency drops.
Also: start-stop-automatic for free ... I am still somewhat spooked when the motor just turns off going 70 km/h because the ECU decides that the ICE is not needed anymore.
The new 2023 model year Serena from Nissan uses a generator optimized engine in a series hybrid setup. The engine runs at a fixed rpm (except in extreme situations like accelerating a bunch on the highway going from 110 to 140) then it switches to a second higher rpm mode. I bought one, it's a lot of fun to manage the engines heat and battery room. My record is 38km per liter using local driving up and down our hilly community. Pretty incredible when you consider hills are the natural enemy to none hybrid millage.
The car accelerates like an EV. And with Japan's expensive electricity I'm paying only about double the millage cost of an EV. Despite the full size minivan costing us about 20k USD new.
Most hybrids, and all Toyota ones, are not using a special fixed rpm engines. They use a regular motor with different timings. The Nissan fixed rpm engine is actually less powerful than the electric motor powering the wheels. Thus at max acceleration you can deplete the battery faster than it is charged.
It's about a microgram.
https://www.science.org/content/article/where-have-all-insec...
I guess overseas flights will just have to absorb the cost, unless it happens to be economical somehow to operate floating stations for the purpose of collecting dropped batteries.
> The electric pumps are powered by lithium-polymer batteries. The second stage uses three batteries which are "hot swapped", two of the batteries are jettisoned once depleted to shed mass.
Energy density of gasoline is literally 12900 Wh/kg and 9500 Wh/L, Li-ion(not combusted) is ~250 Wh/kg and ~700 Wh/L. That's 50x/14x raw and 17x/13x at 33% efficiency without hybrid/ICE optimization gains.
(23222915000 Wh/kg and 370000000000 Wh/L for Pu239 btw, source[1])
And thank you for the 'x' factor. Had never seen that, outside of everyone stating ICE is only 33% efficient.
Firstly, the newest solid state batteries (relevant because that is what I was responding about) are 2x the density so that is quite good (8.5x/6.5x). Which is already pretty close. They are also going to get better through iteration likely to 3-5x or so (but let’s ignore that for now).
Secondly, the power train also includes regenerative breaking, reduced weight from transmission, in hub motors (reducing axcel weight), reduced center of gravity allowing better drag profiles, no external coolant systems, no engine oil compartments, no fan belts, etc.
I’m happy for you to keep doing the math, but the reality is XXX km or miles per “full tank” is the best measurement because it takes all those factors into consideration.
Seriously, if we could just build 2-3 air-cooled Plutonium fission per each megalopolis core and use e-Fuel on existing hybrids we'd solve everything in modern society ever. The reactor could double as cityscale thermojet ventilation system as well, eliminating heat and atmosphere problems once and for all. It will of course work as a training exercise for coming real Space Age in which humanity builds bunches after bunches of cylindrical habitats fabricated and populated in space. The only two roadblocks towards that path are some NIMBYism/NPT fears and cost.
I’m very happy for there to be really nice and safe fission reactors everywhere for grid scale generation. Including efuel generators for air and space transportation.
The major issue is parasitic drivetrain loss from having to push the cylinder which pushes the cam which turns the flywheel which friction fits against the clutch which friction fits against the transmission flywheel which turns dozens of metal gears which rotates the driveshafts. Direct drive implementations where the engine's output shaft is mated directly to the axle are much more efficient and have been used in massive ships, but are entirely impractical for use in passenger vehicles. There's the Otto, Atkinson, Wankel, Scuderi and diesel cycles for liquid fuel combustion, and all have tradeoffs leaving them competitive with eachother instead of having a clear best solution thanks to everything else required to transfer the power from the initial combustion.
In short, we've hit the mechanical engineering dead end for massive efficiency gains with ICEs. It's all chemical from here, and thus gets much more expensive to run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#:~:text=Mode....
Something more radical has to be done about the entire crankshaft and a 4 piston design. Believe me, lots of smart people have tried that as well, for many decades. Because the payoffs if you did find something are huge.
There are lots of YouTube channels needing into all of this. Engineering Explained is a good one if you want to understand the level of how advanced modern engines really are.
Mercedes has devised an engine that achieves more than 50 percent efficiency.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a15049580/mercedes-...
Where gas really shines is ultra cold temperatures where you can make use of the waste heat. But even here it’s still not very efficient.
This is different to a standard car, because losses during refueling are negligible, but losses in the drivetrain obviously aren't. And of course for both types of vehicle you have additional upstream effects, e.g. production and transportation of fuel versus production of electricity, production of the vehicle, etc.
