Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?
construction-physics.com
construction-physics.com
The flavour you want is polymer, single ion conducting solid state with an ion transport activation energy below 10kJ/mol at room temperature and no phase transitions from -40C to 80C.
That is the holy grail of SS batteries.
Our Amearthican designs would never have such flaws. They are completely safe, and several are operating around the galaxy already, producing hundreds of exawatts. Unlike the stellar panels recommended by those ill-advised "environmentalists" which can't work in nebula weather, or helioshock plasma turbines that rely on the stellar wind, our plants provide a sustainable base load in all conditions.
I say was, because the current problem is that those "environmentalists" you mentioned managed to scare remaining interstellar governments away from this technology, which made them double down on biomass extraction.
On the other hand Carter did what she set out to do while McKay fscked up and wasn't trying to blow anything up, so there is also that.
Zero Point Module, often abbreviated ZPM, is a power source, created by the Ancients, capable of supplying tremendous amounts of energy. It is one of the most formidable power sources known to exist, having been developed by the Ancients several million years ago during their reign of the Milky Way galaxy
Carter: I've finished comparing Goa'uld control crystals, all that glow is completely unnecessary.
O'Neill: So they added lights inside closed boxes because…?
Teal'c: The Goa'uld have always favoured displays of grandeur over practicality.
O'Neill: Hold on. You're telling me the galaxy's self-proclaimed gods are flying around in gamer motherboards?
Carter: Sir…
Daniel: No, I think Jack's right.
O'Neill: I am?
Daniel: Glowing lights everywhere, gold trim, needlessly dramatic startup sequence. And they definitely treat us as pawns in their games.
Teal'c: Indeed.
Fortunately we are not on Chulak.
Well that's fine for terrestrial use but aerospace needs that range to be expanded a little in both directions, otherwise it won't be much of a holy grail if it won't cover the needs of one of the largest growing industries.
I believe I get the positive intention behind your post, btw - to defend conversation against shallow dismissals - and of course appreciate that. But if you'd please express it in a respectful way in the future, then you'll be contributing to good conversation rather than degrading it further.
Perhaps a polymer will be invented that can’t be pierced by dendrites. But existing polymers need to be heated for ion transfer efficiency and are combustable.
Technically, QuantumScape also uses an organic liquid catholyte inside the cathode. So it’s not “pure” solid state.
what makes it so? I don't know anything about this subject, I'm really curious now about what the perfect battery would be.
But 10kJ/mol of activation energy is another way of saying less than 100mV of internal loses, and avoiding phase transitions means that your battery won't stop working on that temperature range.
I wish BYD could bring their new infra to the US - it looks pretty ::ahem:: solid!
I don't have a charger that can supply the necessary 350 Amps though.
They also have ridiculous amount of charge cycles. 10x higher than regular Lithium Ion IIRC.
They are more expensive and are larger and heavier for the same stored energy though.
And, while they CAN still catch fire, they are apparently way harder to do so.
The term has obviously been selected because of how revolutionary solid-state electronic devices were/are. And it's not like they selected it after a revolutionary energy storage device was introduced. Solid-state batteries (cells) are an incremental improvement, at best.
And because this is the web: I am not being negative about the technology. I happen to be of the radical opinion that incremental improvements are good, actually.
As for wood batteries,
Most usage of the term 'battery' is independent of technology, outside of usually wanting electricity as the interface. The fact that most batteries people talk about happen to be electrochemical cells is incidental -- it's irrelevant to whatever they are actually talking about. So yes, a lot of the time 'battery' happens to refer to electrochemical cells, but it also refers to energy storage devices in general, which wood obviously is.
The problem with wood being a "solid-state battery" is surely the solid-state part.
Q: I mean how does that even work, solid-state combustion?
A: No, it's still obviously a normal chemical cell. You do a chemistry and these special "electrodes" turn the result into electricity.
Q: Can you recharge it?
A: Well, not in your own home, but in your backyard, maybe sort of.
If we are to use the term 'solid-state' to refer to anything that is solid, as in "solid-state battery", and we can get electricity from burning wood, I don't see the problem with referring to wood as a solid-state battery.
Wood isn't an energy storage device. You can't have a piece of wood where the energy has been depleted. There is no device. Wood is the stored energy - it's a fuel. You consume it in some device, like a furnace, to generate energy.
The "wood is a solid-state battery" thing was an absurd rhetorical device I used to point out -- particularly in a field so significantly connected to electronics -- that merely substituting a liquid for a solid does not justify using what will obviously be understood to be a reference to solid-state electronics.
P.S. A coal-fired steam engine is a solid-state motor.
A steam engine isn't a solid-state motor.
For the purist in doctrine and structure, wood is not a battery. If one is somewhere between neutral and radical, then wood is a battery that was built by its integrated disposable solar cells.
Tbf just like computronium, I actually don't care if my battery is liquid or solid but that almost every atom or molecule that makes up the battery is used for that purpose. I guess we could call it powertronium!
I am surprised they didn't point out the literal "killer app" - military drones. Energy density is king for any airborne power source. And dendrite growth during charge/discharge cycling isn't as big a deal for that application (how many times would you need to charge a disposable weapon?)
Where fiber optic is used though, that is the limit. That is a minority though.
Also, the last big change is network relay drones that fly at a few 1000 ft that allow other drones to have more range. The AI thing hasn't played out because the boards are too expensive to use in 1-way kit.
There's also payload and loiter time to consider.
If you have a drone that can watch the battlefield for hours instead of minutes that is incredibly useful. Same story if you have a drone that can 3x its payload.
