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enslavedrobot 1 days ago [-]
Solid state batteries come in several flavours. Most of them don't stop dendrites.
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.
stronglikedan 5 minutes ago [-]
I'll just take one that charges at ridiculous speeds and can't burn my house down.
I wish BYD could bring their new infra to the US - it looks pretty ::ahem:: solid!
BiraIgnacio 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
what makes it so? I don't know anything about this subject, I'm really curious now about what the perfect battery would be.
marcosdumay 21 hours ago [-]
No idea why polymer single ion conducting would stop dendrites (I know people are looking for it, I don't know why).
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.
jarbus 22 hours ago [-]
I’m still a novice on the material science behind it, but what is QuantumScape lacking here if anything, and why is it a dealbreaker?
dirck-norman 21 hours ago [-]
The only thing different from this list is the ceramic separator. It’s not polymer. However, the ceramic is ultra thin to the point that it’s flexible so volume expansion isn’t a problem and it solves the dendrite problem.
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.
Well technically those are zero point modules, not really batteries.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
If you can extract some energy then by definition it is not zero-point energy.
gadflyinyoureye 53 minutes ago [-]
I presume that was a Stargate reference.
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
AA battery size is black holes. Can’t quite get the technology to scale for AAA so you still have to swap the TV remote.
moffkalast 18 hours ago [-]
The regulatory approval for those is just too expensive in practice. I mean you blow up one star due to cost cutting and nobody trusts the tech ever again...
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
But that was a Joviet power plant with a severe design flaw. They had a foot of up-quark matter at the bottom of their control rods, which increased the reaction rate for a brief moment after the emergency ABSCOND button was pressed. Plus, they were running the reactor at dangerously low graviton flux levels, leading to a pion buildup, during a shift change. Everyone knows those Joviets can't do anything right.
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.
TeMPOraL 2 hours ago [-]
The problem was that the science behind those fancy power plants of yours is so complicated, the rest of the galaxy found it easier to just oxidize biomass, and are now scouring every known sector for M-class planets they haven't yet strip-mined from all organic matter.
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.
marmakoide 11 hours ago [-]
This is ridiculous, there are plenty of stars and most of them are red dwarfs with tidally locked rocks blasted by flares anyway
agumonkey 18 hours ago [-]
their benefit boiled down (sic) to flammability, or the lack thereof, right ?
lightedman 1 days ago [-]
"no phase transitions from -40C to 80C."
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.
vitally3643 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 22 hours ago [-]
Please don't attack another user like this, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It only makes things worse.
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.
To be fair, the poster said “holy grail” which implies perfection.
nerdsniper 23 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. No idea what’s going on with these downvotes.
lightedman 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 22 hours ago [-]
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
If you know more than others do, that's great! But please contribute by sharing some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn, rather than putting others down.
How does someone with such short temper get to work in the aerospace industry? You know we are just a bunch of random strangers on the internet and telling someone to "sit down" just comes across as funny more than authoritative. And I don't think telling someone "I know exactly what the fuck I'm speaking of" has ever had the desired effect on the internet, it just screams insecure - if you're really an expert make it show through your words not by trying to intimidate people.
lightedman 13 hours ago [-]
"How does someone with such short temper get to work in the aerospace industry?"
My temper is very even. I simply do not tolerate bullshit from nobodies who are speaking garbage. And I get to work in aerospace because it seems that out of the millions of people that tried to get my job I'm the only one with the relevant mixed-domain expertise to realize what a company wants to do and get it done.
I have hardware in orbit, I can with 4-sigma certainty guarantee the poster trying to chide me does not.
gambiting 5 hours ago [-]
Right, so were you like this before you started working there, or was putting hardware into orbit what made you behave this way in internet comments? I mean I imagine it must be a huge ego boost, but I don't know, I've done some really cool stuff too but I don't go around telling people to sit down when they try to talk about my domain.
22 hours ago [-]
qwery 23 hours ago [-]
If you know a bit about electronics, you might be a bit surprised by the term 'solid-state battery'. It's a poor analogue to the more common usage of solid-state with semiconductors, integrated circuits, etc. -- a "solid-state" cell is still a chemical cell. It's not a paradigm shift on the level of, say, replacing a relay with a MOSFET.
jhallenworld 16 hours ago [-]
I think "solid-state" is a marketing term which means you need to use Fermi-Dirac statistics to model your device, vs. vacuum tubes where you can use Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. I think you can use Maxwell-Boltzmann at least for the ions in the electrolyte.. but maybe have to use for Fermi-Dirac for all conductors in a solid-state battery.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
I thought it meant your database was singly responsible, open for extension but closed for modification, Liskov substitutable, interface segregated, and dependency inverted.
jojobas 13 hours ago [-]
Non-solid-state batteries have liquid/gel electrolyte.
qwery 12 hours ago [-]
Wood is a solid-state battery.
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.
jojobas 11 hours ago [-]
The word "battery" is a stand-in for electrochemical cell, which wood obviously isn't. Quite some advantages are expected from batteries that don't involve liquids or gels, whether incremental or not.
qwery 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know what more I can say to convince you that I'm not trying to put down the technology. I'm interested in it, that's why I think it's a shame to curse it with a used-car salesman marketing name.
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.
adolph 59 minutes ago [-]
There is a nine box chart with x-axis of doctrine or how it is used and y-axis of structure; each axis has three values, purist, neutral and radical.
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.
pfdietz 48 minutes ago [-]
This article seems to confuse lithium-ion and lithium-metal batteries. Lithium-ion batteries intercalcate lithium ions into pre-existing electrodes and that doesn't form dendrites. Dendrites are a phenomenon of lithium-metal batteries, where lithium ions tend to be reduced to metal at the tips of the dendrites.
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.
mrmckizzle 1 hours ago [-]
Definitely being unreasonable, but that's one of the reasons I don't have an electric vehicle yet. I'm paranoid of that thing catching fire in my garage. Which is ironic since one of my random electronic devices with li-batteries probably could catch fire regardless in my house. At least with a gasoline it seems we are better equipped to deal witg such fires.
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.