The reason I raised the issue is because I hear a lot about well-to-wheels efficiency of BEVs, but I've never heard anyone take into account the effect that conditioning the battery has in certain climates. It's one thing to say that the well-to-wheels efficiency of a BEV is around 60% compared to 16% for ICEVs, but if you're neglecting a large multiplicative efficiency hit in your chain, things like hybrid electric vehicles suddenly compare a lot more favorably.
And if you're comparing mileage on the basis of miles per gallon using energy input at a pump or cable that you paid for, it seems like a reasonable question to ask. Is that mpg figure calculated using the energy of the battery, or the energy that was paid for?
But again, as soon as you move up the chain on one car you need to move up the chain on the other or you’ll get as distorted picture of the tradeoffs.
NYC doesn’t really get cold enough to matter, average temperatures in January are above freezing. So you’re really talking about a subset of unusually cold days where it’s even slightly an issue.
Even combined, that is pretty much exactly the population of France alone, or about 15 million less than Germany alone - and neither of those is exactly a huge country.
Canada and Scandinavia, on the global scale, are small markets.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=canada+population+%2F+w...
How about you do it? I'm getting bored of recreating the character of Sigourney Weaver > Gwen DeMarco > Lieutenant Tawny Madison in Galaxy Quest.
Hint: less than Canada even when combined, both population and GDP.
> The parts of Russia where the rich people live
Central London?
>Central London?
Just voting for this wasn't enough.
It seems if you are sufficiently prepared they are not needed.
Extracting, transporting, manufacturing, and distributing gas takes quite a lot of energy. ~30-50% of gas CO2 emissions occur before you burn it though exact number depends on the specific source etc. But what we care about is vehicle ranges etc not this wider picture.
Thus, local is better.
So being local is again basically meaningless here.
The rise of EV’s will therefore strand more oil as smaller scale processing/distribution is less efficient. Being local to you doesn’t help because oil is transported to refineries before useful products are sent to you.
The crash continues to strand more production as refineries shut down.
It would seem that preventing local production and extraction for political reasons, would be a mistake. It would also seem that preventing pipelines would be too.
This makes sense. People are trying to stop a thing, via 100 paper cuts, instead of just stopping it. Meanwhile, this results in suboptimal production, which inceeases pollution.
If you expect future prices to spike then the wise choice is to avoid drilling until you can maximize gains.
If you expect future prices to remain unchanged then the wise choice is to avoid harming your local environment and have other countries despoil their own.
Only if you expect future prices will tank does drilling become a good idea.
Gasoline got us this far for a hundred years, now we can pursue a different path?
There was a plant in Missouri to convert turkey offal into crude oil using leftovers from a Butterball plant. It’s been shuttered and the parent company filed for chapter 11.
They are still just starting on it.
If there is such a word say, "Kazakh" vs "Kazakhstani" or "Russkiye" vs "Rossiyane", existence of such a word shows that this state is an empire.
Sometimes the "ethnic" word simply doesn't exist, say in "Canadian" or "American" for U.S.: it's only citizenship, there's no ethnicity at all - neither the word nor substance - showing a "melting pot" country.
I mean, concluding that Kazakhstan is an empire while the US is not pretty much discredits the whole thing.
That's a wild, unwarranted and patently wrong statement.
This create strong asymmetries and strong incentives to project power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oi...
"Owning the wrong books, posting a critical tweet, speaking to a journalist or disagreeing with the Crown Prince can earn you a death sentence." (https://reprieve.org/uk/2024/01/02/saudi-arabia-executed-at-...)
Yes, it is a 'miracle' fuel, if you ignore these factors:
(a) Global oil, gas, and coal supply chains. The resulting complex network has 6.09mn nodes and 15.70mn edges: https://github.com/Lkruitwagen/global-fossil-fuel-supply-cha.... And the defense budgets of all the countries protecting these assets and supply lines.
(b) Trillions of dollars in subsidies every year: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat...
(c) 10 million air pollution deaths/year: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
That's a drop in the bucket compared to the plausible future deaths from climate change. Burning gasoline moves carbon from the ground into the air, and we basically have no idea how to undo that operation at an appropriate scale.
If you consider the whole operation (extracting oil -> refining fuel -> burning fuel -> sequestering carbon -> storing said carbon underground), the whole cycle probably provides negative energy.
At this point, things like biodiesel or alcohol (which can be processed from plants) seem more energetically efficient.