- WW2 proximity fuzes that had batteries where the electrolyte was in a vial that got smashed by the G-forces of being shot out of a cannon providing power to the radio inside for the 10 seconds it needs to get to the incoming aircraft
- Hearing aid Zinc-Air batteries, that are extremely energy dense because you only have to actually manufacture the anode, the cathode is the entire atmosphere of the Earth
- Missile batteries, which are often Lithium-silicon/Iron Disulfide batteries that borrow some thermal energy from the rocket motor to get a molten salt electrolyte
Speaking of nuclear, getting tons of the material that powers mars rovers and putting them in every home would generate enough power for decades... At the cost of being able to build a nuclear bomb in a garage.
I live in western Pennsylvania and have both natural gas and electric service, a roof and 1/3 acre of land to utilize. I would love to get rid of at least one of my utility bills and I’m becoming more interested in decoupling from the electric grid than natural gas service. I dream of a future where competition comes to monopoly utilities by way of direct competition with each other as there is a not so far off future where I can utilize solar, batteries and a natural gas fuel cell to cut ties with my Electric Utility. If that kind of competition can exist then the game is on for those utilities to start fighting for customers.
Some places don't allow going off-grid. They force everyone in neighbourhood to pay for gas and/or electricity infrastructure even if you're not using it.
So many people have gone offgrid solar in Pakistan that it is causing severe issues for their electricity market and existing infrastructure.
The energy density is great, but the power density is really bad. For most applications, you still want a battery in addition to the RTG.
I don't know how easy it is to make a nuclear bomb from them, it is not the right isotope. You can probably make a nuclear exploding thing, like a dirty bomb, but not the nuclear bombs we know.
Last time I looked into this was 5 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy, take it with a grain of salt.
And yah, batteries would still be needed to even out the load, but it is extremely predictable and can be offset with preheating water and other things during valleys of usage, also those rovers actually have 500w of power!
I don't know about production, it is a hypothetical and I just assumed you had a bunch of plutonium-238 available, but as I understand it, rather than being an enrichment problem as with uranium-235/238, it is just not made using the same process as plutonium-239 to begin with.
And it's still improving at about 5% per year.
Anyone who’s ever driven between Seattle and Portland and seen the e16b charging lots of people sleeping in their cars knows there is a whole different side to your rosey picture.
EV owners are still internalizing their range anxiety into a benefit.
I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
What? I said no such thing. I would hate to wait two hours at a refueling station.
> it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
I guess I live in fantasy land then.
Maybe the non-Tesla charging story is crap, but I made conscious choices not to participate in that circus.
I have no range anxiety. I point the car where I want to go, it tells me where to charge and for how long, and it’s earned my trust over many road trips. It hasn’t been wrong yet.
There is virtually no EV sold on the market today that takes two hours to charge to 80% at a HVDC charger.
"I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”."
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 takes about 20 minutes to go from 10% SOC to 80% SOC in about 18 min with an 800v charger. That equates to about 3 hours of driving on the highway.
So when you say it’s got a 350 mile range, but then make the point you only need to charge to 40% that you would be fine with a single vehicle that had a 140mile range?
I swear buying an EV in 2026 breaks brains. The push back has been so bad because the mfgs pushed the single car lie… but the people that jumped in now need to defend their $60,000 purchases.
I get it, but please don’t think you guys are sneaky about it. We all know what it is.
“5-10 minutes every two hours” … lol, that’s good when you’re going from LA to San Diego. If I had to stop every two hours on a road trip I’d get a train ticket, it would feel a lot faster.
Sorry, now you're spewing nonsense. LA to SD does not require charging at all.
I did more than 120000 miles of road trips in my EVs across the US and Canada, even before they were fully covered with charging networks. So I know a thing or two about that.
A good way to think about charging is not in kilowatts but in miles per hour. Tesla Model 3 peak charging rate is 1000 miles per hour, and the average on 10-80% is around 600 mph. The state-of-the-art Chinese cars can charge at 3000 miles per hour and more than 1200 mph on average.
So if you want to do a 500-mile road trip (~8 hours of driving), that's about 45 minutes of charging time for a Tesla and less than 30 minutes for modern Chinese cars.
But wait, there's more! For a 500-mile road trip, you will have at least 200 initial miles covered by your home charging or if you stay overnight in a hotel with a charging station. So that's even less time spent charging.
And yeah, people usually prefer to do more frequent charges rather than drawing the battery down to 10% to alleviate the range anxiety and just as a safety buffer.
I mean, you can, because you are clearly emotionally tied into your purchase. But I can’t as an engineer.
I think you should not get an EV. But I like mine.
And even if you totally forget about charging and you really need to go, that's just an additional ~20 minutes or so. You don't even need to plan the route anymore, with so many charging stations available: https://supercharge.info/
> as an engineer.
I have doubts about that.
But I can't assume every time I go leave in my gas-fired Honda that the tank is going to be completely full.
I might decide to fill up before I leave town on a long trip, or I might decide to just head out and start it with whatever's already in the tank.
And either way: Refilling will need to happen at some point, just like with an EV.
And that's fine. I'll probably be stopping every couple of hours or so anyway, if I'm doing it right.
---
There was a time when I'd cannonball every trip as hard as I could, but it was exhausting to do that. I'd work so hard to minimize travel time ("I must not waste time!") that I was basically useless once I finally arrived at my destination. It was terrible. When I'd finally finish the trip, I would often be in such a bad way that my brain would be fried, my abdominal muscles would hurt, and I was very drained of energy; I was always a dysfunctional asshole who needed a proper nap.
But nowadays, I grant myself the time to take things a little easier and take breaks. This method's on-road time takes longer than a cannonball, but that's OK: It allows me to still be a functional and sane human once I arrive where I'm going.