GlibMonkeyDeath 1 days ago [-]
The article gives the technical reasons that answer the headline question (e.g. potential for better energy density)
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?)
hannasanarion 1 days ago [-]
For disposable applications like that, aren't there single-use chemistries that are better already? I'm thinking by analogy to things like:
- 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
15 hours ago [-]
heckintime 18 hours ago [-]
Not all drones are one way
NovemberWhiskey 16 hours ago [-]
Even for drones that are reusable: if there’s a substantial performance advantage to using a primary cell then you might just want to do that if you’re relatively price insensitive and have good logistics (say, the US Army). Or if you need to be self-sustaining in non-permissive environments (say, the US Army).
mekdoonggi 1 days ago [-]
If the thing is going to blow up anyway, does it need to be light? Wouldn't you rather have more cheaper drones?
zamadatix 1 days ago [-]
Less weight (all else being equal) is the same thing as more battery for drones. I.e. better range, payload mass, and/or flight time. You probably want both cheap and poor performing as well as expensive and high performing available.
jgilias 1 days ago [-]
In current battle conditions isn’t the range primarily determined by the size of the fiber optic spool attached to the drone than battery capacity?
bluGill 24 hours ago [-]
Maybe. Last I checked Ukraine preferred radio drones to fiber optic - the spool is heavy and a limitation in many ways (not all that I understand). Fiber optics are used only when you can't get something else to works. Advances in AI, radio relay systems, self-navigation, and anti electronic warfare are all things they are working on so they can use more drones without fiber. For longer ranges drones fiber is not an option and so they have no choice but use something else.
Where fiber optic is used though, that is the limit. That is a minority though.
hunterpayne 13 hours ago [-]
They prefer what works. So it depends on the EM jamming the other side has at that point in the line. Some parts of the line are covered in old fiber optic cable because they are near somewhere important so the Russians have EM jammers there. Other parts of the line, they probably only use radio drones. Also, the ways the drones talk to the operators has changed at least 3 times throughout the war. So by the time you read this, it might have changed again.
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.
dghlsakjg 22 hours ago [-]
For some uses in Ukraine that is true, but even there they are still using radio for many drones, and especially their longest range drones (100+km).
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.
TulliusCicero 21 hours ago [-]
Most Ukrainian drones don't use fiber optic I don't think. To deal with EW, they're favoring autonomous targeting/guidance for the final part of the strike.
hunterpayne 12 hours ago [-]
No...its valuable to know if the drone did its job. That and the extra expense of the boards makes it not really so useful in practice.
zamadatix 1 days ago [-]
Depends on the battle but yes. Even then the range is usually at least 10 km and starts to be limited by the size of the spool you're going to carry on the drone (though dealing with general cable issues over the distance is one of the reasons this type can't be used for everything).
frangonf 1 days ago [-]
Autonomous kamikaze drones don't need spools.
simmerup 1 days ago [-]
if it’s the same range for less weight you have more room for munitions and other gadgets
emptyfile 1 days ago [-]
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lukan 24 hours ago [-]
The lighter the further range or more explosive payload.
19 hours ago [-]
laxisOp 1 days ago [-]
We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
torginus 18 minutes ago [-]
Generally a >10x is easily achievable if we use a chemical reaction that uses oxygen - which we do not have to carry around, that's why things like hydrogen fuel cells have a theoretical energy/mass that we can pretty much assume is best possible with a chemical reaction.
Unfortunately the problems with hydrogen storage and the fuel cells have prevented them from really taking off.
trollbridge 1 days ago [-]
I can - it’s called a bomb. Some of the problems with batteries are heat dissipation (one of those problems that superconductors would mostly solve), fire safety, and end of life disposal. Higher energy density makes it even worse.
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.
thechao 1 days ago [-]
Gasoline has 10x the energy (MJ/Kg) than TNT, but it's not a "bomb". Being a "bomb" is about energy release rate. A battery is still controlled by its chemistry.
vikramkr 1 days ago [-]
Liquid gasoline does not have anywhere near the energy of TNT, or even a battery for that matter. It contains basically zero releasable energy. It needs oxygen or another oxidizer to react with to actually release any energy. TNT and batteries' energy density calculations include the oxidizer and the oxidizer is in close proximity to the fuel (molecularly so in the case of TNT). If you 10x the "energy content" of gasoline it's still rate limited by access to oxygen. If you 10x the energy density of a battery (the type with the oxidizer contained within the battery, not a fuel cell or metal air battery) you've got 10x the energy ready to be released quickly if oxidizer and fuel mix in unfortunate ways
csours 24 hours ago [-]
It's an interesting discussion, because if you assume access to atmospheric oxygen, gasoline is MUCH more energy dense.
TNT.....: 4 kJ/gram and 7 MJ/liter
Gasoline: 43 kJ/gram and 33 MJ/liter
saltcured 23 hours ago [-]
The previous point is fair though. What is the energy density of gasoline in a stoichiometric mixture with its oxidizer and not already detonated? That's where TNT beats it by a long shot. The mixture with any chance of being stored would be some relatively low pressure gas.
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...
ux266478 22 hours ago [-]
In the context of the conversation, it doesn't actually refute the point though, which is that explosive danger is contingent on a much broader set of relations than simple energy density. Gasoline just demonstrates the disconnect. Tacking on additional conditions to make high-density batteries dangerous is exactly what the engineering goal should be.
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.
JoshuaDavid 17 hours ago [-]
Gasoline + LOX beats TNT on energy density per unit mass and per unit volume, no?
There's a reason that kerosene+h2o2 is a classic rocket fuel, and TNT is not.
oskarkk 16 hours ago [-]
It's usually kerosene + O2, not H2O2. But H2 + O2 is another classic liquid rocket fuel that has higher specific energy (energy per mass), but lower energy density (energy per volume) than kerosene, and is used mostly as a 2nd stage fuel (where mass is most important). Its lower density and the need to keep it very cool mean heavier tanks, and it's also hard to work with due to being such a small molecule that likes to leak, which causes development costs to be higher.
PunchyHamster 17 hours ago [-]
> The previous point is fair though. What is the energy density of gasoline in a stoichiometric mixture with its oxidizer and not already detonated? That's where TNT beats it by a long shot. The mixture with any chance of being stored would be some relatively low pressure gas.
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
SV_BubbleTime 21 hours ago [-]
Air is usually quite available though.
mathgeek 17 hours ago [-]
Many batteries are sealed specifically for this reason.
