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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

#521
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cruze is way better than that anyway, you'd need to be in an excruciating traffic jam to get that low mileage. Well, my 12 years old (gas) Honda Fit does +40MPG being very "pedal happy" and near 50 driving normally, and my dad's 20 years old (diesel) Citroen Xsara Picasso does around 60MPG

This has the 2011 Honda Fit pegged at between 29-31 mpg. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform...

The European one has a different engine, it's the 1.5i-VTEC, certified at 4.7l/100km in highway and 5.4 mixed.

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

#522
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…

Its almost like electric cars are cleaner, more efficient and better for the environment. Telsa's are god tier level of engineering under the hood. (Maybe not so much fit and finish). The only reason the gov't isn't buying these for everyone is because Tesla disrupted deeply entrenched companies and people don't like Elon.

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

#523
post #331

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…

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…

Extracting, transporting, refining oil costs a lot of energy. And that's before we get into the entire military infrastructure that has been built up simply to ensure the safe extraction and transportation of oil around the world.

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

#524
How do these batteries compare in terms of charge/discharge cycles? I suppose that if they can store twice the energy by mass, they'd only need 1/2 the cycles to be equivalent, yes?

If it's twice the density and the same number of cycles, a BEV will have a lifetime of 4 ICE vehicles.

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

#525
post #412
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…

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…

There are like 200 billion tons of lithium in seawater. If we really need it, there will be ways to extract it economically.

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

#526
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cruze is way better than that anyway, you'd need to be in an excruciating traffic jam to get that low mileage. Well, my 12 years old (gas) Honda Fit does +40MPG being very "pedal happy" and near 50 driving normally, and my dad's 20 years old (diesel) Citroen Xsara Picasso does around 60MPG

> Xsara Picasso does around 60MPG 3.9l/100km in a Xsara, really?

Ouch. When calculating I think I did UK MPGs instead of US. It does less than 5l/100, and I think it's certified at 4.4.

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

#527
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…

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…

One of the big sources of electricity generation here is hydroelectric, so I've been joking with my kids for a while that we have a water powered car. The first time I brought it up sparked a fun conversation as they wanted to understand how water makes electricity, and then started rabbit-holing on how magnets are involved in everything.

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

#528
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the absolute best theoretical efficiency of this might be 70% I fell down a rabbit hole and found this link, which gives 46% for the theoretical limit for the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98966/maximum-th...

Most power generation facilities are natural gas fired, using large aero derivitive gas turbine engines (essentially the same engine that is in the 747 - LM6000 vs CF6 for example) with a combined cycle steam turbine to capture the energy from excess heat. This arrangement has a thermodynamic efficiency of 60%. Even with electrical transmission losses, the efficiency is still far better (1.7X) than having the power p…

Also, methane produces less carbon for the same amount of energy as larger hydrocarbons like gasoline and diesel.

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

#529
500 Wh/kg means Sulphur cathode, which also explains the solid electrolyte. Roughly speaking, it'll be 3x as energy dense but only a 1/2 as volumetrically efficient (so, a given capacity battery will weigh 1/3 less but take up twice as much space).

There are other approaches to Li-S (and Al-S and Mn-S) which will be less expensive. Grats to CATL for bringing this to market, but the race for sure isn't over yet.

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

#530
post #331

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…

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's a path-dependent calculation, not a state-dependent calculation, so the numbers are all over the map. Take two cases:

(1) Alberta tar sands production, which relies on imports of natural gas to melt and process the tar sand into a crude oil equivalent, called syncrude. If the syncrude is shipped to San Francisco Bay for refining at Chevron's Richmond Refinery, then you have to tag on the shipping fuel used, the gas used in the refinery, and finally the tanker fuel used to move the fuel to a gas station in San Francisco. Finding all these numbers is not easy, it's often proprietary, but you can find that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries (bulk numbers):

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_capfuel_dcu_nus_a.htm

(2) Sweet light crude from a pressurized reservoir that's refined a few miles away from the oil field and used in a nearby city.

The end-product, refined gasoline, has the same state property (energy density) regardless of how it was manufactured, but that's irrelevant for getting the energy that it cost to make it. I imagine the spread can be pretty wide indeed, as the above examples show.

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