Very straightforwardly true. But if you add some steps: having an industrial revolution -> developing technology -> manufacturing solar panels or other renewables on a massive scale -> collecting energy for the carbon sequestration - you could imagine the human race coming out ahead.
But what caused this initial sickness?
https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/links-between-air-polluti...
: In a study funded in part by EPA, researchers from Johns Hopkins University found that children exposed to outdoor coarse particulate matter (PM10-2.5), were more likely to develop asthma
: Coarse PM can come from roadway particles such as brake and tire wear, and mixtures of road dust and metals.
: This finding is significant because while researchers have generally found that exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is associated with the development of asthma and other respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
: While researchers do not fully understand how air pollution exposure increases asthma prevalence, evidence suggests air pollutants suppress genes that regulate the immune system’s ability to differentiate an allergen from a dangerous foreign substance, such as a virus or bacteria. The immune system then goes into action, setting up an inflammatory response whether the substance is harmful or not, which leads to asthma.
: In the study, researchers from the Children’s Center at Stanford University examined the impact of air pollution on two genes involved in immune tolerance in children from an area known to have high air pollution levels. Researchers found that short-term and long-term exposures to high levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and PM 2.5 were associated with alterations to these two genes and those alterations were significantly associated with asthma.
Here's one for you though: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/breaking-pollution-rec...
: Pollution has been recorded as a cause of death for the first time in the UK at the inquest of a nine-year-old girl.
: A coroner concluded air pollution made a "material contribution" to the death of Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah after a severe asthma attack in February 2013, in the landmark ruling.
: The schoolgirl, who lived in Lewisham, South London, was rushed to hospital at 2am before she died.
: Her family has long argued that pollution caused her death, and it has emerged that levels of nitrogen dioxide where she lived were unlawful.
For example, the highest income tax rate in the UK is 45%. If I estimate that it should be 60% can I truthfully say that right people are getting a 15% (of pretax income) income subsidy? There is 0% VAT on books, if I think it should be the standard 20% can I truthfully say the government is subsidising the purchases of books? When people were campaigning to abolish the 5% VAT on tampons and STs would it have been a valid counter argument to say they were being subsidised by not being subject to the 20% rate?
A graduate with 3 kids on 55k, with their employer spending £1138 on a bonus, gets
* £138 on NI (employer)
* £20 on NI (employee)
* £90 graduate tax (student loan payments which in the UK are income based)
* £400 income tax
* £290 child tax (the uk government give one parent about £1k a child per year, but then takes it away for those earning between 50 and 60k. Two parents can earn 50k each and receive the full amount, but a single parent on 60k gets nothing)
Leaving them with just £200, or 17.5% of the money their company spent on them.
For those of us earning 150k, who have paid off that student loan, have been fully taxed for the kids, get to keep about half of that £1138.
If you are suggesting the tax system is unfair or that NI is a way of disguising the fact that earned income is taxed at a higher rate than unearned income I agree with you!
Aww.. the Government are such a lovely, benevolent bunch, what would we do without them.
Pull out yet another ridiculous tax out of your ass, then slap it on everything and the things you didn't slap it on (yet)... call that a subsidy. Just government things * chefs kiss *
I hope you're not forgetting to factor in the positive effects of those 10 million people not being able to cause any more pollution </sarcasm>...
Before gasoline and gas people burned wood to stay warm, in houses with very primitive chimneys. Lots of people died from air pollution then, but maybe less because the populations were smaller. Same with cars: if you take accidents per driven mile most cars are extremely safe compared to horse riding. I don't think returning to the 1700's with the current world population is a viable option.
We plant a tree that gets burned, so embodied carbon gets released. And the modern appliances emit 1g/kg of particulate emission.
Personally I'm just tired of this discussion around energy density being brought up every time transportation is mentioned. These conversations almost never surface interesting new points.
and how long will that take to eventuate tho?
Yes, that's why I said early to mid 2030s: extrapolating current trends, that's when a 200kWh battery will cost $US 10k-15k.
The biggest thing about EV cars IMHO though is the responsiveness. There's no way a gas engine will ever keep up with that.
Like, 220V AC outlets are becoming pretty standard on newer EVs. In you can pre-heat or pre-cool the car no matter where it's parked. It's possible and now common to build EVs with a skateboard-like architecture which gives way more interior space than a gasoline car ever could. You can build cars with 2, 3 or even 4 motors, with super fast torque vectoring. It's feasible to have steering on the rear wheels. And we're not even done with the innovations. Look at Hyundai's recently announced Uni Wheel design which frees up even more interior space.