21 hours ago [-]
ranger_danger 24 hours ago [-]
That's a huge assumption that won't always be the case though. A gasoline tank with a small hole in it is a lot safer than a liquid-electrolyte battery with a hole in it.
csours 23 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's what makes it interesting.
Interesting discussions about energetics are best had from a distance.
K0balt 22 hours ago [-]
I can remember several situations where “a little bit of gasoline” caused a lot of problems. It’s a relative term. You need a lot of air to make it really shine, but “a little bit of gas” goes a long way lol.
dredmorbius 17 hours ago [-]
Energy capacity vs. energy release rate, or energy vs. power, tends to follow an inverse relationship, at least within similar domains.
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.
"Liquid gasoline does not have anywhere near the energy of TNT,"
Energy density of gasoline is approximately 44 to 45 megajoules per kilogram.
Energy density of TNT is approximately 4.184 megajoules per kilogram.
leonidasrup 21 hours ago [-]
Gasoline, when in liquid form, is not mixed with oxygen and burns, releases energy slowly. In comparison with TNT which is both the fuel and oxidizing agent releases energy very fast, it has detonation velocity of 6,900 m/s.
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."
A snickers bar has nearly 5× TNT’s energy per kilogram—TNT merely has the habit of being extremely impatient about releasing it.
18 hours ago [-]
moffkalast 21 hours ago [-]
I'm still surprised we haven't figured out a bioreactor you can feed your scrap food and turn it into energy, methane combustion notwithstanding. Like imagine feeding a roomba some sugar and it's set for a few days lol.
mathgeek 17 hours ago [-]
You could probably even power a time machine without needing plutonium.
imp0cat 10 hours ago [-]
But only if said Roomba is unable to find enough sugar on the ground for a few days. Otherwise, it's completely self-sufficient, you just have to leave enough crumbs on the floor.
vitally3643 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lightedman 23 hours ago [-]
I read it all and even what is stated is mostly wrong UNTIL THE EXACT UNIT IS SPECIFIED.
And I'd know because I have to work with this IN ORBIT. I've had this conversation a dozen times in meetings with military and government.
24 hours ago [-]
trollbridge 1 days ago [-]
One of the problems with gasoline is its explosive nature, which the fuel storage and delivery system of a car attempts to mitigate. It has a better profile for burning off than a battery though since it will spill out and burn away from the vehicle.
not_the_fda 22 hours ago [-]
Gasoline isn't that explosive. You can shoot up a gas tank and it will just burn. What you see on TV is movie magic. Gasoline vapor can explode, but you need the right air to fuel ratio and a spark.
SV_BubbleTime 21 hours ago [-]
Uh… gasoline has a super high vapor pressure. If you start out at the wrong ratio, it does what it can to make that ratio right.
I’ve seen a few gasoline fires that start by burning, and then much more rapidly expressing potential.
capitainenemo 21 hours ago [-]
Requires a good mix though. The parent is still correct.
Mythbusters spent a long time trying to get cars to blow up in a dramatic hollywood fashion in various episodes and determined that under most conditions it wouldn't happen.
They did get it to happen, they just had to try really hard.
In most accidents the gas tank will not blow up.
vablings 20 hours ago [-]
High velocity accidents where the gas is quickly dispersed into the air is pretty much the only way that happens.
jojobas 13 hours ago [-]
Even then it's just a slow-burning fireball, not detonation, no shockwave.
leonidasrup 21 hours ago [-]
"Fast X: why cars don’t really explode when they crash"
"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."
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.)
CamperBob2 17 hours ago [-]
Bleach? What does that do?
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.
jimt1234 13 hours ago [-]
We used to take a half-full can of gas, then get a ping pong ball, drill a hole in it, fill it with bleach, then put tape over the hole. Drop the ping pong ball in the gas can, screw the lid on really tight, then wait. It used to take about 10 minutes for the gas to eat its way into the ping pong ball, but when it did, and the bleach mixed with the gas... boom! The scary part is only worked, maybe, half the time. So there would be cans of gas/bleach just sitting in a field, waiting to explode or release really harmful chems into the air. We were kids, young and stupid.
CamperBob2 13 hours ago [-]
WTF. Seriously? Just plain old Clorox? Which is ~95% water?
BRB, stopping by the laundry room on my way to the garage...
duped 24 hours ago [-]
Poorly stored gasoline can spontaneously combust, though. So more like a firebomb.
not_the_fda 22 hours ago [-]
No it can't. To combust it needs ~ 500F. If you left it out uncovered in the open and allowed the it to vaporize with a spark nearby, it might explode, but thats not spontaneous combustion. Gasoline sitting in a sealed container wont spontaneously combust.
swiftcoder 22 hours ago [-]
Didn't everyone have one of those old mechanic friends who liked to put the cigarette out in the can of gas to scare the tourists?
SV_BubbleTime 21 hours ago [-]
That is definitely one of those “it worked the first 50 times no problem” tricks.
PunchyHamster 17 hours ago [-]
...it was probably diesel not gasoline
swiftcoder 8 hours ago [-]
Oh, it was most definitely gasoline. As long as there is no vapour hanging above the container, it works just fine... as the neighbour post says, the first 50 times. Then one day the old timer blows up himself and the shop
ridgeguy 22 hours ago [-]
Gasoline doesn't do that. Perhaps you're thinking of the following?
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.
duped 21 hours ago [-]
No, I'm thinking of improperly stored gasoline evaporating and combusting.
stirfish 12 hours ago [-]
I remember something about someone trying to do a photo shoot with candles in abandoned cars in a junkyard
LiFePO4 batteries are close to the dangerous lithium ion, but they're not even close to bombs. You can cut one in half or throw it in a fire (I think) and it doesn't explode.
interstice 24 hours ago [-]
Some heavier elements have hilariously high energy densities and aren't bombs (on their own), but the catch is the energy release is a trickle. Point is it's not an automatic follow that high density = high discharge.
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.
HPsquared 21 hours ago [-]
Making it require air (or some other kinetic / transport process) would help with that. E.g. zinc-air battery.
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
The past 20 years have made lithium ion 2-3x more dense, both because of some chemistry changes and because of better pack level design.
