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Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

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Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#121

Post by AtlasBarfed »

2x the density of.... what? ? "commercial lithium ion batteries"?

Watt-hours per kg, and watt-hours per liter.

And with all solid state, have they solved scaling production beyond a small demonstration cell? It is now a known investment "con" to create a solid state cell that appears to kick the tar out of conventional cells and then try to get funded to "solve production". I lost count of how many companies were doing this.

This is an embarrassing article from an engineering organization website.

What appears to be happening is that solid state will simply be a distraction technology. Sulfur chemistries (medium/long term) and prosaic unsexy LFP and sodium ion (short term) will drive the true revolution in electrification of transportation and grid storage.

Solid state may produce usable use cases around laptops / phones / etc at some point, and who knows, solid state sulfur may become a thing eventually, but what's really needed from batteries now is scale and cost.

The 200 wh/kg LFP (230+ on the roadmap/12-24 months away!) and 150 wh/kg sodium ion (180-200 wh/kg on roadmap) going into mass production are the big revolution in batteries. That is a non-cobalt/nickel LFP battery that can do 400 mile cars, and a sodium ion battery that should drop to 40$/kwh costs that can do a 300 mile car, and the roadmap should further upgrade/cheapen those chemistries.

The 150 wh/kg sodium ion battery should mean 250-350 mile range city cars that are significantly cheaper than ICE drivetrains can achieve. It is tranportation for 3-4 billion people that won't use fossil fuels.

LFP should eventually be able to do the medium range electric semi truck. Sulfur chemistries should enable or better a long haul semi, but sulfur chems are probably 8-12 years from mass production (I really hope I'm wrong and it is sooner though)

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#122

Post by AtlasBarfed »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #10
chimen wrote: post #5

Surprised how "dead" this industry is. I remember having Lithium-Ion batteries since I was in high school which was more than 20 years ago (and some Li-Po until then). Everything is leaps and bounds since then but not the batteries. Seems like a massive disconnect to me but I'm no chemist or researcher in this field.

Energy density is ~8 times higher than in 2008 at 1/10th the price. That's more progress than we've made in single-core performance in the same timeframe. Sources: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-apri... https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-... https://mlech26l.github.io/pages/2020/12/17/cpus.html

That has to be an astroturfer that posted that comment.

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#123

Post by jandrese »

sorenjan wrote: post #105
rbanffy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, a Chevy Bolt has a lithium ion battery to power the drivetrain and a conventional lead-acid battery for the accessories. This seems like an odd choice - unless you already bought a supply of lead-acid batteries for the next 50 years or so. I've read about a car using supercapacitors in the regenerative brakes to capture energy at high current and, then let it trickle back into the main batteries (or dr…

Tesla switched from lead-acid to 12V lithium ion their S and X models in 2021. James May had some issues with his Tesla when the 12V battery went flat. https://insideevs.com/news/546087/tesla-liion-12v-auxiliary-... https://youtu.be/NsKwMryKqRE

Tesla is also switching to 48V for the accessories.

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#124

Post by sorenjan »

RRRA wrote: post #113
sorenjan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One drawback of using lots of lithium batteries in your home is that they might experience thermal runaway and burn your house down. Not having to worry about that should have some additional value.

Most new solar installations now use LiFePO4 which apparently is much safer on that runaway side...

That's good, but is that what's used in "used car-batteries with degraded capacity"?

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#125

Post by AtlasBarfed »

ashish10 wrote: post #9

Isn't this what Quantumscape is already betting on ?

Hey, remember them? They were right on the verge of production allegedly while the shorters were "outing" them?

I've heard nothing about them for a solid 16 months, so I'm guessing the shorters were right.

Solid State batteries appear pretty easy to crank out a demonstration cell with lots of density advantages over the production cells, and handwave away the scaling of production as a detail resolved in investment. There are a solid dozen companies I've seen with that basic approach.

None of the solid state companies appear close to scaling production.

Likely the sulfur chemistries will beat them to market with far superior material cost and density and scalability. Solid state still has a good opportunity in cell phones / laptops / etc, which is a big market, but the real play in batteries is grid storange and tranportation, which will dwarf phones/laptops by several orders of magnitude in volume.