I mean: I'm not delivering paid-by-the-mile packages here. Rather, I'm going somewhere because I want to enjoy myself when I get there, or because I have work to do (or sometimes a combination of both). Therefore, I do not have to race.
And now that I'm not trying to race from A to B anymore and I choose to take it easy periodically as I go, the trip itself isn't such an exertion.
I can get some fun and/or constructive stuff done once I finally arrive, or if it's appropriate I can lay down for some properly-restorative sleep like a sane person who isn't feeling like they just pulled an all-nighter working on some deeply-involved project that they stubbornly refused to pull myself away from.
The overall time investment of a road trip (including eventual wind-down and recovery) is about the same, but I find that the results are better for the entire duration.
And that's me, with my gas-powered van that can go an astounding 500 miles between refuelling stops.
I don't need that much range to take a long trip; it doesn't help much there at all. And in my normal daily life, the big fuel tank mostly just stretches out the time between visits to my favorite gas station between home and work.
With the long-trip prerogatives I've described, an EV would normally do fine.
And the rest of the time, at least for those whose living situation can allow it: Plugging in at home can often completely eliminate refueling stops during any series of normal weeks. (When EV owners laugh about not being able to remember when the last time they needed to stop at a gas station was, they aren't joking. It works.)
First, you're not assuming good faith.
Second, I got a used Model 3 for $16k. I also have an F150. I _choose_ to drive the 3 on road trips. I am not suffering from whatever mental illness you think EV drivers are.
Ev's are not 60,000 purchases anymore. They should be significantly cheaper than ICE cars since they are fundamentally simpler
"“5-10 minutes every two hours” … lol, that’s good when you’re going from LA to San Diego. If I had to stop every two hours on a road trip I’d get a train ticket, it would feel a lot faster."
I would be interested to know where you are located in the USA that a train is faster than driving on the highway, its very rare.
Wild fucking west right there.
You can buy BYD vehicles without airbags.
They’re Chinese market vehicles.
It’s like DJI drones, they work, and they cheap, some are even decent performance on paper, but they aren’t “real” in a sense that serious users would demand.
It’s OK if a BYD is bricked with a bad OTA. It’s less OK for the auto industry in the rest of the world.
It’s taken Tesla a LONG time to figure out building computers is easy, and cars are hard. Same for BYD.
At the same time, western manufacturers are closing factories and begging for EU bailouts.
Not sure what you trying to say about BYD. I don't like them as cars, my friends do indeed have reliability issues and early ones are super uncomfortable. Latest ones are tacky with crappy software. IMO there's a lot of hype about them for some unknown reason. You can get vastly better deals over here.
Anyway there's only 1 car with over 500kW charge rate, only 5 over 400kW you can buy here - https://evdb.nz/evs?dcCharging=350%2B&mega=true
So they are not as common as you think they are. They'll probably come tho. Fastest charging BYD you can get here is 150kW lol.
meanwhile ICE has gotten ridiculously clean and efficient over the years it is more efficient at the shaft does not settle total-system efficiency, cost, weight, resource use, grid losses, battery production, or suitability for every operating env. Comparing an engine with a motor while ignoring the battery and electricity supply chain is silly
I still do not trust that sitting on a pile of lithium batteries is safe. NMC does not mean non flammable or consequence free. LFP cells can still enter thermal runaway, release toxic gases, reignite, and require difficult firefighting procedures. They also generally trade energy density and cold-weather performance for that improved safety. Also the speed charging ? That dramatically reduces the stability and lifespan of the batteries. Ton of used EVs not being sold because the battery replacement is somewhere between 40~60% of the car's value.
we had ICE for over a century now, its just like a software that gets continuous updates ICE systems are highly optimized, repairable, energy-dense, fast to refuel, and supported by enormous infrastructure. EVs are improving faster partly because they still have major weaknesses to solve. A steeper improvement curve does not prove that the present technology is superior for every use case neither is using the latest javascript framework.
Internal combustion is not clean, and is inherently significantly less efficient than an electric motor.
Also, LFP chemistries are incredibly safe compared to NMC, which is what you're concerned about in terms of thermal runaway.
ICE is mostly stagnant tech. Meanwhile EV tech is rapidly improving!
Depends on your definition of cold. California cold sure. Wisconsin cold you are looking at losing 40%-60% range.
but its rare you say ?
Oh? Show me a model of EV that has it is going to lower capacity battery heating and cooling systems.
I’m an automotive EE… I can’t name any. I’m working on things that will go in 2032 vehicles. Surprise, most are ICE, but of the EV vehicles the battery protection systems are becoming more rugged, not less.
Where does your supposition come from?
A person who really needs an ICE car would encourage others to buy EVs because it would reduce oil demand, and with demand destruction, considerably lower oil prices. With lowered demand, Saudi Arabia can supply a barrel for $5 - $10/barrel from Ghawar Field. Which means a gas-head who commutes every day from Yukon, Canada to Guadalajara, Mexico has a significantly lower gas bill.
The only people who wants everyone to buy ICE are fossil fuel shills.
so you admit EV is a cult if ICE is a religion ? that's not okay.
The whole world is in a transition phase. For some it will make sense to jump to pure EV use, for others it won't. That whole “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” thing...
I have one of each. They work well for different reasons.
EV is the charge-at-home city car that is preferred for every day use.
The ICE is for when two cars are needed and long distance travel because charging stations here are not well sorted yet.
My plan for the future: The ICE car will be replaced with a hybrid with a significant emphasis on battery. Then eventually it'll be an EV as well. We'll get there.
The EV push back is because the MBAs decide to market them as replacement daily drivers. And despite the people that went all in being part of the same reality that has caused the massive pushback against EVs… they will defend their purchases to the death.