And it's still improving at about 5% per year.
dzhiurgis 1 days ago [-]
Tesla has been around for nearly 20 years. Model S (12 years) has gained 17% of range due to chemistry (rest is system efficiency and simply bigger battery).
100percentjake 24 hours ago [-]
BMW i3 went from 60Ah to 120Ah of battery capacity (and slightly more voltage) in the exact same chassis through the span of its life (2014-2022, RIP). It is even possible to put the later 120Ah batteries in the early 60Ah cars and reap the rewards, and is a practice that is actually supported by the cars' software natively.
heaney-555 1 days ago [-]
Range is not a real issue for electric cars. Charging time is, though, and there are massive improvements happening for that right now.
superxpro12 24 hours ago [-]
Tell that to my polestar 2 pls. and then come back again in the winter when it drops another 30% due to the battery heater energizing
piquadrat 24 hours ago [-]
Your Polestar 2 battery is based on battery technology that is 5+ years old. Right now you can buy a BYD car in China that charges at up to 1500kW - close to 10x the peak charging rate of a Polestar 2.
dzhiurgis 9 hours ago [-]
In NZ we have pretty good competition of Chinese EVs, but probably better would be looking at Australian market.
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.
SV_BubbleTime 21 hours ago [-]
I’m an automotive EE… I find particular interest when someone mentions BYD as what “works” in electric vehicles.
Wild fucking west right there.
epistasis 21 hours ago [-]
I'm not an automotive EE, could you explain more about BYD? I'd love to hear more from an expert!
SV_BubbleTime 12 hours ago [-]
Things like crash, fire, egress, homologation and pedestrian impact, long term service… these are things western mfgs obsess over, and BYD doesn’t give a shit about.
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.
umeshunni 10 hours ago [-]
BYD is selling millions of cars and will be #5 globally this year. They're doing fine whether or not racist westerners take them seriously.
At the same time, western manufacturers are closing factories and begging for EU bailouts.
dzhiurgis 9 hours ago [-]
DJI is bad example as they are pretty much only consumer drone you'd ever wanna buy. It absolutely decimates competition. It's more like Tesla.
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.
orliesaurus 20 hours ago [-]
I'd love to learn more about this.
jtwaleson 18 hours ago [-]
*west -> east? ;)
17 hours ago [-]
jqbd 1 days ago [-]
I would wager charging time is basically solved, adoption is only thing that's left.
rogerrogerr 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, when I take a road trip I genuinely enjoy the cadence of charging. 5-10 minutes every two hours, just enough to go to the bathroom or walk around. I get to my destination not materially later, and feeling far more relaxed than when I was doing death marches in a gas car.
SV_BubbleTime 21 hours ago [-]
This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station.
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”.
vablings 20 hours ago [-]
"This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station."
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.
rogerrogerr 19 hours ago [-]
And you mostly aren’t charging to 80%, usually it’s closer to 40-60%.
SV_BubbleTime 17 hours ago [-]
heh, ok, that’s strange.
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.
mastermage 5 hours ago [-]
I took a trip from Germany to Italy over the alps with my EV with only 60 kWh of Battery. In reality the largest amount of delay I got due to other uncontrollable factors like a massive 2 hours traffic jam. in contrast to that I had like 1 20 minutes charging break and one 5 minutes to buy my esim that i forgot for switzerland. The 20 minute break i was gonna take anyways to take a piss and eat some food.
rogerrogerr 13 hours ago [-]
> the people that jumped in now need to defend their $60,000 purchases.
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.
cyberax 15 hours ago [-]
> “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.
SV_BubbleTime 12 hours ago [-]
You can’t just assume every time you go somewhere your battery is fully charged.
I mean, you can, because you are clearly emotionally tied into your purchase. But I can’t as an engineer.
rogerrogerr 12 hours ago [-]
I can, because I charge it every night. Also, I have never once engaged in a long road trip that I did not know about at least a few hours in advance.
I think you should not get an EV. But I like mine.
cyberax 12 hours ago [-]
I made plenty of spontaneous trips. But even then I just need to pop into my garage, plug in the car, and it'll likely be close to 100% charged within 1-2 hours. Just enough time for me to get breakfast and read the morning YC news.
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.
ssl-3 6 hours ago [-]
I drive an (awesome, by the way) Honda Odyssey. I can get somewhere in the realm of 500 miles from a tank of gas with that capacious machine.
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.)
rogerrogerr 20 hours ago [-]
> This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station.
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.
not_the_fda 22 hours ago [-]
Its a huge issue in cold climates.
zuzululu 22 hours ago [-]
uphills + cold/hot climates, the ranges won't be able to compete with ICE. its basic physics. cold uphill still reduces charging speed, available power, and range, while sustained heat accelerates degradation. Thermal-management systems mitigate those weaknesses by consuming energy and adding cost, weight, and complexity.
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.
epistasis 21 hours ago [-]
> its basic physics
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.
heaney-555 22 hours ago [-]
The latest battery chemistries perform incredibly well in cold and hot climates.
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!
not_the_fda 22 hours ago [-]
> The latest battery chemistries perform incredibly well in cold and hot climates.
Depends on your definition of cold. California cold sure. Wisconsin cold you are looking at losing 40%-60% range.
seanmcdirmid 13 hours ago [-]
China cold tests their EVs in Harbin and Mohe, where “cold” means -40 (F or C doesn’t matter, it’s the same). They lose some range, and indoor charging garages are more common (for better charging performance), but the tech has gotten good enough that even harbiners (a small city of 20 million people) are adopting EVs at a rapid clip.
zuzululu 11 hours ago [-]
so good that batteries are ejected when they catch fire
seanmcdirmid 10 hours ago [-]
It is so rare for EVs to catch fire that it makes the news whenever one does, and these form the core of the anti-EV memes that are popular with boomers on Facebook.
SV_BubbleTime 17 hours ago [-]
> The latest battery chemistries perform incredibly well in cold and hot climates.
