A new chapter begins for EV batteries with the expiry of key LFP patents

Anyone who needs their help already knows the promise of LFP in at least enough details that they would need the patent search anyway as part of their efforts to learn if it is right for them. All secondary patents are important, the only question is: do you license them, work around them, or not infringe in the first place. (I'm going to ignore the possibility of intentional infringing though that happens)

Self driving cars have had many incremental improvements. I think fusion power is actually making progress, not clear about solid state batteries. Seems more companies closing than making solid progress.

>Self driving cars are…I guess they are here already.

They may be where you are, but they aren't generally here.

I am happy to pay extra $100 for Solid State Battery on Apple Watch. I am not sure if other brands could get this advantage.

And yet Apple just isn't interested any more.

If your source on that is a Toyota press release, take it with a huge grain of (lithium) salt.

Toyota has been saying similar things for a very long time. But they continue to make extremely poor bets, except for their hybrids. There's something really odd about their management culture that prevents them from finding the common and easy path of lithium ion batteries that everybody has already taken.

Yes, the largest issue is that they heating isn't enabled unless it's charging or 'knows' it will be soon.

Ps: the heating is increasingly heat pump based instead of resistive.

It does, but it costs is complex, requires power and time.

It's noticeable even in climates like NZ.

There are coldgating stories about LFP. Some even reduce output and very low SOC and temperature, so you drive 60km/h in highway.

Sodium is vastly superior here and CATL is not going to be giving it away for free.

There are variants of the Model Y with LFP batteries.

What? How does an SUV require less power per cf than a sedan? I would think that aero alone would always be worse for an SUV, making sedans more efficient.

such strange unit of measurement. cubic feet of space. especially for civilian transport when most of the time no one uses that space. i mean most of the time its one person per car without any baggage. what's important is weight of the car. and i bet suv is heavier than sedans.

I've tried to express SUV's as in American SUVs - full sized 7 seat monstrosity. Most EV SUVs right now are crossovers, i.e. Model Y. Cybertruck is closest approximation and it uses nearly 2x more power than Model Y. Even with ~most advanced batteries people still think Cybertruck's range is way too little whereas I'm pretty certain majority of Model Y's sold are LFPs.

When are the aluminum batteries coming?

It still does have expensive materials (cheaper form of graphite), but a little bit less of it, namely lithium and there's something else I can't remember.

> LFP charging in cold has pretty much been solved by adding a heater to battery pack.

That's a hack, not a solution.

> Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.

Wanna bet? LFP is ~1,000 GWh scale right now. GWh scale is 0.1%.

Does the heater handle real winters, like they have in Alaska, Mongolia, and parts of Russia north of it? Or just European and American "winters" where -20°C is considered hardcore? Gasoline powered engines handle this well, and you can warm them up with a gasoline torch if they stay outside for too long and refuse to start. The cold does not destroy them.

Using lfp at low temp is not an issue. Charging is the problem.

One thing I hadn't groked about Sodium Ion was the enormous Voltage range leads to a bit of an issue when it comes to current. You have a 4x voltage from top to bottom of the battery and this also means your current is 4x as well for the same power output. This becomes a bit of an issue and it is part of the efficiency equation, not just externally to the battery where wires have to be much larger than LFP or LI but internally due to internal resistance.

Sodium gravimetric density is same. Volumetric is worse. Shipping containers generally cost by volume, but given how dense batteries are I suspect this won't matter.

> While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working.

Oh man, when I first moved to Austin and used the bus as my only method of transport, getting to work was usually straightforward, but whenever I wanted to go somewhere on the weekend, I prepared for the fact that there'd be a detour around downtown, where I normally make my transfer. I'd have to get off the bus somewhere new and try to figure out where to catch the bus for the next leg.

There were also a few occasions where there was over an hour between the "every 30 minutes" bus. Rare, but it happened. Buses naturally tend to clump together, so they need careful, intentional management to prevent this.

Public transit is great, and we need more, but it's not as reliable as I'd like. Cars are far more reliable, at least for moderately wealthy people who can afford to buy new-ish and keep them well-maintained. Bikes, too, if you're able to bike in rain and snow. (I ended up switching to almost 100% bike travel after about three years, and just kept a change of clothes at work, and at least dry socks, shirt, and underwear in my bag. Spare pants added too much bulk to lug around.)