I have had two EVs for around town. Love em. But not real for only car outside of California.
Tell that to the millions of people in EU and China who have EVs as their only car. I swear Americans live in the 50s in 2026.
a) 37% of US households own two vehicles. This is the biggest demographic and they can definitely have one EV.
b) College students and professors/administrators who live close to campus. They drive a lot less, ~5K miles/year instead of 12 - 15K miles/year.
c) Retired people, very old people who only drive around town for shopping, doctor appointments.
As adoption increases, most Americans would have seen first hand that EVs work and they can charge anywhere, electricity is not scarce and every building has electricity (don't need to go somewhere special just to charge it), electricity is not the work of the devil, it is okay to use EVs.
Europe is mostly urbanized it's almost boring. Dunno about China, but I guess they cracked charging infrastructure.
“Oh, but Norway uses EVs a ton!” … cool, Norway is the size of an average US state, the population of Connecticut, over an extremely thin area which optimizes one vector of infrastructure automatically. And makes the majority of its money on oil.
Geez, almost like EV ultra-success stories aren’t even remotely comparable the rest of the world.
No one has ever said “man, I love this gas station and wish I could stay here for two hours”
… idk, I guess people like Buckeys for some reason.
If you live your life in a hurry it can def be a problem.
Could you ELI5 these basic physics? I've heard many people make claims like this but there's never any physics that actually follows. I've had most of an undergraduate curriculum of physics, so if it's beyond basic, then don't be afraid to refer to those physical ideas.
> meanwhile ICE has gotten ridiculously clean and efficient over the years it is more efficient at the shaft does not settle total-system efficiency, cost, weight, resource use, grid losses, battery production, or suitability for every operating env
Is 30% "ridiculously clean and efficient"? 35%? I'm not sure I can agree with that at all.
Battery production? That's ridiculously efficient. For a very small amount weight, there's an insane amount of Wh that get shuttled through that material, which can then be recycled into even more kWh of storage than went into the recycling process, due to the continual improvement in battery production efficiency.
Meanwhile, every single gallon of gas results in 20 pounds of CO2 emissions. Fracking oil requires disposing of 2-10 gallons of dirty waste water for every gallon of gas. That's a massive amount of waste for only 20-50 vehicle miles.
These EVs, are they in the room with us?
A good place to start would be a BMS on individual cells that monitors them for general degradation, unexpected discharge, unexpected temperature changes, and can remove a failing cell from the array.
I’ve seen a few gasoline fires that start by burning, and then much more rapidly expressing potential.
They did get it to happen, they just had to try really hard.
In most accidents the gas tank will not blow up.
"Petrol and diesel can only explode when under pressure and mixed with air and in the case of petrol, have a small amount of energy added in the form of a spark or a flame. Engines pressurise the fuel/air mixture in the cylinder and so produce small, confined explosions which turn a crankshaft and drive the wheels."
"When cars are involved in collisions, fuel lines are often torn and petrol leaks out onto a hot engine. Liquid petrol can catch fire in the presence of air. But it can’t explode because it’s not under pressure and is in the liquid phase rather than a vapour."
https://theconversation.com/fast-x-why-cars-dont-really-expl...
Energy density of gasoline is approximately 44 to 45 megajoules per kilogram.
Energy density of TNT is approximately 4.184 megajoules per kilogram.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_...
There is a way how to use the energy density of gasoline for explosive purposes, Thermobaric weapons.
"A fuel–air explosive (FAE) device consists of a container of fuel and two separate explosive charges. After the munition is dropped or fired, the first explosive charge bursts open the container at a predetermined height and disperses the fuel in a cloud that mixes with atmospheric oxygen (the size of the cloud varies with the size of the munition). The cloud of fuel flows around objects and into structures. The second charge then detonates the cloud and creates a massive blast wave."
TNT.....: 4 kJ/gram and 7 MJ/liter
Gasoline: 43 kJ/gram and 33 MJ/literInteresting discussions about energetics are best had from a distance.
Edit: Or, a fair closed-system comparison to a battery would need to include a liquid oxygen tank or similar so you have the two components stored but can control the delivery...
As a stupid example, if we have a high density battery technology that never explodes unless, say, under magnetic forces only seen being produced by magnetars, that's a pretty safe battery.
eeeh that still doesn't matter really. Gasoline is safe(r) because it needs conditions to explode (spreading into area then ignition), instead of just detonator. Diesel even more so
A damaged gasoline tank that's near empty might explode but more likely it will just leak and start burning, and probably at that moment be still extinguishable. Explosives, well, you won't have time to blink.
Batteries ? Zero chance to extinguish, gonna let it burn thru. THAT is the problem
The fuels which afford the highest rates of storage tend to release it more slowly. Chemical explosives typically have about 1/10 the energy storage capacity (by mass) of fuels, as several people have pointed out.
Similar relationships exist for other forms of energy storage. For electricity, fuel cells, chemical cells ("batteries"), flywheel / reaction storage, and capacitors tend to offer a trade-off between total storage capacity and reaction time. Capacitors can react at intra-phase rates (that is, within a single 60Hz power cycle), whilst batteries and flywheels can take longer to come online.
See for example: "Battery Parameters" <https://www.monolithicpower.com/en/learning/mpscholar/batter...>.
What it does do is slowly polymerize, becoming useless as an ICE fuel in time, typically in a year or two. This is why backup generators should run on propane, which has no degradation mechanism.
Edit: https://petapixel.com/2015/06/11/explosion-at-junk-yard-phot...
My teen years would beg to differ, when some neighborhood friends and I decided to experiment with gas and bleach. The neighborhood residents, fire department and local police also had an opinion, too. (We all got into BIG trouble. Definitely one of the dumber things I did as a teen.)