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?
dzhiurgis 8 hours ago [-]
Sodium batteries loose only 10% or capacity and doesn't need pre-heating when charging. Latest Chinese LFPs perform well in cold too (I don't know exact deets and tbf they don't do great job publishing them other than marketing fluff). Also added ripple preheating that Tesla has.
zuzululu 17 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised they didn't flag and downvote you. There seems to be a certain crowd that seems view EV as sort of a panacea without considering the true realities which involve experience and research to know they are far from replacing ICE
thelastgallon 16 hours ago [-]
If ICE is the only vehicle for you, because of religious reasons, thats okay. There are large and small countries ( China, Norway) that have majority EV cars and continue to grow. There are 120+ other countries that are buying EVs. Even in US, there are a few people who have bought EVs and realized it works for them.
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.
_carbyau_ 14 hours ago [-]
I find this whole discussion weird.
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.
thelastgallon 11 hours ago [-]
Thats right, most families with 2 cars can immediately switch to an EV and use it as a daily driver.
SV_BubbleTime 10 hours ago [-]
This is the correct use for EV. A second car, around town. Perfect.
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.
umeshunni 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thelastgallon 9 hours ago [-]
Thats correct, but Americans are conditioned by fossil fuel shills that EVs are not for them, driven by irrational fear of range anxiety. To dispel a lie, we need to spend 100x effort[1]. Its hard to convince everyone to switch to EVs, perhaps we agree with the false premise, but break it down and focus on certain demographics that it will work for.
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.
It's different use cases and daily living styles entirely. You can't compare nations and cultures as though they operate in an equivalent manner.
dzhiurgis 8 hours ago [-]
I suspect there's a big of cognitive dissonance here. My guess US has more emphasis on road trips, longer distances, vastly more wilderness areas, etc.
Europe is mostly urbanized it's almost boring. Dunno about China, but I guess they cracked charging infrastructure.
zuzululu 16 hours ago [-]
> If ICE is the only vehicle for you, because of religious reasons, thats okay
so you admit EV is a cult if ICE is a religion ? that's not okay.
dzhiurgis 8 hours ago [-]
I finally met someone who plans to downgrade from EV to ICE. He does 100k km per year, running multiple businesses. Lives 120km outside Dublin. Biggest issue seems to be wait at public charge stations. IMO he needs to get long range EV and get better chargers at home/work. But oh well, I'm not going to stop him if he's going to get luxury sports cars instead lol.
1234letshaveatw 1 days ago [-]
This EV owner disagrees, and I imagine that city dwellers without dedicated charging agree
heaney-555 22 hours ago [-]
If you could charge the battery in 5 minutes at a public charger, would the range still be a problem?
rconti 22 hours ago [-]
Plenty of city dwellers get by without home gasoline filling spigot.
himata4113 1 days ago [-]
I don't think 10x density is possible without getting into nuclear, at least not with the chemistries we know of today, everything at a certain point becomes an explosive.
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.
Aboutplants 1 days ago [-]
The next revolution will be small scale generation. Fuel cells, extremely efficient cheap solar, even smaller modular reactors, etc.
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.
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
With modern heat pumps and induction stoves getting off of natural gas is fairly easy for most people and saves money in the long run. Meanwhile the grid is switching to renewables so getting off gas is your best investment. You can get of electric too, but on your 1/3rd acre that probably means significant lifestyle compromises - I will be impressed if you are willing to live with them.
Tostino 23 hours ago [-]
Batteries are cheap enough to build (using a commercial installer completely kills the economics, because you're paying five to ten times the actual cost in the US) a reasonable size personal battery bank (~100+ kwh), paired with some overkill solar, to totally replace the grid in a lot of cases. GP isn't limited to rooftop solar with 1/3rd an acre, so they can do it quite cheap if they want.
robocat 11 hours ago [-]
> love to get rid of at least one of my utility bills
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.
GuB-42 15 hours ago [-]
The problem with the stuff that powers mars rovers (RTG) is that gives off constant power. If your RTG gives off 100W, you will always get 100W, no more, no less, until it progressively decays on the scale of decades. You can't even turn it off.
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.
himata4113 12 hours ago [-]
The hard part of enrichment is getting to around 20%, after that it actually becomes easier. They're slow-decay isotopes yes, but I am fairly sure you can build a multi-stage device to create a superheated plasma to release all that energy in a fraction of a second since they are capable of chain reactions and it is largely dictated by heat.
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!
GuB-42 5 hours ago [-]
It is actually the opposite, RTGs use plutonium-238, which is much more radioactive than the plutonium-239 used in bombs. And it is a problem because it will blow up before you can assemble enough of it to make a big nuclear explosion. In addition, it is not as fissile as plutonium-239.
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.
cestith 1 days ago [-]
I seem to remember recent advances in TMSR research and construction. Those tend to e much safer and have safer byproducts than uranium or plutonium fueled water-cooled reactors.
utopiah 1 days ago [-]
In term of dual use nuclear seems culturally radically different from everything else, wondering why.
toddmorey 1 days ago [-]
Agreed, but I think people can imagine and companies are very motivated: powertools, phones, laptops, watches, backup UPS, cars, hospital equipment... there's high demand for durable, long-lasting batteries. I think the research is there, it's just complex chemistry. We'll get there. Impressive to see the progress in EV batteries and they've actually turned out to be more durable than first feared.
laxpri 18 hours ago [-]
hard core lipo user here(for DIY). battery is great but it gets balloon after using some time
raumgeist 1 days ago [-]
I think, apart from finding better Batteries altoghether, we should build multi-tier batteries inspired by biology.
Humans have bloodsugar, sugar in the Liver and then fat. All of them have their respective properties with availability and amount. This way, engineering tradeoffs could be allocated much more fine grained.
For example, a while ago I read about a startup building an energy storage where they heat up large amounts of sand to store the surplus of renewables. This could serve analogous to the fat in humans.
floatrock 2 hours ago [-]
CATL is kinda doing that for EVs. They're making battery packs that are a blend of sodium-ion and lithium-ion.
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.
jubilanti 22 hours ago [-]
Biological power is marvelous, but really inefficient. All that sugar and fat in entire human body only generates 50-150 Watts.
andrewflnr 22 hours ago [-]
Humans do that because we're big and extra complicated. The closest analogue is probably a hybrid car, though ideally you'd want one that can create synthetic fuel from its battery. But I suspect cellphones are properly analogous to e.g. bacteria that have much simpler energy storage.
kansface 22 hours ago [-]
I look to a future of regularly servicing the immune system of my battery.
spockz 22 hours ago [-]
That reminds me of the gel packs in the USS Voyager. At some point they became “infected” and they needed to the raise their temperatures to let them destroy the infection!
jqbd 1 days ago [-]
I think I've heard of sodium, lithium hybrids. But that's only 2, what's the fat? Gasoline, LPG hybrid? Shit gets expensive fast. Probably 2x cost of just a sodium or ion EV? The human body is too amazing.
laxpri 18 hours ago [-]
sorry in advance , but my POV is .