Modern cars tend to be very reliable in the early years. As they get older they get less reliable. I suspect your friends issue was budget, they were not willing (likely able) to spend the money needed to have a reliable car)

> dense towns/cities will always be more affordable

In my experience, that isn't true. At the very least, it depends on what your preferences are. If I moved my home from outside Austin to inside the city, I couldn't afford it.

Density is more expensive. Not just because of demand for the area (though that doesn't help), but because density requires different building methods. Your single family house can be built so cheaply because it doesn't have to support the weight of many floors above; nor does it need to be fireproof because in the rare fire you can evacuate. (density means more people are displaced, fires are more likely, and longer distances to get away)

Density is also more expensive because higher costs are worth it. A rural area cannot afford things like library in walking distance of every farmer (every farmer would have to pay for a personal librarian), but in a dense area it is only a couple bucks for each one - but that all adds up to hundreds of dollars in extra costs that less dense areas do without. (you decide if it is worth the cost)

Suburbs do pay for their infrastructure. Strongtowns keeps spreading the myth that they can't, but the numbers they use don't add up. They choose not to pay for transit because they don't need it.

NYC tunnels have outsized cost, but even tunnels that cost 10% of that would not be cheap. Most of the NYC subway was built quickly and relatively cheaply by digging trenches and covering them later, not by boring tunnels. NYC used to use elevated trains a lot, and still has plenty of those outside Manhattan, but they have other downsides, such as noise.

NYC subway has two drivers per train due to the trade union resistance. Very understandable, even though not really necessary.

Self-driving buses could be also remotely driven in situations that require special handling, by a smaller number of drivers.

As usual, it mostly takes a political will, the technology is not rocket science; one of the poster kids of that is Curitiba in Brazil.

Its laughable to think the cities of America in 2025 still look the same and function the same as the cities of America in 1925. "Cities" weren't nearly as sparsely populated and highly zoned as many suburbs are these days. You didn't have neighborhoods with seemingly fractal patterns of roads ending in cul-de-sacs the size of several city blocks with only a couple entrances and exits like what seems to be common these days. The average American urban household in 1920 didn't live on a quarter acre lot multiple miles away from the nearest food source. So yeah, there were streetcar suburbs as well as the denser city apartments and rowhouses, they were largely grid patterns with a major boulevard. They didn't sprawl anywhere near as far. They weren't nearly as insulated.

> Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport

I can point to dozens of cities around me that never had actual public transportation throughout their entire history, and that's just a small part that I happen to know off-hand. Few places actually had any kind of real public transit.

Rural communities often still had an expectation of some amount of private transportation accessible. What, are you really tiling the soil by hand? No, you've got horses.

Look, I'm not saying public transportation can't happen in the US today. Obviously it can. There are lots of places where it does today. There are even more places that could have it tomorrow if the voters decided to do so. There are also lots of places that require quite a bit of urban redesign to actually make transit make sense for those communities.

I'll give you an example. I used to know someone who worked in Dallas, around I-635 and US-75[0]. They lived someplace like this. [1] How does public transit serve this person effectively? How would you have a bus service with both decent ridership and good service times in a town like Forney here, while not just having the bus snake through the mazes of neighborhoods? How do you convince someone to ride the bus to work when its probably going to have poor service intervals, require multiple changes, and ultimately likely to take considerably more time than the average day in the car?

Then copy and paste that same issue hundreds of times over. How does transit make sense in Seis Lagos or the rest of Lucas for that matter? [2] These people likely work in West Plano or Dallas. How do you convince them to take the bus?

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/ETD6a9XgTFoZCYR78

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/WwLYVAuquAs4ecpD8

[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/TdxZAgjdbiUbYHEE8

What's the price cap got to do with it? You can get tariffs that are very cheap and outside of the price cap: https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Good...

Frying the planet is bad. That said i don't see the reliance argument for uranium. There's a variety of existing sources on the planet and some we stopped mining. It's proportionally a super small financial element of the energy production process unlike with fossil fuels. So in the case of let's say Putin's Russia you can avoid using their or let's say Kazakhstan's fuel and if you don't but don't take it's gas directly or via intermediaries like armenia then Russia still ends up in the financial shitter because their income from Rosatom/uranium one/... doesn't even compare.