My high-school crowd stopped just short of building a multistage FAE device. I left early for college and everybody else was short of cash, and that was the end of our neighborhood R&D program. All pre-9/11, needless to say. It's a lot less fun when the possible punishment goes from detention at lunch to waterboarding in Gitmo.
BRB, stopping by the laundry room on my way to the garage...
Theres a handfull of Tier 1 BMS chips that support it already. though, half of them are meant for traction/EV packs instead of BESS.
Electric long distance container ships.
Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns.
Even longer range drones.
If energy is cheaper than the price of water you can pull water out of thin air (dehumidifiers).
If energy is cheaper you can grow food in areas you normally couldn't.
When you can transport anything for cheap you can move food to areas that are vulnerable to food insecurity.
If you can store energy at large scale you can nearly eliminate grid failures, savings lives in the summer and winter.
Costs for transporting food would go down significantly, imagine groceries being 10-15% cheaper.
Assuming airlines have competitive pressure you could expect plane flight costs to drop 20-30% improving everyone's mobility.
But it IS crucial for removing bottlenecks & replace fossil fuels.
You build a power plant on a geothermal vent in Iceland. The electricity it produces is plentiful and cheap. You run it full tilt charging batteries.
You ship those batteries to wherever you need cheap power, and send them back empty. This works with hydro, wind, solar, ...
Batteries do drive down energy costs because even ignoring transmission lines, they let you move energy in both space and time, pushing all energy costs towards the cost of the cheapest means of generation on its best day.
Sodium ion batteries have worse energy density than lithium ion but they have potential to be cheaper and more reliable. Iron air batteries have poor round trip efficiency but could be even cheaper.
You might not like the efficiency of that type of battery, though.
Most of the things that we copy directly from humans do not work in terms of robustness.
Its like instead of harddrive use human DNA to store the data for 3T years,but no-one is mentioning the bandwidth speed here(which is the most important thing) etc,
I know it has some usecases.Also "one spoon butter is more energy dense than a battery"
but how we are gonna use butter(I dont know enough bio) but it is way harder to convert energy .
Sodium-ion isn't as energy dense as lithium-ion and it has a slightly smaller power efficiency, but it's a lot cheaper, has better cold resistance, and can deliver more power at low states of charge.
Use the two together and the thinking is you can get a sweet spot that performs better across a wider range of conditions your cars are likely to experience.
but if there is level 1 to 10 and the chips are level 10, from transistor to today.
the battery would be level 2-3 . if this continues the battery cant keep up with more advance tech,where energy density matters like flying cars,BCI etc .
like people are selling two same products to the same person(same time), because the battery life is bad.
A 1 GWh grid scale battery takes up about 4 hectares at the moment. The UKs total energy use is about 2,000GWh a day.
It would need to use 240,000 hectares to store all energy requirements (eletric, transport, heating etc) for a whole month. Even in extreme cold conditions it would last a couple of weeks.
That would be about 1% of land use.
As a society relying on solar, I'd want to have more of a buffer than one that relies on hydro.
Until that ratio falls by at least 3x to 5x in favor of batteries being cheaper than generation, extra generation is going to be the way that grids actually get built out. Batteries and generation are both falling in cost fairly quickly, but generation still has the overall edge in learning rate. Cost decreases won't bottom out for at least a decade, because there's been no slow down yet, so I wouldn't expect this ratio to change for a minimum of 20 years, which means that pretty much a full energy system interchange will have happened by the time that this price ration changes.
So there's at least a few assumptions about the current industry and it's future development that underlie my assertion that a month of storage makes no sense, but I'm confident enough that I'd place money on the bet, and there's very very few things I'd bet on.
Edit: one thing that would break my assumption is the industrial development of storage that's super cheap for once-per-year usage. Most storage now needs to be cycled about 300x per year to make economic sense. "Long duration" storage is actually better defined as "economical storage at few battery cycles per year". There's nothing like that in the research hopper, but that doesn't mean it couldn't appear tomorrow and be deployed within a decade. Something that only gets used once or twice a year has to be dirt cheap, even if you could get 10x or 20x normal electricity prices for it.
You could store an entire years worth of energy (not just electricity) for a fairly dense country like the UK and still have 95% of the country left for other usage.
I had previously been hopeful that battery storage would allow more shared used of land, but the fire risks of batteries have been pretty severe. And since the land usage requirements are fairly low, there's no need to enhance the risk by putting batteries, say, in enclosed spaces of former natural gas generation facilities [1].
I'm hopeful that we'll see a lot more storage, say a shipping container's worth, at the end of distribution feeders, which helps suck up residential solar with minimal resources, but solving the problem of "who pays for the benefits for all" when the utility is incentivized to keep grid costs high means that nobody is knocking down doors to make that happen...
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/moss-landing-fire-battery-s...
But the beauty of battery and solar/wind is that it can be far more distributed. This of course means far harder to take out -- a wildfire near a nuclear power plant could knock out 3GW of capacity, a wildfire near one of 50x 60MW solar plants would knock out 60MW of capacity.
Solar might not be the only solution in a country at a high latitude, but for the contiguous 48 states even in winter solar produces more than enough power per hectare that when coupled with an appropriately sized battery can generate the entire needs.
1 hectare in sourthern california generates about 3.5MWh a day in December. In North Dakota about 1.5MWh a day, battery size for that is a tiny amount of land.
To generate enough solar energy to power the entire US electric needs, on a bad winter day, the US would have to have 60,000 square km of solar+battery.
The US currently uses 150,000 sqkm just to grow corn ethanol
You'd need a decent HVDC connectors from the southern states to the more demanding northern ones.