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 .
win311fwg 21 hours ago [-]
The good news is that humans already exist, so you can already use them. It will give them something to do with AI replacing them elsewhere.
You might not like the efficiency of that type of battery, though.
clickety_clack 1 days ago [-]
I think people can imagine lighter cars and laptops and things. Is there something bizarre that’s unlocked like battery powered space launches or something?
tflinton 24 hours ago [-]
High density batteries allows us to have dramatically cheaper electricity. Think of it like this, what happens when electricity is 1/10th the cost? Beyond what others have pointed out (electric airplanes, cars that drive thousands of miles), costs for everything would drop as energy is a core driver of it in every good you consume. If you can pull energy where it's very cheaply available and store/transport it anywhere the world millions of lives would be saved. For example;
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.
ianburrell 20 hours ago [-]
Energy density doesn't matter for electricity since the storage batteries don't move and there is plenty of space for them. Cost per energy stored is what matters. Density is important for transportation especially planes.
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.
RetroTechie 23 hours ago [-]
Batteries are not power sources, but storage. The energy still has to come from somewhere, and power generation won't magically become 10x cheaper overnight. No matter how cheap battery storage becomes.
But it IS crucial for removing bottlenecks & replace fossil fuels.
Borealid 22 hours ago [-]
Imagine for a moment that batteries with decent shelf lives are free.
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.
ricardobeat 1 days ago [-]
Aviation, drones with hours+ flight range, more solar power usage as storage gets easier/cheaper, phones that last more than a day, robots with actually useful battery life, smaller IoT devices. A lot of current tech is severely limited by battery capacity.
nico_h 1 days ago [-]
Electric long distance passenger planes. Possibly requiring the help of EMALs.
Electric long distance container ships.
Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns.
Even longer range drones.
aqme28 22 hours ago [-]
What point is there in gasoline if we can get better energy storage in batteries?
schainks 21 hours ago [-]
How is billions every year on R&D not enough, especially when you measure consistent improvement year over year in the technology?
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"
laxpri 19 hours ago [-]
maybe you are right . I was thinking a world where battery improvement is the rate as chip performance improvement ,
dmix 1 days ago [-]
The article says $4B was put into solid state research/companies as of 2025 in the US alone. Seems like they are working on it
laxpri 18 hours ago [-]
maybe, but not enough.
but if there is level 1 to 10 and the chips are level 10, from transistor to today.
the battery would be level 2-3 .
if this continues the battery cant keep up with more advance tech,where energy density matters like flying cars,BCI etc .
like people are selling two same products to the same person(same time), because the battery life is bad.
dmix 17 hours ago [-]
I'm all for more
toss1 1 days ago [-]
It should be relatively straightforward to imagine — we already have that in gasoline-powered internal combustion engines.
The Watt-hours per kilogram of good Lithium Ion batteries is around 250-280 Wh/Kg; for Lithium Iron Phosphate it's about 180 Wh/kg, and for Sodium-Ion about 170 Wh/Kg.
The raw energy in gasoline is about 12,300 Wh/Kg but automobile internal combustion engines get only about 20-30% efficiency yielding about 2500-3600 Wh/Kg. For aviation piston engines it is a bit better at 25-30$ 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.
rootusrootus 24 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
_carbyau_ 14 hours ago [-]
> we could make EVs with the same form factor as today but with over a thousand miles of range. Not that we need that
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.
rootusrootus 7 minutes ago [-]
> juicing 10 cars in 5 minutes has to require significant electrical infrastructure!
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.
SoftTalker 24 hours ago [-]
Some people might need that range. If you cannot charge at home and you don't have good public charging infrastructure then you might want enough range so you only have to deal with charging once or twice a month.
ryan_lane 14 hours ago [-]
If you can't charge at home it's probably because you're in an apartment, which means you're in a city, in which case there's going to be charging infrastructure.
toss1 23 hours ago [-]
Yes, underselling a bit for sure! I didn't even want to get into the optimizations available if cars were really designed for lightweight when the entire motors+battery is only 100-150kg, and the battery can be low and centered.
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!
thelastgallon 23 hours ago [-]
An EV doesn't need to have 480 miles of range. Nobody is driving that distance daily. 98% of trips are under 50 miles. Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!
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.
Sohcahtoa82 21 hours ago [-]
> EVs should be built with 100 - 150 mile range. [..] if they need to go longer, US has a robust rental car industry
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.
kazinator 19 hours ago [-]
Not only that, but with a longer range, you have more flexibility in planning recharging. It may take more time to top up from 50 km left to 500 km, but you have more flexibility about when to do it. Something that needs a daily charge is going to be interfering with your schedule.
Sohcahtoa82 18 hours ago [-]
Exactly.
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.
vablings 20 hours ago [-]
"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."
Just wait for people to be priced out of ICE cars. EV's should be and will be significantly cheaper to buy and manufacture.
laxpri 18 hours ago [-]
If we stop considering ICE , its still a whole new world would created by smaller batteries .
could be some bad examples(right now in mind),correct me .
but smart ring , BCI systems is not possible with oil.
iso1631 1 days ago [-]
Not all batteries need to be mobile.
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.
epistasis 23 hours ago [-]
Storing a month of energy use doesn't make any sense when it comes to renewable grids. Since you don't have to mine/extract and transport an inventory, far far less storage is required.
womble2 23 hours ago [-]
A month is probably excessive, but there are large regions of the world where its not uncommon for both solar and wind power to be running at <5% for multiple weeks in a row.
epistasis 22 hours ago [-]
There's an engineering tradeoff between having excess generation capacity, for that seasonal minimum, and having more storage. The cost optimal decision on that tradeoff will be determined by the ratio of excess generation cost and storage cost for rarely-used storage.
