Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 175 posts

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#61

Post by sowbug »

ebbv wrote: post #58
gnicholas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers should absolutely consider whether we are on a sustainable growth curve. How common will electric charging stations be if it turns out that EVs can't rise above 10% of the total car market? If hydrogen-powered cars all of a sudden became the norm, EV drivers will be much less well-served than if EV sales continue to scale (as most EV purchasers probably assume they will).

> How common will electric charging stations be if it turns out that EVs can't rise above 10% of the total car market? One of the beauties of EVs is you don't need charging stations. I leased a Nissan LEAF 2 years ago, and it almost only gets charged at home. You can't really know whether EVs are going to take over or not, it depends on too many factors. If our government gets bamboozled with Hydrogen the way they di…

The best part of an electric car is starting every day with a full tank. I could never switch back to gas for that one reason.

[edit: yes, I know it's an anachronism. I still dial phones, too.]

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#62

Post by greglindahl »

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #52
Animats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next big problem is the lack of a unified charging infrastructure. Yes, you can buy a trunk full of adapters.[1] Teslas use their own plug, for which there are a CHAdeMO adapter, a J1772 adapter, and adapters for standard 120VAC and 240VAC outlets. A full set of adapters is about $700. [2] The Chevy Bolt uses Combo Cord, which supports J1772 and CCS. Looking around Silicon Valley, almost all charging points have…

Yes, but you don't need chademo. Your car comes with 120 and 220v, plus j1172, plus you don't need an adapter for superchargers. So $0 additional cost. Plus it comes with the wall charger. So you might live in a place with Chademo, but its only useful if it exists, and there is no high power charger. So the extra set would $450, but you actually need $0 extra - and it fits in the corner of the trunk. I've owned a tes…

I live in an area with a lot of CHAdeMO chargers, and I've never been tempted to buy the adapter... near-home charging (I have an apartment) and superchargers have done the job, even for longer trips.

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#63

Post by dTal »

sowbug wrote: post #59
gnicholas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers should absolutely consider whether we are on a sustainable growth curve. How common will electric charging stations be if it turns out that EVs can't rise above 10% of the total car market? If hydrogen-powered cars all of a sudden became the norm, EV drivers will be much less well-served than if EV sales continue to scale (as most EV purchasers probably assume they will).

Most hydrogen-powered cars are electric cars. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle (listing upcoming hydrogen vehicles, all using fuel cells). And that's actually the point of switching cars to electricity: we have many sustainable ways of making electricity, and zero ways of sustainably making gasoline. Get cars running on electricity, then continue building out the infrastructure.

>zero ways of sustainably making gasoline

This is untrue, actually. You can depolymerise virtually anything carbon-based into oil. It's currently more expensive than digging it out of the ground, but we'll never run out of oil.

What's more, assuming the carbon in the feed stock originally came from the atmosphere, burning the resulting product is carbon-neutral.

Something to think about, given the unbeatable energy density of gasoline (barring nigh-magical battery technology).

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#64

Post by dredmorbius »

yuhong wrote: post #45
dredmorbius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a real problem and a real concern. An EV essentially is a car with a very expensive fuel tank (the battery), made out of specific materials and properties. While it is efficient in energy use and can make use of fungible electricity, lithium is rare, limited to specific areas of concentration, and can (as any material) only be partially recycled. There's lithium elsewhere on Earth, or more precisely, in seawa…

processing seawater for minerals (uranium is another which might be extracted) is expensive in the sense of requiring a lot of energy (arguably the ultimate definition of cost is energy requirements). But it has to be done only once when the battery is produced, right?

Yes. But there's a constant flux of lithium require (flow) for an economy based on battery storage -- or at least so long as lithium is your battery substrate.

How much is determined by the storage per vehicle, vehicles per capita, lifetime of the battery pack, and recovery rate of recycling.

If you go to an inventory of mineral or element prevalence in the Earth's crust, you'll come up with a list of elements and what percentage (usually by mass) they constitute of the Earth's crust.

Strategic minerals: iron, copper, zinc, silver, gold, tin, lead, mercury, gallium, etc., etc., all have specific rates of occurrence. We mine them from ores in which they're more concentrated, because that's easier (again: less energy requirement), but those ores are scarce. Ultimately the question becomes how much energy is required to access minerals vs. how much energy do they make available. If the first exceeds the second, they're a losing proposition no matter the technology applied to extraction.

Ore concentrations are formed by various mechanisms -- and I understand them only partially, this isn't my field, though I'm studying it now. Iron, for example was largely concentrated into ores billions of years ago, during the first big flourishing of life on Earth, in the Great Rusting. Biological activity, mostly algae, concentrated what had previously been unoxidised molecular iron (sourced from cosmic material that coalesced on Earth).

Other mineral ores seem to also have biological origins in concentration, some various chemical transformations, some geological activity (coal, oil, and natural gas most notably), some are pretty directly remnants of late meteor or asteroid impacts -- especially gold and heavy elements which would otherwise have sunk to the Earth's mantle and core.