But even factoring in current prices of wind, solar, battery, and grid, it would only cost somewhere in the $6T range. Over 30 years that's $200b a year, or about $80 per MWh
New nuclear is about $150 per MWh before decommissioning costs
How much does a 5GW fusion plant cost today, how long does it take to build, what's the total cost over say 30 years, and how much energy will it generate in that time, what are the supply chain risks and what are the environmental risks (if there's an earthquake or wildfire nearby how much do you lose)
We know the answer for renewable, and renewable+storage, and nuclear fission, gas, coal, hydro etc.
If we want to get out of fossils, we will have to store for longer. Or built a ton of atomics
Another option is natural gas peaker plant on a ship/barge. Have a fleet of these around that can dock at any port and supply electrictity. A peaker powership is essentially a mobile, marine-class version of an onshore peaking power plant.
What would be best long term if we have a few hundred - few thousand nuclear ships/subs that can go anywhere and supply power.
It can be the sharing economy for clean power at scale.
Why would you want this?
Once you 2x-10x the cost of electrolyzer capital by only using it rarely, more generation and throwing away the excess electricity often makes the most sense.
Nuclear ships are similarly super super expensive. The only reason we build them at all are for their unique and wonderful operational capabilities, as in not needing to surface or refuel. Using nuclear ships for power would so expensive that we may need to up our GDPs 10x before such wasteful use makes sense. (Though I'm hoping we do reach such future luxurious lifestyles!)
Proportionally less population, less snow covered territory and general coldness = easier requirements.
Land coverage? To say Australia has plenty of land is an understatement.
To amp up(excuse the pun) this mental exercise (don't mind the practicalities of building it!) a bit:
If efficient super-long distance power transmission was a thing, we could have batteries and solar for the whole world and locate it where few people would ever see it.
If placed into a single contiguous blob though, I imagine the solar panels would cause their own microclimate by sucking 20% of the suns energy out of many hectares/acres of land... so that may be a problem.
The Watt-hours per kilogram of good Lithium Ion batteries is around 250-280 Wh/Kg; for Lithium Iron Phosphate it's about 180 Wh/kg, and for Sodium-Ion about 170 Wh/Kg.
The raw energy in gasoline is about 12,300 Wh/Kg but automobile internal combustion engines get only about 20-30% efficiency yielding about 2500-3600 Wh/Kg. For aviation piston engines it is a bit better at 25-30$ so 3000-3600 Wh/kg.
So, the batteries, instead of being 10-12X the weight of the gasoline for the same net driving/flying range, could weigh about the same as the gasoline. So, a typical car with maybe a 16 gallon tank and 30 miles per gallon fills up with 128 pounds (58 kg) of gasoline to get 480 miles of range. The Li-Ion battery for that range would weigh something like 1300 Lbs (590 kg). That is a substantial additional weight for a car that could be 2800-3800 Lbs in ICE configuration, so 35-45% added weight (a bit less because of savings on the ICE engine, etc). This requires everything else to also be heavier, from the structural frame, the suspension system, and even the wheels and tires (which is also unsprung weight, further impairing performance).
With a 130Lb/60kg battery instead, and saving the weight of the ICE engine and fuel system, the overall car design could go much more lightweight, regaining a lot of performance and range, all while gaining the huge torque of electric motors.
In aviation, a battery systems of that weight would enable all-electric aviation to go from small performance niches to the default for general aviation.
So yes, it would be a HUGE benefit to achieve 10X energy density batteries, and we do have reference points for people to imagine it.
I think you're underselling it, even. A typical like-for-like modern EV is only marginally heavier than the ICE equivalent. If we were able to drop the weight of the battery by a thousand pounds, cars would be lighter than they have been in decades while retaining all the modern safety and convenience features we've come to expect. And if density improved along with weight, we could make EVs with the same form factor as today but with over a thousand miles of range. Not that we need that, but it is just as a tiny example of how mind boggling the game change would be.
As it is I've only recently internalized the notion that the most powerful electric tools are battery powered (what can I say, I grew up when rechargeable batteries were NiCad and they basically sucked). And it will just get better and better as time goes on.
We could go for performance, trading off some battery for four inboard motors (fully sprung weight) with half-shafts and CV joints, steel space-frame chassis and carbon fiber body — it could put many supercars to shame.
Going for range, same light-weighting, but less powerful motors and adding more battery, the range could get silly long at something like 1000 miles for 100kg of battery.
For the kind of long range options another poster mentioned, with 100 kg for 1000 miles, a few 10-kilo swappable battery packs could make it easy to trade luggage space for range, or bring them to a charge station only occasionally, but not lug them around for most in-town trips.
No question, we could go wild!
I like the way you think. Putting a meaningful amount of capacity in something luggable by an average human would open up a lot of possibilities. Not just for cars, but everything. Our battery powered future looks bright already, but this would be incredible.
I think this is the way to go. For most people (you can never please everyone) 1000 miles is enough to cover a full day car trip.
Then 8 hours of charge time while you sleep.
Charging while you sleep requires more distributed, lower power infrastructure compared to a 10 berth service station trying to juice cars in 5 minutes as seems to be commonly touted. I haven't run the numbers but juicing 10 cars in 5 minutes has to require significant electrical infrastructure!
Side bonus: never having to go to a service station.
I believe it is becoming fairly common to use batteries as a buffer at fast chargers. The demand charges for bursting megawatts of power from the grid are apparently really steep, so it makes sense to put in a big battery and steadily draw a lower amount of power and then just charge cars from the battery.
Also, EVs use regenerative braking. That should help a little bit.
