221–230 of 396 posts
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Two minutes is about the amount of time it takes to fill my ICE car, so yeah, that'd be nice.
Yeah but do you have a gas station at home so it's "always full"? That's really nice ;)
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"Mostly from Australia and Chile" seems like the opposite of baggage, that sounds like about the best you could hope for in a global commodity, so many of which come from unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries. Yes, I know that China does most of the refining/assembly, but that has little to do with the chemistry. "Building new Na-ion capacity outside China" is probably even harder than "building…
Let's unpack it then. You've stated: >"Mostly from Australia and Chile" seems like the opposite of baggage, that sounds like about the best you could hope for in a global commodity, so many of which come from unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries. So let's break it down with some facts (all easily searchable.) (1) The graph states that Australia is the largest producer of Lithium, and states tha…
> While this is a baseless comment, let's look at it anyway:
It's not baseless. This is a golden boy startup, blessed with save the Earth kudos and highly subsidized. The DOE spun this outfit up in 2020 with $19M. Michigan and Whitmer have fast tracked the one, modest, token plant, delivered the tax breaks and signed the contracts for a sodium battery power facility in the state. VC money chased after all this as you would expect.
Those are all temporary or one-time goodies. This is heavy industry and at some point all the love goes away: the subsidies go away, the exemptions go away. Then the foreign competitors steal your tech and undercut you.
At that point you have a choice: fail, or build out where labor is cheap, workers are disposable and regulators are just low-cost party agents, and use your position as US company to readily import your foreign made products.
Notice how none this has anything to do with what raw materials are involved or battery chemistry. It's not about those things. It never has been. The fact that the US has large reserves of sodium is not a factor: filling a ship with sodium and sending it to some foreign plant being only the most obvious thing to do.
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Two minutes is about the amount of time it takes to fill my ICE car, so yeah, that'd be nice.
Yeah but do you have a gas station at home so it's "always full"? That's really nice ;)
That system also allows you to participate in oil futures as an end user, not to mention it lets you keep your generator up and running for a very long time.
Downside is, modern e10 gasoline tends to adsorb water from the air over time, so fuel isn't stable long term. Most guys doing this are running diesel cars/gensets for that reason.
The model is, go to a truck depot with a 300 gallon trailer, fill up trailer and truck, park the trailer at home. Then fuel the truck off the trailer until it needs to be filled again, repeat. Do understand that, you can get a larger tank, but anything over 1000 gallons requires a placard/permit to haul around. That's in a single tank, so, in theory, a legal length 5th wheel trailer could have multiple tanks under that and be compliant. If you want the tanks attached to a vehicle itself, the maximum size is 150 gallons, hence why semi trucks have multiple fuel tanks that are smaller than that.
Really the only difficulty is finding a place nearby that is willing to sell that much fuel to an individual.
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It's the powertrain that's far more apt to be the problem. Hence a plugin hybrid generator style should be far simpler than a system with both an ICE and electric powertrain.
For most Toyota hybrids they use a single planetary gear set to combine electric motors and a gas engine into a single unit. That's the entire transmission. It's far more efficient than bolting a generator on an electric car. For climate control, they are nearly identical to a gas Toyota.
Their engineering is just that insanely conservative. They just make giant, absurdly understressed engines. You can pull a 2.5L 4cyl engine out of a Camry, designed to make 180 horsepower, replace only a few components, and make 400hp with the reliability you would normally expect from an engine built for endurance racing. They are super popular in drift racing leagues.
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The problem lies on electric grid capacity. If we're phasing out fossil fuel powered transportation, we will have to upgrade massivelly electricity productions well as in grid capacity.
> The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency. > Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002, and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle. > In…
The power grid also naturally grows from year to year. As more and more battery systems come online and are available to store and discharge power (your car, a household power backup system, solar, etc), the load on the grid will smooth out.
We’re undergoing a Cambrian explosion of battery chemistries at the moment. Other startups, such as From Energy is scaling up production of Iron Air batteries in West Virginia, which will be an order of magnitude cheaper than lithium ion and will provide grid scale power [1]. North Harbour Clean Energy Promised to build a manufacturing facility in Australia to build Vanadium Flow batteries, which have very high charg…
> which will be an order of magnitude cheaper than lithium ion Maybe. But take a lot of these cost claims with a giant pinch of salt: TCOE/TCOS at scale is what matters and we won’t have any real idea what that will be while most of these battery chemistries are still pre commercialization. That being said the cambrian explosion is very encouraging. Just good to temper optimism sometimes. Source: I talk to grid batte…
That was funny.
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From the article it claims charge speed 10x that of lithium and 50,000 cycle lifetime. I don’t know about you but a EV that can go 150 miles and charge to 80% again in 2min would be super compelling to me. Solid commuter car but not too annoying on the rare roadtrip. But, I am guessing grid frequency regulation use cases are going to make these too expensive for a car for a long time.
2 mins to charge a 40 kWh battery is 1.2 MW. I can't see that happening any time soon.
You are almost certainly not charging from 0->100%. It's probably more like 10%->90% which gives you 32kW to charge. We currently have 350kW chargers on the market, they'd do that in ~6 minutes.
At some point trying to get 2 minutes vs 6 minutes is just silly nit picking.
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DOE puts out comparison papers at times, but I haven't looked in a while.
"The energy density of sodium ion batteries is low.It is only 100-150Wh/kg, while the energy density of lithium energy is 120-180Wh/kg. This means that for batteries of the same size, sodium-ion batteries can store much less energy than lithium-ion batteries.Jan 2, 2024" https://www.dnkpower.com/will-sodium-batteries-replace-lithi...
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That is just a meme without substance. The ongoing maintenance cost of a mature Japanese ICE drivetrain is negligible compared to the overall operating costs of the whole car. There is a reason why Toyota hybrids are by far the most popular cars for Uber drivers.
Total cost of ownership of a Toyota hybrid is less than many other entirely ICE cars lol
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You do, but at least repair costs should be low because typically you won't put very many miles on that engine. Suppose 90% of your miles are electric. After you've put 250K miles (400K km) on the car, you've only got 25K miles (40K km) on the engine. Rarely do you have significant engine trouble at that mileage. Also, the engine design can probably be simplified if it's just acting as a generator. You don't need a t…
I wish they'd just sell/rent little trailers with a charging engine on them you could take on long trips.
That said, they certainly have tow-behind generators, and they're certainly available for rent, it's just without modification you'd have to stop in order to charge. I've seen people with a model X doing exactly this out in the desert. Seemed to be an ok solution honestly, because they were camping and had genset power for camping needs, assuming of course that the whole electricity while camping thing is something you're into.