Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#281

Post by mrmckizzle » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

Definitely being unreasonable, but that's one of the reasons I don't have an electric vehicle yet. I'm paranoid of that thing catching fire in my garage. Which is ironic since one of my random electronic devices with li-batteries probably could catch fire regardless in my house. At least with a gasoline it seems we are better equipped to deal witg such fires.

Overall my end goal is to have a seperate storage for the e-vehicle.. Plus it be easier to slap some solar on that structure.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#282

Post by adolph » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

jojobas wrote: post #238

qwery wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wood is a solid-state battery. The term has obviously been selected because of how revolutionary solid-state electronic devices were/are. And it's not like they selected it after a revolutionary energy storage device was introduced. Solid-state batteries ( cells ) are an incremental improvement, at best. And because this is the web: I am not being negative about the technology. I happen to be of the radical opinion t…

The word "battery" is a stand-in for electrochemical cell, which wood obviously isn't. Quite some advantages are expected from batteries that don't involve liquids or gels, whether incremental or not.

There is a nine box chart with x-axis of doctrine or how it is used and y-axis of structure; each axis has three values, purist, neutral and radical.

For the purist in doctrine and structure, wood is not a battery. If one is somewhere between neutral and radical, then wood is a battery that was built by its integrated disposable solar cells.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#283

Post by gadflyinyoureye » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #275

pseudohadamard wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well technically those are zero point modules, not really batteries.

If you can extract some energy then by definition it is not zero-point energy.

I presume that was a Stargate reference.

Zero Point Module, often abbreviated ZPM, is a power source, created by the Ancients, capable of supplying tremendous amounts of energy. It is one of the most formidable power sources known to exist, having been developed by the Ancients several million years ago during their reign of the Milky Way galaxy

https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Zero_Point_Module

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#284

Post by pfdietz » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

This article seems to confuse lithium-ion and lithium-metal batteries. Lithium-ion batteries intercalcate lithium ions into pre-existing electrodes and that doesn't form dendrites. Dendrites are a phenomenon of lithium-metal batteries, where lithium ions tend to be reduced to metal at the tips of the dendrites.

You can get lithium metal forming on lithium-ion electrodes, which could go on to form dendrites, but the failure there is the metal formation, not the dendrite formation.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#285

Post by conorcleary » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

floatrock wrote: post #269

j16sdiz wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the energy density for that? Something that works doesn't mean something is desirable

Is energy density required for all applications? Something that's not desirable for say a car doesn't mean something isn't good enough for say non-mobile applications.

Hold on, buying Lemon calls.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#286

Post by torginus » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

laxisOp wrote: post #6

We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.

Generally a >10x is easily achievable if we use a chemical reaction that uses oxygen - which we do not have to carry around, that's why things like hydrogen fuel cells have a theoretical energy/mass that we can pretty much assume is best possible with a chemical reaction.

Unfortunately the problems with hydrogen storage and the fuel cells have prevented them from really taking off.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#287

Post by iso1631 » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #126

iso1631 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which just emphasises the point -- density and thus land use isn't really a major concern You could store an entire years worth of energy (not just electricity) for a fairly dense country like the UK and still have 95% of the country left for other usage.

Definitely! However I frequently encounter people on energy discussion forums that assume that we need 2-3 months of battery storage, perhaps because they see natural gas or other storage and assume that batteries need exactly the same thing, so I'm perhaps overly eager to respond to claims about month-long battery storage. I had previously been hopeful that battery storage would allow more shared used of land, but t…

You'd have to compare the fire risk of a high density battery vs a substation.

But the beauty of battery and solar/wind is that it can be far more distributed. This of course means far harder to take out -- a wildfire near a nuclear power plant could knock out 3GW of capacity, a wildfire near one of 50x 60MW solar plants would knock out 60MW of capacity.

Solar might not be the only solution in a country at a high latitude, but for the contiguous 48 states even in winter solar produces more than enough power per hectare that when coupled with an appropriately sized battery can generate the entire needs.

1 hectare in sourthern california generates about 3.5MWh a day in December. In North Dakota about 1.5MWh a day, battery size for that is a tiny amount of land.

To generate enough solar energy to power the entire US electric needs, on a bad winter day, the US would have to have 60,000 square km of solar+battery.

The US currently uses 150,000 sqkm just to grow corn ethanol

You'd need a decent HVDC connectors from the southern states to the more demanding northern ones.

But even factoring in current prices of wind, solar, battery, and grid, it would only cost somewhere in the $6T range. Over 30 years that's $200b a year, or about $80 per MWh

New nuclear is about $150 per MWh before decommissioning costs

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#288

Post by rootusrootus » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #212

rootusrootus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With a 130Lb/60kg battery instead, and saving the weight of the ICE engine and fuel system, the overall car design could go much more lightweight, regaining a lot of performance and range, all while gaining the huge torque of electric motors. I think you're underselling it, even. A typical like-for-like modern EV is only marginally heavier than the ICE equivalent. If we were able to drop the weight of the battery b…

> we could make EVs with the same form factor as today but with over a thousand miles of range. Not that we need that I think this is the way to go. For most people (you can never please everyone) 1000 miles is enough to cover a full day car trip. Then 8 hours of charge time while you sleep. Charging while you sleep requires more distributed, lower power infrastructure compared to a 10 berth service station trying to…

> juicing 10 cars in 5 minutes has to require significant electrical infrastructure!

I believe it is becoming fairly common to use batteries as a buffer at fast chargers. The demand charges for bursting megawatts of power from the grid are apparently really steep, so it makes sense to put in a big battery and steadily draw a lower amount of power and then just charge cars from the battery.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#289

Post by stronglikedan » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

enslavedrobot wrote: post #5

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.

I'll just take one that charges at ridiculous speeds and can't burn my house down.

I wish BYD could bring their new infra to the US - it looks pretty ::ahem:: solid!

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#290

Post by rootusrootus » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 3:12 PM UTC

mrmckizzle wrote: post #281

Definitely being unreasonable, but that's one of the reasons I don't have an electric vehicle yet. I'm paranoid of that thing catching fire in my garage. Which is ironic since one of my random electronic devices with li-batteries probably could catch fire regardless in my house. At least with a gasoline it seems we are better equipped to deal witg such fires. Overall my end goal is to have a seperate storage for the…

I understand the paranoia, but it is definitely emotional reasoning overriding facts. Gasoline powered vehicles are vastly more likely to go up in flames. Even when you adjust for age and mileage. Even if you only look at cars that spontaneously ignited when parked. The wiring in a gas car is exposed to a tremendous amount of heat and vibration.

EVs spontaneously igniting are newsworthy partly because politics, but also because it is novel. Gas vehicles burn daily, the odds are pretty good that a couple are burning somewhere right now.