EVs should be built with 100 - 150 mile range. All families with 2 cars can immediately switch one of their cars to a daily driver EV and the other vehicle is a minivan. There are lots and lots of people for whom an EV works perfectly well and if they need to go longer, US has a robust rental car industry. What would help is to let people charge anywhere they park. All workplaces should offer free charging, and companies can negotiate to get paid for charging their employees cars. The price of electricity goes negative because of lack of demand, and this is something that they can offer to the grid, demand as a service.
As an EV owner myself, no. Absolutely not.
The reason is simple: The mere existence of low-range EVs hurts overall EV adoption, because people aren't going to rent a car just for a road trip. You're talking about adding $100+ per day on what's supposed to be a cheaper method of travel compared to flying.
ICE-holes don't think critically. They don't care that long range EVs exist. They'll just see one that only gets 100-150 miles of range and go "See? EVs have short range. They're not appropriate for road trips. That's why I'll never get one.", despite plenty of 250+ mile options.
Now, I suppose you could argue that this type of person would simply never get an EV and would just come up with a different reason, and you'd probably be right. But the general point still remains: People want a car that satisfies ALL their needs and won't settle for something that works "only" 98% of the time.
Just wait for people to be priced out of ICE cars. EV's should be and will be significantly cheaper to buy and manufacture.
Having only a 100 mile range is plenty for your daily driving, but if you can't charge at home, it becomes very disruptive.
Short range EVs typically only support J-1772 which only charges at up to 19.2 kW, and many cars only even support 11.5 kW. You'll be charging for at least an hour.
At least with a 300 mile range, most people could get away with charging for just 20 minutes/week.
Sure, ubiquitous charging will be enormously helpful to adoption, and universal rapid charging also. But the reality is it doesn't yet exist.
Until then, just because long trips are lower frequency does not mean they are less important or can be ignored as a requirement, particularly if a person/family has only one vehicle.
The long trips may be the most important trips, maybe to see family only a few times a year...
Plus, even though you might be able to rationalized away the long range requirement, generations of people are accustomed to cars yielding 4-600 miles between fill-ups. It is not only the ability to drive on a long trip, but also the need to only fill up your car every 1-3 weeks instead of every day or two.
Desirable Range between fill-ups is also a human-factors issue. You want the range of the car to be at least, indeed around, the distance people can drive in a single stint. If you can drive 350 miles in 4.5 hours, and your car gets that distance, you're probably OK resting and filling up. If it goes 1000 miles between fill-ups, that isn't a big advantage. But if the car makes you stop before you feel you need to stop, that will feel like the car is not good enough for your needs.
So, sure, if we suddenly got 2500 Wh/kg batteries and could easily make cars with a 1000-mile range, and manufacturers offered 1000, 500, and 100-mile ranges, I'd expect the most sales to be in the 500-mile units.
could be some bad examples(right now in mind),correct me . but smart ring , BCI systems is not possible with oil.
10x energy dense does not mean 10x safer. Gasoline is still widely used because it is considered one of the safest options around!
The problem is more nuanced than just "let's do all the battery density"
Transistor manufacturing as we know it today started in the 1950s. Lithium battery tech as we know it started in the early 2000s.
Not only is there a massive difference in time spent on each tech, but the engineering disciplines involved are completely different from each other.
Unfortunately the problems with hydrogen storage and the fuel cells have prevented them from really taking off.
The energy density scatter plot is physically correct but misleading and everyone makes this mistake.
From an engineering point of view you have to use work delivered at the end of the drive train not fuel raw energy content.
When you do that lithium ion batteries compare more favorably to liquid fuels. That’s because the conversion path is more than 90% efficient. For ICE engines you’re starting with only 20-40% Carnot efficiency (depending on how good and in good shape the engine is) and then losing in the transmission and then losing more because ICE cars have more other gears and moving parts. Power to wheel is pretty terrible. Most of the energy from gasoline heats the air around the car.
This is also why you get outrageous sounding but accurate things like: an EV charged on 100% coal fired electricity emits less carbon than a typical gasoline car. The fact that coal is literal pure carbon fuel is made up for by the high thermal efficiency of a giant supercritical steam turbine vs a small piston engine. Coal burns real hot too (steeper thermal gradient). So more of the energy from coal ends up doing actual work vs heating the air. (Well directly heating the air I mean.)
For example, no need to build natural gas infrastructure to every home. Use induction stoves (or electric coil -- already 67% of homes). Heat pump water heater instead of gas. And heat pump for HVAC.
If all energy bills are consolidated as electricity (instead of gas, natural gas and electricity), most people would install solar on their rooftops, buy EVs, and save ~$1000/month on energy bills.
This isn't true at all for natural gas. Burning it for heat in the home is much more efficient than burning it in a plant, converting it to electricity, transferring that electricity, then turning that electricity into heat.
Heat pumps are significantly more efficient than 100%. They can get to 500% efficiency. So no, it's definitely not more efficient to burn gas in a home. (To say nothing of the safety of running gas lines to every house.)
You said
> Burning it for heat in the home is much more efficient than burning it in a plant, converting it to electricity, transferring that electricity, then turning that electricity into heat.
Burning it for heat in the home may be something like: 99% transport efficiency (gas distribution systems lose maybe 1%) * 80% combustion efficiency (a lot of heat energy still goes out your chimney as exhaust). Call it 79%. If you spent more for a high-efficiency burner with extra heat-recovery stages, you could get into the 90's.
Compare to: burning it in a plant (power plants can run efficient combined-cycle infrastructure, which is about 60% efficient turning it into electricity), transferring that electricity (plant-to-home transmission & distribution losses are 8-15%, so call it 85%), then turning that electricity into heat (and here is where heat pumps shine... heat pumps don't burn electricity, they use it to move heat, so they can have efficiencies above 100%).
