101–110 of 331 posts
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.
Are anyone building the battery you described?
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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).
Range is not a real issue for electric cars. Charging time is, though, and there are massive improvements happening for that right now.
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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.
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.
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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.
Poorly stored gasoline can spontaneously combust, though. So more like a firebomb.
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Are anyone building the battery you described?
No. The holy grail goes undiscovered for now.
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"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.
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We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
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 lar…
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. https://youtu.be/xQFVIs4leig?si=iOOt5gg_2MJAIoFR
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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 HV…
> 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.
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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.
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.
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.