Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will there be gas stations, though?
And will there be enough power stations to generate all the electricity?
Yes, but what will they be powered by?
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
#172Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
#173… in mice.
Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re only banning sales of new EVs in the short term, and poor people don’t buy new cars anyway. By the time they are buying EVs, they’ll be much cheaper.
I doubt this. The manufacturer are pushing subscription-base model. Used electric car won't become cheap
When I bought my used EV there were 2 options: Leaf or Zoe. As a high percentage of Zoe's had rented batteries, and the websites didn't have a filter for that, I didn't even bother test driving one.
Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a battery of arbitrary weight you need to spend the same amount of energy accelerating its mass, irrespective of how much energy that battery contains.
The article mentions aircraft multiple times. Once a range is achieved through available energy, reducing weight is a goal. The energy is more useful the less weight you need to move as then you can shave off a bit more weight as less energy was needed. Your car may not need this as much, an aircraft does.
Average plane cannot fly with batteries; the weight is still too high compared to jet fuel and the range is too short. Only short flights of up to 1000 km and 90 minutes will be in reach initially, jet fuel minus efficiency loses is still over 3000 Wh/kg, 6 times more than these new batteries.
Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
#176Another reason we will all rely on China…
Apparently they're in turn relying on a US company named Group14:
https://group14.technology/en/news/group14-enters-production...
CATL is a spinoff from ATL, so it's possible that there's some cross-pollination going on.
This company is fascinating to me, because until recently they had no media presence.
Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well we had electric aircraft for half a century, but thats just toys. The variable is how many passengers can you fit.
Nope, the variable is cost per passenger. Large jets only exist because fuel is really expensive. The cost per passenger gets astronomical with smaller planes. That's why only rich people can afford that. Big planes are more economical. Because of the fuel. This is simply not true with electrical planes. A mega watt hour of power is about 60-100$. And much cheaper than that with renewables. Not at retail prices of co…
Nail on the head.
Airliners have already moved away from the hub-and-spoke model to a point-to-point model where smaller narrowbodies fly direct from small airport to small airport (E.g. Southwest in the US). They do this specifically because of the increased efficiencies of smaller aircraft.
If you can further lower the per passanger cost of small planes, you can make smaller airports more viable, and fly point-to-point from more odd routes. Think Oxford, UK (OXF), to Gothenburg, Sweden (GSE).
Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it’s like how analog photography shops were going, no not really. Perhaps you will get specialized shops for fuel and biofuels?
Or we'll just go full circle and gasoline will be available at pharmacies: https://radair.com/blog/2011/11/10/automotive-history-benz/
Wondering… Is it possible to make tiny refineries for say a town or area? So locally produced or is that a environmental nightmare?
Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> battery with 500 Wh/kg Wow, that's amazing, creeping up towards the energy density of gasoline at around 1200 Wh/kg Of course you don't have to lug around the spent gasoline after you've used it, but that's really the problem too innit?
Various theoretical energy densities of batteries and gasoline: lead acid 123 Wh/kg lithium ion 250 Wh/kg zinc-oxygen 1,084 Wh/kg sodium-oxygen 1,605 Wh/kg lithium-sulfur 2,600 Wh/kg magnesium-oxygen 6,800 Wh/kg aluminium-oxygen 8,100 Wh/kg lithium-air 11,140 Wh/kg gasoline 12,700 Wh/kg from 2022, Asad A. Naqvi et. al., Aprotic lithium air batteries with oxygen-selective membranes , Table 1, https://link.springer.com…
And Uranium-235 about 1GWh/kg
EDIT: this is for nuclear fuel enriched to 3% in a normal (not breeder) reactor 35000 MJ per 10g pellet https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-density.html Only a tiny fraction of the total energy is actually used
Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
500-600 Wh/kg is the target for replacing average flight durations. Fuel is one of the highest costs for an airline, so eliminating the majority of that will make the demand for any viable options go bananas, even with a much higher upfront cost. Being seen as 'green' is a big bonus for the airline.
If the tech takes off (pun intended) every major airport will need a SMR. Which is maybe good? But politically impractical today .
Less of the "S". With current flight patterns you need multiple gigawatts. Calculations based on 737s leaving Gatwick:
Energy density of the fuel: 9.6kWh/L
900 flights per day = one flight every 96 seconds
26024.706L per flight
Total energy per flight: 9.6 x 26024.706kWh = 250MWh give or take = 900GJ
Total power supplied from Gatwick in the form of aviation fuel: 900GJ/96s = 9.375GW.
That's not only outside the range of SMRs, it's bigger than any single nuclear power station that's been built, by a comfortable margin.
To make electric flight work you can't think in terms of the way the current industry is structured because it's so distorted by the energy density of the current fuel.