So compare that 79%-90% "burn for heat in the home" efficiency to 60% * 85% * 300-500% = 150-255% efficiency for "burn it in a plant, convert to electricity, transfer that electricity, then turn that electricity into heat".
It's just not the point I was actually responding to. The OP was under the impression that you would be "extracting a lot more energy" from the gas in a plant vs the home.
Yes, converting gas to electricity allows you to use a heat pump, which in many cases uses much _less_ energy than a furnace to heat a home. (As long as it's not too cold.)
But that's just not what I was talking about. I was talking about the claim of extracting _more_ energy from the gas. Good day!
Also, the US residential gas infrastructure leaks ~1% of the gas it moves. That sounds like nothing, until you account for how unburnt ch4 is ~80 times worse than co2 on a timescale of 20 years.
Burning gas to heat a home means "1kWh" of gas, delivers ~1kWh of heat.
Modern gas power plants are about 55 to 60% efficient, so "1kWh" of gas becomes ~0.57kWh of electricity, which after transport losses (-6%) arrives at the home as 0.52kWh, which gets turned into 1.5 to 2.0kWh of heat.
=> It's almost two times as efficient to turn gas into electricity and use heat pumps in the home
The only gas-based solution to get close would be using a gas generator at home (30%) to power the 500% heat-pump, and routing the 70% of waste heat inside (to get a combined 220% efficiency).
But that heavily depends on the heat-pump efficiency, which will depend on your ambient heat and instalation.
There are 7 more items to consider: https://www.batterydesign.net/10-things-about-ssbs-that-you-...
[0]https://www.kmbc.com/article/lithium-ion-batteries-catch-fir...
[1]https://www.kmbc.com/article/panasonic-plant-de-soto-evacuat...
When these reach markets in significant quantities, most Li ion (NMC, LiPo, and LFP) with liquid electrolyte or plastic separators should be banned for most purposes, especially vehicles and occupied areas. These are whale oil lamps that pose a silent, ubiquitous danger to life and property.
Ambri was working on large scale batteries which seemed like a pretty good idea (looks like they ran out of money): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambri_Inc.
https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.20...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S20954...
Anyway, you are comparing apples and oranges. While solid state sodium ion might become a thing at some point, it so far isn't. The lithium based solid state batteries currently being readied by several battery companies for mass production around 2028 or so tend to have up to 500-600 wh/kg densities. Sodium ion batteries are currently at or below 175 wh/kg typically. LFP is a bit better, and some high end NMC batteries might do 250ish wh/kg. That would be just the first generation solid state batteries. Densities might improve after that. The theoretical limit is a lot denser than that and there is a lot of money going into researching ways to do better than that.
Of course energy density is just one thing you might optimize for. Other properties you might look at are operating temperatures, amount of charge cycles the battery can handle before it degrades below 85% of its original capacity, the speed at which it can cycle, fire safety, cost, etc. Mostly sodium ion scores very well on all of this except density.
High energy density usually comes at a price. Both in dollars and in compromises with these other things. Think lower lifetime, more constrained temperature ranges, etc. Worth it if weight and volume are really constrained. Like in anything that flies.
Overall my end goal is to have a seperate storage for the e-vehicle.. Plus it be easier to slap some solar on that structure.
EVs spontaneously igniting are newsworthy partly because politics, but also because it is novel. Gas vehicles burn daily, the odds are pretty good that a couple are burning somewhere right now.
You can get lithium metal forming on lithium-ion electrodes, which could go on to form dendrites, but the failure there is the metal formation, not the dendrite formation.
I still have the question though. How does the electrolyte do that? :-)
A Lithium ion has the same charge in magnitude as an elecron. Electron is much lighter. Why and how is it that Li+ ions are able to, but electrons can't?
A same number of ions and electrons should be generating on the electrodes.
>> Generally move
When there no free electron space in atoms, instead of electrons being stuck, should still move the electrolyte as free particles just like ions.
Seems like they can't in this case. Why not?
Li-Ion is dominating because of the amount of inertia and economies of scale it has. But if we assumed equal amounts of R&D and investment you'd expect a future of solid state batteries for mobile applications and flow batteries for stationary applications
So, Methanol + doseable hydrogenperoxide or something similar it is. If it can drive your drone, power its onboard compute and fire a gun or convert into explosives at the end of the journey, thats pure victory.
Bonuspoints again, if you can standardize your whole setup into machine assembleable legobricks, creating changeable drones on demand, that can iterate in hours through, where normal military industrial complexes take months, years, generations. Every drone, every rocket just a stack of coke cans, foil-wrapped, going for a walk, a fly.
The problem is primarily that batteries are storing a lot of energy, which can be released when things go wrong. The electrolytes (technically, the solvents) typically don't ignite under 750°F or so, which makes them less flammable than a lot of other common materials, and far less of a concern than, say, the lithium metal.
Is that the electrical discharge, then the lithium going off, then the electrolytes?
The liquid electrolyte is the thing that releases most energy when the battery burns, more than the anode and cathode. Some also have a very low self ignition temperature.
So the main risk here would be the likelyhood of short circuiting under different failure scenarios.
An 18650 battery weighs ~50g and stores ~10 watt-hours. 10 watt-hours is 8,604 calories, enough to heat 50g of water by 172 C or 310 F. The battery would not even burn without a liquid electrolyte to ignite.
is LiFePo4 immune to dendrite shorts? Or do they happen just don't burn?
The most common lithium battery failure mode is that you have a hole in the plastic separator between the +/- sheets inside the battery, which shorts and causes a hotspot that eventually starts a fire. Dendrites cause the short by growing across the gap. In normal batteries it is caused by a manufacturing defect. The outcome is pretty similar.