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CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

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Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#511
post #329

1200wh/kg is when it will get really interesting to me. Half the weight and double the range would be great. Plus, electrified ultralight "aircraft" start to have numerous advantages over the traditional 2 stoke engines.

Why would it only be interesting at that point? At 500wh/kg, if the cost is low enough, you're already going to eliminate fossil fuels from basically everything except long range flights and shipping. > Half the weight and double the range would be great You don't need to quadruple energy density to achieve that. If you just half the weight (without increasing the total amount of energy in the battery), you're going…

> But it'll probably take 10-20 years regardless of when we get good batteries because it'll take a long time to design and certify the aircrafts.

I'm wondering if large aircraft companies are actually already designing the next aircraft based on assumed battery densities? I know they put out press releases with nice looking renderings, but I am talking about serious development?

If you wait until you have the batteries on hand, and then spend 20 years to design a plane (and 20 years might be conservative, since arppovals will be harder to get for a brand new concept), you might be left behind. Instead, they could be already designing the plane and when 500Wh/Kg is available, boom, they are 15 years ahead.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrap the combustion engine with a heatpump to a small steam engine?

It isn't precisely "wrapped", but this is essentially how all natural gas fired generation facilities work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant

I think the parent is referring to harvesting some of the waste heat

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#513
post #133

I just realized how much energy efficiency is being squeezed out of a Tesla. It's incredible. A normal diesel fueled sedan such as the Chevy Cruze diesel runs at about 31mpg, which is 13.2 km/l or 15.3 km/kg. Diesel has a mind-boggling 12700 Wh/kg energy density[1], which translates to an efficiency of ~827 Wh/km for the Chevy. By contrast, the Tesla Model S, has a ~540 kg battery[2]. At 272 Wh/kg (from the posted ar…

For a normal, new car, anything above 6l/100km for that size of a car (and usually around 5) is something's wrong with the car. That's more than twice the efficiency of described one from 1976.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#514
post #133

I just realized how much energy efficiency is being squeezed out of a Tesla. It's incredible. A normal diesel fueled sedan such as the Chevy Cruze diesel runs at about 31mpg, which is 13.2 km/l or 15.3 km/kg. Diesel has a mind-boggling 12700 Wh/kg energy density[1], which translates to an efficiency of ~827 Wh/km for the Chevy. By contrast, the Tesla Model S, has a ~540 kg battery[2]. At 272 Wh/kg (from the posted ar…

Isn’t this what the MPGe rating tells you?

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#515
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a sign of the success of the oil industry that this analysis always takes the cost of electricity generation back to the source, but assumes that fuel stations pump from a perfect source of naturally refined/distilled hydrocarbons. It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil. The best I found was this: https://www.speakev.com/threads/energy-required-t…

> It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil. Damn, I've never thought about that before. In hindsight that feels like an obvious thing to consider but this is the first time I'm aware of that thought entering my brain. Thank you for provoking the thought. What would be the equivalent consideration on the other side? Would it be something like inquiring in…

This does come up a lot ... for ethanol production. How much fuel is used to produce ethanol is constantly discussed, with some people claiming it is barely break-even or even energy-negative.

But yeah, no one then goes on to give equivalent numbers for petroleum.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#516
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a fundamental question though. Will EVs (Li battery based) achieve the holy grail of IC engine replacement? Earth's Lithium deposits.................. 88,000,000,000 Kilograms [2], [3] @25% Viable for mining.................... 22,000,000,000 Kilograms [2], [3] Tesla S battery weight.................... 540 Kilograms per car [4] Lithium weight per Tesla S battery........ 63 Kilograms per battery [4] Max Tesla…

Known Earth's Lithium deposits =/= Earth's Lithium Deposits

And in fact this number changed by large amounts in the last decade, even before the current boom of the 2020s.

Remember peak oil, which was a big panic of some in the 2000s? It turns out that peak production didn't happen overall, but if you look at the original set of "known resources", the peak oil predictions were spot on. Yet we didn't experience huge oil supply shortages because huge expenditures into new fracking tech enables far more resources to be accessed.