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.
iso1631 22 hours ago [-]
Which just emphasises the point -- density and thus land use isn't really a major concern
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.
epistasis 22 hours ago [-]
Definitely! However I frequently encounter people on energy discussion forums that assume that we need 2-3 months of battery storage, perhaps because they see natural gas or other storage and assume that batteries need exactly the same thing, so I'm perhaps overly eager to respond to claims about month-long battery storage.
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...
You'd have to compare the fire risk of a high density battery vs a substation.
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
barbazoo 23 hours ago [-]
Doesn't that depend on the sources of energy though? Pretty much constant short and mid term supply like geothermal, hydro, tides, etc vs unpredictable or variable in the short term like wind and solar.
As a society relying on solar, I'd want to have more of a buffer than one that relies on hydro.
PunchyHamster 17 hours ago [-]
you don't want industry going down coz there has been bad weather for few days in a row. And other alternative is burning gas.
If we want to get out of fossils, we will have to store for longer. Or built a ton of atomics
_carbyau_ 14 hours ago [-]
Even if it doesn't work for the UK. Australia could do this easily.
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.
thelastgallon 22 hours ago [-]
Instead of batteries, why not green hydrogen or green ammonia? Ammonia is needed for fertilizer, storage/logistics are a solved problem. Emergency plants around that can use ammonia as fuel can solve the dunkelflaute problem?
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.
epistasis 22 hours ago [-]
Capital costs and round-trip efficiency are the primary reasons. Even at constant utilization, electrolyzers are expensive enough that it's hard to replace fossil-fuel generated hydrogen at the moment.
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!)
bawolff 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Why would you want this?
47635274172635 6 hours ago [-]
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VaderAi 2 hours ago [-]
It seems the solid state battery is the long awaited answer to ev development. Where we will see range of 1000km and super fast charging and reasonable battery replacement costs. Currently in the market with battery failures it is cheaper to buy another ev rather than replace the battery.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
YouTuber "NightHawkInLight" just made a flow battery from common materials. Why would I want a solid state battery when I could have a battery whose capacity expands just by duct taping plastic water barrels to it?
wongarsu 2 hours ago [-]
For storage at the level of a home or a grid-level battery, absolutely.
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
j16sdiz 3 hours ago [-]
What's the energy density for that?
Something that works doesn't mean something is desirable
floatrock 3 hours ago [-]
Is energy density required for all applications? Something that's not desirable for say a car doesn't mean something isn't good enough for say non-mobile applications.
conorcleary 27 minutes ago [-]
Hold on, buying Lemon calls.
homeonthemtn 3 hours ago [-]
Well, yes actually. If you're talking any kind of batteries above Duracell level, then it's important to understand how much power can be stored in a given "unit"
floatrock 2 hours ago [-]
Of course you need to know the power per unit to some degree, but when you're building warehouse-sized stationary storage arrays, land is cheap and LCOS is more important than energy density. That's a very different tradeoff calculation than if you're building a car.
I find the fact that the military here is setup orthogonal to the civilian sector fascinating- for the military- a unified energy carrier - that can be everything, battery, fuel, explosives is the golden grail.
Bonuspoints if you can squeeze that liquid through a fuel cell.
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.
thelastgallon 1 days ago [-]
Aren't sodium batteries close to production and a lot cheaper and safer?
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.
GlibMonkeyDeath 1 days ago [-]
Depends on the application - each battery technology has a trade-off between energy density, cost, lifetime, safety, scalability, etc. Sodium may have a place in grid storage, although iron-air is being deployed today and is even cheaper and safer (but poor energy density, which doesn't matter much for grid storage - https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/)
jillesvangurp 18 hours ago [-]
Sodium ion batteries are already being mass produced in China. CATL actually just started producing their second generation sodium ion batteries. In the US, Peak energy is doing storage solutions based on sodium ion.
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.
margalabargala 1 days ago [-]
Cheaper yes. Non-aqueous sodium ion batteries (which are most of them) are more dangerous than LiFePO4 though.
vitaminCPP 1 days ago [-]
In what way, if you don't mind me asking?
margalabargala 1 days ago [-]
In the way that they are more likely to catch fire or explode or undergo thermal runaway.
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.)
thelastgallon 1 days ago [-]
Yes, electricity should be the only abstraction layer to deliver energy to end user. We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants and also continuously switch out dirtier fuels with clean energy.
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.
mb7733 1 days ago [-]
> We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants
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.
gabrielhidasy 1 days ago [-]
Depends, if you are turning that electricity into heat using a heat-pump you might win on most situations (maybe lose if the weather is really cold outside, unless you add geothermal loops, but then its a lot more expensive to make)
fhn 20 hours ago [-]
No it wouldn't depend. Electricity generation and electricity transfer has losses. Gas transfer has loss only if there is a leak.
Tuna-Fish 5 hours ago [-]
The ceiling is not 100% efficient, when you have a heat pump.
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.
maxwwwt 1 days ago [-]
The theoretical efficiency maximum for burning gas in a home is 100%. Most systems won't hit that because they need to vent waste gases, which carry some heat away.
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.)
mb7733 9 hours ago [-]
Completely separate conversation. I was responding to the statement "We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants".
floatrock 2 hours ago [-]
You might be missing the point of heat pumps, and your statement was really about end-heat in homes.
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".
mb7733 1 hours ago [-]
I completely understand your point. I know what a heat pump is and how it works. They are great. I am not anti heat pump. I am pro heat pump.
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!
thelastgallon 22 hours ago [-]
In addition the sibling comments (COP of heat pumps is 500%), air pollution in homes is worse than air pollution outside. If you don't have natural gas and burning fuel, it helps a lot. Not only is electricity cheaper and cleaner, but also healthier.
mb7733 20 hours ago [-]
Not what I replied to
idontwantthis 1 days ago [-]
That is false. Heat pumps are more efficient than burning gas in a home even when the electricity came from burning gas.
mb7733 9 hours ago [-]
It does not follow that "We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants"
mbreese 1 days ago [-]
But isn't it more advantageous to have the gas -> electricity conversion in a plant from an emissions point of view? You still have losses in the system when moving natural gas around from the source to individual homes too (leaks). In theory you don't, but in practice you do.
alok-g 15 hours ago [-]
Can someone please explain why electrons also cannot go directly through the electrolyte just like Lithium ions? Footnote 1 skips explaining this. I tried asking ChatGPT, but it is not getting to a complete answer. It says things that just pushes the question into another form.