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#65

Post by kalleboo »

mtgx wrote: post #17

> There is no Moore’s law for battery storage—the power of batteries doesn’t magically double every two years. > Put another away, the battery pack in the 2017 Volt will cost less than 10 percent more than the one in the 2012 Volt. But it will be more than four times more powerful. Intel wishes its chips still quadrupled in performance every 5 years. > We’re moving toward a world where more and more cars will either…

> But it will be more than four times more powerful

It's also more than twice as heavy

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#66

Post by dredmorbius »

8note wrote: post #42
dredmorbius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a real problem and a real concern. An EV essentially is a car with a very expensive fuel tank (the battery), made out of specific materials and properties. While it is efficient in energy use and can make use of fungible electricity, lithium is rare, limited to specific areas of concentration, and can (as any material) only be partially recycled. There's lithium elsewhere on Earth, or more precisely, in seawa…

There's someone in Halifax researching Sodium Batteries, which would be a fair bit easier to find than lithium, though less effective.

I've kept a modest watch on battery technologies, and there are some interesting developments, though most are fairly modest.

You've got the fundamental problem that battery energy storage densities by weight are ~1/100 - 1/50 that of liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Synthetic analogs of petrol, kerosene, and diesel would be quite useful (though expensive). All but irreplaceable for some uses (heavier-than-air flight, marine propulsion).

Among batteries, you have:

1. Liquid / molton salt batteries. Some of these have highly abundant substrates. The problem is the 300-600C+ temperatures they operate at. Especially in vehicle applications.

2. Metal-air batteries. Iron and aluminium particularly. Here the oxidation is supplied from air. You're consuming the (anode?) in use, and it's got to be replaced, but that can include recycling. Abundant but problematic.

3. Fuel cells. A reaction, typically of hydrogen and oxygen, producing electron flows. The problem is the reaction chamber, which usually requires scarce catalysts (e.g., platinum) which are a) expensive and b) rarer than lithium.

4. Advanced allotropes. Carbon or silicon or other materials which are abundant but offer unique properties in new molecular forms. While this is well outside my area of expertise, it's an un(der) explored area which might pack some suprises.

5. Biocells. Life does some amazing things with enzymes and other agents, including maintaining an exceptionally high voltage potential across cell membranes (see Nick Lane's book, recently mentioned here via Bill Gates). Humans utilising biological mechanisms to provide electricity might offer another out, though this again is highly speculative.

The advantage of my #s 4 & 5 is that they could rely on highly abundant elements arranged in complex molecules to perform desired functions. Experience suggests that such molecules are difficult to come up with, degrade quickly, and have narrow operating bands in which they're viable. But at least the abundance constraint is removed.

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#67

Post by owengriffiths »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #29
microcolonel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how slate got the idea that they're not "expensive". Maybe the prices have been manipulated independently of supply.

Battery costs are five years ahead of the predicted price curve: http://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/26/ev-battery-costs-already... GM says li-ion pack costs for its Bolt are ~$145/kWh, predicting $100/kWh by 2021: http://www.hybridcars.com/gm-ev-battery-cells-down-to-145kwh... Tesla confirms its costs are below $190/kWh: https://forums.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/battery-cost-bel... Batteries are following the same pr…

I think there's a bit of confusion about Pack prices vs Cell prices. The $145 is cell only, which is one of the reasons it is so much lower. There don't seem to be consistent pack-pack price comparisons.

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#68

Post by toomuchtodo »

owengriffiths wrote: post #67
toomuchtodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery costs are five years ahead of the predicted price curve: http://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/26/ev-battery-costs-already... GM says li-ion pack costs for its Bolt are ~$145/kWh, predicting $100/kWh by 2021: http://www.hybridcars.com/gm-ev-battery-cells-down-to-145kwh... Tesla confirms its costs are below $190/kWh: https://forums.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/battery-cost-bel... Batteries are following the same pr…

I think there's a bit of confusion about Pack prices vs Cell prices. The $145 is cell only, which is one of the reasons it is so much lower. There don't seem to be consistent pack-pack price comparisons.

I agree there is a disparity between the Bolt's cell-only cost vs Tesla's cost all-in on a pack. Regardless, the cost is below $200/kWh, and it appears that the cost decreases will continue.

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#69

Post by brownbat »

Spooky23 wrote: post #48
vonklaus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you see as the 'gaping flaws' of a pure electric vehicle? I would never want a hybrid, as I would optimize for either an ICE or EV but there doesn't seem to be space in a consumer vehicle to have a workable hybrid that is better than either of its pureplay counterparts.

A few: - Road trips. Range needs to accommodate the 95th percentile trip, not the mean. - Apartment living - Unknown depreciation curve The other inconvenient fact is that you need to drive a lot for the TCO of an electric car to be lower than a similar gasoline car.

- Road trips.

Someone should make a novel rental program where you can swap an electric for a fresh one every 200 miles or so, like getting fresh horses. It would let more people try the vehicles while also offering a faster solution for road trips (assuming Tesla owners would get a significant discount).

Re: Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

#70

Post by jseliger »

pcr0 wrote: post #18

I'm all for electric vehicles, but there are a few things that have bothered me about its mass adoption. Right now, electrics comprise a tiny part of the automobile market share. Yet Tesla is already running into supply issues, particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world. Secondly, I suppose we're current…

But what will happen 5-8 years down the line, when all the early mainstream adopters of electrics will have to replace their batteries? Is it feasible to recycle all those batteries?

I quoted this below, but yes: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/09/3775606/used-sec....

Furthermore, lots of research is going into electric battery recycling. I've worked on EV-battery-related grant applications that also demonstrate promise. I can't say more about them, but I'm optimistic.

At the moment, lithium commodity prices remain oddly low if most people expect reserves to run out (if you (in the plural you sense) expect reserves to run out, there's a fortune to be made!). See also http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-There-Enough-....

Post reply on HN