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#126

Post by IshKebab »

seszett wrote: post #39
danbruc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 GWh in what time? Gigafactory 1 was at 30 GWh per year in 2019 and they planned to ramp up to 54 GWh, according to Wikipedia. So probably per year? Which would make their production capacity 570 kW. Also according to Wikipedia, a production of 35 GWh per year which is 4 MW was estimated to require 300 MW of energy input.

What is the point of comparing 300 MW energy use for production with 35 GWh/year (which is technically 4MW indeed) new battery capacity though? These are technically the same units, but they don't measure the same things.

They measure comparable things. The ratio is how many times you would have to discharge the battery to output enough energy to manufacture the battery. It's the capacity independent measure of embodied energy. An important metric.

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#127

Post by phkahler »

mabbo wrote: post #63

Lithium ion batteries set the standard because they have an acceptable level of all the key metrics: energy storage by weight; energy storage by volume; discharge rate; charging rate; production costs. Every single one of these big breakthrough announcements touts how great this new tech is- in just one or two particular metrics. The problem is that Li-Ion batteries are just barely acceptable in all of those metrics.…

Actually, energy storage by weight is not as big a deal for electric cars. Regenerative braking can recover most of a vehicles kinetic energy, which is where the weight dependent energy goes. This is why several hybrids get better fuel economy in city driving than highway, the biggest losses are due to aero which increases nonlinearly with speed.

Otherwise yes, it's important to find something better without sacrificing on any of those metrics.

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#128

Post by dev_daftly »

datacruncher01 wrote: post #60
gt565k wrote: post #11

I read an article somewhere that discusses how Toyota has the most battery patents out of any company and also owns most of the solid state patents and are actually working on commercializing solid state batteries for vehicles. The point I think the article was trying to make is that while everyone is focused on lithium ion, Toyota was biding it’s time and getting ready to one-up everyone with solid state batteries a…

I think that Toyota won't really go heavy into EVs until batteries are more available. EV batteries are heavily dependent on lithium availability which is limited by world wide exploration limits. We are only able to mine enough to make about 2 million Tesla equivalent cars per year, and that's if none of it goes to phones other electronic devices. Toyota sells that many vehicles alone each year. Until there is somet…

I mean, Toyota has said this themselves. Their view is that making 1,000,000 hybrids is better than 1,000 evs because most of an evs battery capacity is wasted on a daily basis.

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#129

Post by Kye »

tromp wrote: post #116
DennisP wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are the specs on the Amprius silicon-anode battery, currently shipping in low volume: https://amprius.com/products/ That's better on all the metrics you listed except cost, which it doesn't mention. Whatever their current cost is, it should drop significantly once they complete their factory in 2025. https://amprius.com/facility/ Most of the battery is standard lithium-ion, the anode is a drop-in replacement.

It mentions lasting for 200-1200 cycles, which (besides a suspiciously large range compared to Li-ion's 500-1000 cycles) is not better on all mentioned metrics.

If it's like Li-Ion, that's full discharge and charge cycles, not every top off. So if these batteries are sufficiently higher capacity, it might make up for the difference. 200+ charges is enough if each charge lasts 2x longer or more.

Re: Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode

#130

Post by scythe »

cryptoegorophy wrote: post #110
mabbo wrote: post #63

Lithium ion batteries set the standard because they have an acceptable level of all the key metrics: energy storage by weight; energy storage by volume; discharge rate; charging rate; production costs. Every single one of these big breakthrough announcements touts how great this new tech is- in just one or two particular metrics. The problem is that Li-Ion batteries are just barely acceptable in all of those metrics.…

As well as battery charge cycles

Particularly relevant for this particular battery, because the authors seem to think it's impressive that they had 80% capacity retention after 50 cycles. No, I didn't forget a zero. That's 50, not 500 or 5000. It may be an improvement on other Li-metal anodes, but it's still orders of magnitude away from being stable enough for practical use.

I'm not sure if the paper is open access or if my library is automatically logging me in again, but the cycling behavior is shown in Figure S18 of the Supporting Information here, page 12:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?do...

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