Shitty-kitty 15 hours ago [-]
An ion is a atom that has lost electrons and thus it has a + charge. The electrons are the - charge. The electrolyte allows + to flow but not -
alok-g 15 hours ago [-]
Cool! That seems to fit as the voltage build-up (assuming no current taken from the battery) is not reversed by the negative ions flowing backwards.
I still have the question though. How does the electrolyte do that? :-)
Tuna-Fish 6 hours ago [-]
Electrons require significant voltage to move through free space or insulators. They generally move between places by hopping between atoms with free outer electrons. Electrolytes are designed to not have any.
deckar01 1 days ago [-]
The Two Bit Da Vinci YouTube channel has a good video on solid state battery fundamentals and a deep dive into a battery company (ProLogium) that has demonstrated manufacturing at scale.
Those use liquid electrolyte cells and the video is more promo than rigorous testing.
jhawk28 21 hours ago [-]
I'm not trying to build a solid-state battery...
MarkusQ 23 hours ago [-]
> because the liquid electrolyte currently used in batteries is flammable, replacing it with a solid could make batteries safer and less susceptible to fire.
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.
usrusr 23 hours ago [-]
Isn't the key difference that flammable solids have a limited reaction surface when they burn, whereas flammable liquids can be wildly unpredictable?
londons_explore 23 hours ago [-]
This isn't true for most lithium ion chemistries.
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.
rhdunn 23 hours ago [-]
IIUC, the main problem with the current Li batteries is that the two plates can over time grow material that will 1) degrade performance; and 2) make it more likely to short circuit and catch fire. Similarly with electric car batteries after accidents where the battery is damaged, short circuits, and then catches fire.
So the main risk here would be the likelyhood of short circuiting under different failure scenarios.
hwillis 22 hours ago [-]
The energy "stored" in the light oil electrolyte of a battery is >10x more than the electrical energy or the energy released by reacting lithium alone.
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.
m463 23 hours ago [-]
I wonder about the youtube videos of someone driving a screwdriver through a battery pack.
Is that the electrical discharge, then the lithium going off, then the electrolytes?
fhn 20 hours ago [-]
you ever short a car battery? That much electricity running through metal will create a lot of heat which then ignites the lithium. Watch a video on thermite and you'll get the idea.
1 days ago [-]
jsLavaGoat 19 hours ago [-]
When titles with rhetorical questions sound almost like dumb questions.
lenerdenator 22 hours ago [-]
Manufacturing the batteries would probably benefit from solid state. The Panasonic battery plant in the exurbs of Kansas City, MO has had two evacuations this year from thermal issues related to lithium-ion battery production, including one yesterday morning. [0] [1]
Was Dendrite shorts the reason for Samsung failure?
NooneAtAll3 1 days ago [-]
have I misread or 3/4 of the article explained what a battery is and only final tiny part got to "short-circuiting dendrites don't happen without electrolite"?
wolfi1 1 days ago [-]
dendrites are an inherent problem with liquid elctrolytes and I would have emphasized that as well
hn6l4bg2fw 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah I've made peace with this too
ck2 1 days ago [-]
are dendrites why so many people are now burning down their apartment/complex charging their scooters
is LiFePo4 immune to dendrite shorts? Or do they happen just don't burn?
reportingsjr 1 days ago [-]
There are a number of reasons why lithium batteries may catastrophically fail and catch fire. Dendrite shorts is one, another reason is poor alignment of the layers during assembly, allowing for eventual shifting of layers leading to internal shorting. Another is conductive or sharp debris getting into the battery during manufacturing, and after a while the anode/cathode separator getting pierced by the debris. Lots of reasons!
hwillis 22 hours ago [-]
dendrites are not really a significant problem in popular batteries. It's associated with lithium metal, vs lithium in normal batteries is in the form of salts. Solid state lets you use metal, which is much more energy dense since you don't need the salts.
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.
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.
I wish BYD could bring their new infra to the US - it looks pretty ::ahem:: solid!
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.
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.
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
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Zero_Point_Module
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you know more than others do, that's great! But please contribute by sharing some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn, rather than putting others down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My temper is very even. I simply do not tolerate bullshit from nobodies who are speaking garbage. And I get to work in aerospace because it seems that out of the millions of people that tried to get my job I'm the only one with the relevant mixed-domain expertise to realize what a company wants to do and get it done.
I have hardware in orbit, I can with 4-sigma certainty guarantee the poster trying to chide me does not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
- 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
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.
Unfortunately the problems with hydrogen storage and the fuel cells have prevented them from really taking off.
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.
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
Interesting discussions about energetics are best had from a distance.
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...>.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon
And I'd know because I have to work with this IN ORBIT. I've had this conversation a dozen times in meetings with military and government.
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...
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...
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...
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.
And it's still improving at about 5% per year.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://criticalfallibilism.com/brandolinis-law/
Europe is mostly urbanized it's almost boring. Dunno about China, but I guess they cracked charging infrastructure.
so you admit EV is a cult if ICE is a religion ? that's not okay.
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.
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.
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 .
You might not like the efficiency of that type of battery, though.
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.
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.
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.
Electric long distance container ships.
Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns.
Even longer range drones.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Just wait for people to be priced out of ICE cars. EV's should be and will be significantly cheaper to buy and manufacture.
could be some bad examples(right now in mind),correct me . but smart ring , BCI systems is not possible with oil.
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.
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
As a society relying on solar, I'd want to have more of a buffer than one that relies on hydro.
If we want to get out of fossils, we will have to store for longer. Or built a ton of atomics
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.
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.
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!)
Why would you want this?
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.
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.
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.
https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.20...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S20954...
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.
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.
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!
I still have the question though. How does the electrolyte do that? :-)
https://youtu.be/xQFVIs4leig?si=iOOt5gg_2MJAIoFR
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.
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 that the electrical discharge, then the lithium going off, then the electrolytes?
[0]https://www.kmbc.com/article/lithium-ion-batteries-catch-fir...
[1]https://www.kmbc.com/article/panasonic-plant-de-soto-evacuat...
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.