It's frankly inexcusable to not be specific when you're citing an article where both figures are clearly visible. You must have seen it, and consciously chosen to ignore it, causing unnecessary confusion.
A 2012 Toyota Camry was rated around 28 mpg combined. A 2025 is rated at 46 mpg combined. That's a 60 percent improvement.
I don't think the model s has seen anywhere near a 60 percent improvement in range or efficiency during the same time span.
Another knock against gasoline is that you spend about 1 EV battery pack of energy to refine a cars tank of gasoline from crude oil in the first place.
For 20-years now we’ve heard graphene, would revolutionize the world.
Not just batteries, but throughout tech.
But unless I mistaken, there’s not a single graphene product on the market yet.
Maybe it’ll be like AI. Where no major advancements happened for 50-years, and then ChatGPT was made.
https://d29xot63vimef3.cloudfront.net/image/popular-science/...
You can buy graphene batteries right now.
They are more expensive than non-graphene batteries so unless you have a need for the extra performance you tend to overlook them when shopping for batteries.
(graphene being well regarded for being able to do anything but leave the lab for actual real world use)
But designing a secondary (rechargeable) cell is a different story... Every promising chemistry has been investigated for many decades and yet the successes are few. Magnesium, sodium or aluminium-based rechargeable battery can in theory be just as capable as lithium-based one, but we can't just get them to work.
They promised that they were going to start using a manufacturing technique called dry electrode coating, and they have done that.
Same article since 2010, always Coming Soon™.
I suppose it depends on what risk you're concerned about, but if you've got the cashflow to flush money down the lease rabbithole, you probably don't care too much about a couple grand difference in value down the road on your car, beyond academically.
Or something like that.
go back to 2010 and show past you the batteries we've got now, you'd be impressed by what huge progress there was.
The gain in capacity has also been noticable. It's a few percent per year, but over a decade that adds up.
The Tesla Model S was introduced with 60 and 85 kWh batteries ~10 years ago. Today you can buy vehicles in the same class with 120 kWh, and dozens of models with 85+ kWh: https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/useable-battery-capacity-...
Of course affordability remains a problem, but the battery capacity per vehicle has drastically improved, even without world shattering breakthroughs in chemistry.
I’m hoping maybe in a few years a 2023 Ioniq 5 will be affordable enough, but we will see.
Computers get much better every couple years, but you don't dismiss those as "Coming Soon™".
Did you write this from 2010? _Consumer_ computer products has been barely getting any better for a decade now. (last big WOW for me personally was getting first gen Retina MacBook Pro with SSD).
Now, the phones? Those have improved significantly. The cameras, the on-device AI, and where those two things were blended together - night photography, and translating text within images (even though image translation was first demonstrated on phones in 2010, it's a much better experience now).
"Wow" or not, processors are at least twice as fast per core compared to several years ago, and they have double the cores too. And a 4070 is more than 5x as fast as a 770.
When I see articles talking about electric car improvements that are possible in the next handful of years, 2x is usually at the high end. None of them go near 5x.
Plenty of reasons right now to hold off buying an EV; upfront or operating costs, lack of at home charging, inability to get access to fast chargers for whatever reason, inability to tow heavy loads to desired destinations, etc. I sincerely doubt solid state batteries is one of the concerns on most people's list.
With current EVs I'd have to keep that it a very long time just to break even with the energy used in manufacturing. I think I've heard estimates of about 20,000-30,000 miles to break even.
For a number reasons I don't find the current EV offerings compelling enough to trade in my old Golf yet. Right now I don't think there's anything I need to do for my use-cases that I could do better in a current EV.
Solid state is more or less progressing on a time line that hasn't really deviated a lot from what was projected a few years ago. There are a few companies out there that by now have proven that they can build cells that last lots of cycles and generally perform well. Taking those cells to production necessarily involves a series of increasingly larger plants to produce these cells and testing the hell out of the resulting cells. This is a slow process but it seems like a few companies are ramping up production volumes.
Quantumscape is a good example. They are exactly where they said they would be a few years ago. They've delivered sample cells to a few of their customers (VW and a few others) and the tests came back positive. I think this year they are building small production facility to start producing low volumes of cells. If that's successful, we might see some cars from 2026/2027 onwards or so. But I would expect volume production to be dominated by LFP and increasingly sodium ion batteries for cheaper EVs for quite some time. They are good enough. Higher energy density will come at a premium.