We have always loved in a complete abundance of lithium, so we never bothered to look for more resources. Now that we need more, we will find it. It's not a particularly rare element.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#517
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a sign of the success of the oil industry that this analysis always takes the cost of electricity generation back to the source, but assumes that fuel stations pump from a perfect source of naturally refined/distilled hydrocarbons. It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil. The best I found was this: https://www.speakev.com/threads/energy-required-t…

ICE cars also have to often go out of their way to the fuel pump, while most EVs are charged at home/office. There must be small impact of that as well to the CO2 calculations.

I mean, it's like, 50 yards out of the way? You stop at whatever gas station you're driving past. I don't know anybody who makes a specific trip to go fuel their car.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#518
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big reason for this is thermodynamics. A conventional internal combustion engine car has to convert chemical energy to kinetic energy - the absolute best theoretical efficiency of this might be 70%, but in practice it's more like 30%. Electric cars have to pay the same thermodynamic penalty, but they pay it at the power station (In practice, thanks to renewables, not all the electricity used to charge a car will…

Though that makes me think that hybrids have a real future. Or hydrogen fuel cells. Anything that doesn't require charging directly from the grid all the time, because although parts of the USA and Norway are ready for that, it's very tricky to get right globally. Maybe hybrids like the Prius get to be so efficient that such cars will have a truly negligible impact on global warming.

Hydrogen fuel cells in mass produced vehicles do not have a future since hydrogen does not actually like to react - you need a catalyst. And the best ones we have are based on platinum, which is very rare a expensive. If we produced any decent quantities of "hydrogen" cars, we would have such a shortage of platinum we would not be able to complete them. Of course there are claim this has been solved but to the best of my knowledge no such catalyst actually ships in commercial quantities. [0]

The second reason is that hydrogen is 1/10th the density of diesel even when liquid (which is as dense as it gets). Maintaining hydrogen in its liquid form is energy intensive. Hydrogen tends to leak through the smallest cracks and also because the atoms are so small tends to leak even through solid metal. To sustain the high pressures and degradation by hydrogen you need a very expensive tanks. You also need to handle the case, when the car crashes/ catches fire releasing all of the hydrogen somewhat safely. This tends to be a 6 MW flame upward of the car. Too bad if it crashed under a bridge or garage. This is much worse than a burning ICE/ BEV car.

Hydrogen gas stations have all of the problems with the tanks as well. That makes them very expensive. Battery charging stations are somewhat easier - everywhere you have higher voltage you can build a decent charging station. Big parking lots can have solar roofs fulfilling a part of the charging demand and keeping the cars colder in the summer.

At the same time you don't have any of the advantages of batteries - such as that you can charge them almost everywhere or when breaking. Hydrogen cars would need to be hybrids basically to improve on these, in this regard they are more similar to classical ICE cars.

Finally, making hydrogen ecologically and economically is not that easy in big quantities. In the end, you realize it is means to a longer operation of the infrastructure of classical fossil fuel companies. Unrelated to cars, you can put some hydrogen (up to about 8% it seems) into natural gas without noticeable change in properties when used for heating. But you can probably slap a green or at least "blue" stamp on the solution. In the end, all of this is just as damaging as the production/ burning of bio diesel/ gasoline spiked with ethanol. Putting hydrogen into cars would just make support this fossil fuel agenda without actually helping the environment much and quite possibly enable decades of even more damage to the environment and public health with profits mostly for just a few already filthy rich people.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Can-I-create-a-Hydrogen-fuel-cell-with...

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#519
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the British fuel system is designed to hide the cost per mile of driving, at least tacitly. At present it's difficult to work out without some external tool.

It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared. (Quite normally for my age in the UK I think, I'm familiar with both metric & Imperial measurements, but generally fairly bad at converting. Except I know 568ml = 1 (UK! Not US!) pint - for which I can than…

> It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.

1. I think with liters, people typically reverse the relationship so it's liters/100km. Which is a much more intuitive unit.

2. If you're buying gas in liters, I think it'd be a lot easier to switch over to using liters for efficiency. You may not be able to compare easily to other vehicles, but you'd be able to estimate your personal fuel more easily.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ah yes, the endless march to turn humanity into a singular blob of consistent units of nature, under a banner of the opposite. The entire world uses metric units apart from America, Libya and Myanmar. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries... What I absolutely love about this fact is that America is still using British Imperial units. After literally having a war over whether or not the US shoul…

They aren't British Imperial units. They're US customary units.

They were standardized separately, and vary slightly to considerably from the British Imperial counterparts.

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