It's almost inviting anti renewables arguments based on things like aluminium mostly being produced in china and russia or based on where the vast majority of panels are produced, etc.

It's not that simple. For example, in the The Netherlands, the use of electricity was stable for a long time. Mostly because all kinds of equipment (light bulbs, etc) got more efficient.

Grid operators predicted that with the energy transition, demand would rise, but politics wanted to keep prices low and limited investments.

So now, there is a big problem in the entire country connecting companies or new residential areas to the grid independent of how electricity is generated.

At the same time, the government is extremely forward looking and builds massive interconnection points on the North-Sea. Not a bad idea in the long run, but in the short run it does make electricity from wind on sea more expensive.

That said, the biggest hit to EU countries is that cheap natural gas disappeared. Coal is not cheap and extremely polluting. Natural gas was cheap for a while. Until it wasn't.

The European situation is a bit more complicated. It was very well known for a long time that Russia is a ticking time bomb in our backyard yet we made ourselves nearly dependent on their energy supplies and now combined with the push for renewables (which in my opinion is the right thing to do) we have a crisis. Now there are also lot of countries in the EU with different priorities, so while in theory we could build long-range HVDC connections across borders, it is very hard to do.

Old wind turbines might be perfectly fine but they are also no longer competitive with modern replacements. Usually it does make sense to replace them with more modern alternatives. Subsidies have gotten very low because carbon credits are now a much more important way for renewables to boost their income (most negative prices reflect that).

Offshore wind is facing the challenge that it is more expensive than onshore wind and also that solar is having a day with ever decreasing prices. Governments are trying hard to minimize the cost of the energy transition, offshore is primarily hurting because of this.

>There must be an absolutely fantastic opportunity to make money and investors should be like vultures grabbing new projects for renewables.

They are. While the marginal price is being set (most of the time) by expensive gas renewables projects are making money hand over fist.

Sounds like you think renewables aren't cheaper. It is hard to tell, but we have a natural experiment going on in Australia that may shed some light.

The state of South Australia (SA) has no coal or gas, and is a long way from anywhere so importing those fuels are expensive. The eastern states live on a sea of coal and gas, exporting a huge amounts of it overseas.

Historically the price of electricity SA has always been more expensive than elsewhere. When renewables became an option, SA enthusiastically adopted them. Prices went up even more for a while presumable because of the CAPEX in building the renewable infrastructure. For a while SA, had the largest grid battery on the planet (others are now bigger), which is a little surprising for a place with a population of just 1.8M. Right over a year they average about 80% of renewable. From what I can tell the balance is supplied by gas peakers. They say they will be 100% renewable by 2027. SA is now paying about £0.20 / kWh retail.

SA transition happened over 2 decades. For the most of those two decades the eastern Australian states governments did mostly nothing, which is to say their coal fired power stations just kept chugging along. They couldn't do exactly nothing because the population is growing and they needed new supply. The cheapest way to add that was with renewables, filling in any gaps with more expensive gas peakers. The Federal government helped by subsidising solar. For the most of those 2 decades SA was transitioning impact of renewables in the eastern states was small, so their electricity prices remained stable while SA's went up. But it didn't stay that way.

Renewables contribution kept growing. Solar in particular accelerated. The Federal subsidies were designed to gradually reduce to 0 by 2030, but the impact of those reducing subsidies were more than offset by solar panel prices reducing. What those subsidies did do is train a generation of tradesmen on how to install them efficiently, and so Australia despite its high wages now has one of the cheapest installation costs for household solar. The end result of all that is now Australia has the highest penetration of household solar in the world, supplying well over 50% of demand when the sun is shining.

It turns out the renewables are free market poison for coal fired power plants. The coal plants were designed to make a profit by operating for 24 hours a day. Solar now reduces the wholesale price of electricity to $0 for 8 hours a day. Those wind installs intermittently rob them of income overnight. Compounding the problem is governments privatised the coal fired power plants while they were at mid life, priced on the basis of selling power for 24 hours. Presumably the logic was to sell them off while they were still making money, so the public purse could avoid shoulder the huge CAPEX of replacing them when the time came. But the introduction of renewables means they now aren't making money, so their private operators are shutting them down before their anticipated EOL has been reached, which has caused a mad scramble to replace the lost generation.

As the eastern states still have a low'ish penetration of renewables, the cheapest option to replace those coal fired generators is yet more renewables, supplemented with yet more gas peakers. The CAPEX needed to do that has created it's own crisis of sorts, so now the price of electricity in eastern states has reached parity with SA for the first time in history. Meanwhile the electricity produced by gas peakers is comparatively expensive, so expensive that with a little nudge it's cheaper for a household to buy a battery so they don't have to purchase gas electricity. The Federal government has just stepped in to provide that nudge, with a 30% subsidy (also gradually sun setting by 2030, I think). I'm not sure it was needed a wholesale battery prices dropped by 30% last year, but the publicity sure focused a lot of household owners minds on how to reduce their electricity bill. That has lead to an explosion of new battery installs and yet more solar, and a chronic shortage of installers which is amazing given the size of the solar industry in Australia.

If the price of solar and batteries keep dropping then the outcome looks to me that household solar + batteries will replace coal as the major supplier of electricity in Australia. Gas peakers will continue on for a while, but their high price means eventually renewables plus over provisioning plus storage will wipe them out. We've yet to figure out what we can do with all the excess but unreliable power that over provisioning will produce, but there are any number of entrepreneurs trying to figure out how they can make money out of it by producing ammonia, hydrogen and metallurgical refining.

SA will get there well before anyone else. If their own estimates are accurate, by 2028. Their continuing CAPEX will be mostly done at that point, and I guess their inflation adjusted electricity prices will start dropping. They may well have the lowest prices for electricity in mainland Australia for a while.

Include it and it's still cheaper than, say, nuclear.

Also ... even when storage is included, you still gain freedom from opex spending for fuel (that is, lining oily pockets). Once there, renewables are "pure payoff".

I've talked to people from that very lab at the Université de Montréal many years ago, before the parent expired.

The IP was licensed by Hydro-Quebec first, and some of it was also held by UT. A123 was a US company manufacturing LFP batteries in 2005 in infringement of the patents.

A123, Hydro-Quebec, UT spent 15 years suing each other (and also suing BAK technology in China and other companies that used the technology), complete with secondary patents, etc...

Hydro-Quebec actually was producing LFP batteries commercially, along with an EV program. Those ventures were cancelled, in no small part because of the political issues when Canadian SoEs compete with American businesses (but also for other reasons). HQ is restarting the LFP manufacturing program now, though, through a new spinoff.

Anyways, this is not like Nortel at all - we had two decades of a headstart and we didn't give the license to Chinese companies until quite a few years later. A big part of the issue is because an American company violated the IP, then filed secondary pattents and tried to get the originals invalidated, which led to a huge legal battle strongly discouraging investment. There was really no mistake done in licensing it to Chinese companies.

It was under 3kWh.

The idea was just to illustrate how much lithium there is getting thrown away, I think the better option is recycling the lithium in the cells into re-usable raw material.

> The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year.

This is often because someone holds an important patent but either isn't licensing it to others because they're actually manufacturing it (implying they're holding back everyone else in the market), or they're asking too much and then almost everyone uses the existing technology instead of licensing the patent, again holding things back. As soon as the patent expires everyone starts using it.

> The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.

This is often even worse, because then you have a hundred companies with patents and as soon as one of them goes out of business the patents go to a troll who starts shaking everyone down because MAD doesn't apply to trolls who don't make anything. And then companies wary of being subjected to that will be avoiding doing anything under patent until the patents expire.

Companies in industries like this should probably start using some kind of patent GPL where you have to permanently license all your patents to everyone else who does the same, the purpose of which is to thwart trolls because everyone has to put their patents in while they're still in business or they'll be sued, and then the patents are already in by the time a failing company gets liquidated.

Doesn't that indicate that patents are being used to suppress competitors rather than as a direct revenue source? I don't see how that indicates patents aren't an issue.