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Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

theguardian.com

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Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#61

Post by _hypx »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #59
_hypx wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, because the economics of hydrogen is heading to nearly zero cost. This is the same trajectory of wind and solar. All of these things have one thing in common: They all are made from practically infinite and free resources. Wind, sunlight and water are very cheap after all. This will imply that hydrogen will also be very cheap. Also, hydrogen is more ubiquitous than electricity. In fact, it is cheaper to distri…

This will imply that hydrogen will also be very cheap. This will imply that electricity will be even cheaper. Most of the practical schemes for breaking molecular bonds in order to release hydrogen uses electricity and lots of it. Eventually some intelligent hydrogen fanboy will hit upon a bright idea --- let's forget all this hydrogen stuff and just use all the electricity we are generating directly --- cause it's e…

Not "cheap," zero and sometimes even negatively priced.

The problem is that there is no way of utilizing that electricity. It is excess electricity generated by unpredictable renewable energy. You might as well use that free and useless electricity to make something actually useful.

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#62

Post by _hypx »

moolcool wrote: post #60
_hypx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lithium ion energy density has ~tripled in the past decade. That's actually false. It originated from a literally made-up story by Bloomberg. In reality, NCA cells have existed since the late-2000s. Effective energy density was 250 Wh/kg. We have not significantly improved on this value since then.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-apri...

The author of that article is simply wrong. I've seen this post more than once now and it is becoming a serious mistake on their part.

FYI, high energy density li-ion batteries existed since 2009: https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/en091218-2

There is hard contradictory evidence to the claims of that DoE article.

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#63

Post by hnburnsy »

ramesh31 wrote: post #30

Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few…

I wish journalists would at least ask some of these questions on battery tech articles. Please post this on every battery tech story thank you!

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#64

Post by function_seven »

_hypx wrote: post #61
jqpabc123 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will imply that hydrogen will also be very cheap. This will imply that electricity will be even cheaper. Most of the practical schemes for breaking molecular bonds in order to release hydrogen uses electricity and lots of it. Eventually some intelligent hydrogen fanboy will hit upon a bright idea --- let's forget all this hydrogen stuff and just use all the electricity we are generating directly --- cause it's e…

Not "cheap," zero and sometimes even negatively priced. The problem is that there is no way of utilizing that electricity. It is excess electricity generated by unpredictable renewable energy. You might as well use that free and useless electricity to make something actually useful.

> You might as well use that free and useless electricity to make something actually useful.

Like charge a battery? A battery located anywhere on the grid?

Why add more complexity by electrolyzing water, storing the resultant hydrogen, building a vast distribution network to physically move that hydrogen, and keep vehicles dependent on a single form of chemical energy storage?

With an EV, my car can charge off the excess energy in the grid, or from the battery I have in my house, for from fossil fuel plants, or from nuclear, or whatever. I can trivially do this at home (rather than having to visit a refueling station). I can do this at work. Or at the grocery store.

Everyone I know who has an EV will never go back to fuel-powered cars.

I can see a use case for hydrogen in fleet vehicles, or in long-haul trucking scenarios. But for consumer automobiles, it has way too many downsides compared to the EVs that you just plug into a regular wall outlet.

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#65

Post by local_crmdgeon »

chris222 wrote: post #45
umeshunni wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying there haven't been any battery breakthroughs? What do you think the average capacity, density and cycle time of a battery in 2003 vs 2023 is.

I’d rather an article talk about how panasonic cells achieved 20% more density over 5 years at volume production. Much more impressive. https://electrek.co/2020/07/30/tesla-batteries-energy-densit...

Same - and more globally too. I'd love to know how GM got their quality act together, how Airbus builds 100 a320s a month with no public defects, etc.

The real, slow engineering stories have the best lessons

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#66

Post by panick21_ »

_hypx wrote: post #47
staticautomatic wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not underestimate the amount of weight behind the development and commercialization of hydrogen technology. Everyone in the oil and gas industry, including natural gas utilities, has a strong incentive to figure out how to make it work.

Literally everyone has a massive incentive to make green hydrogen work. It is pretty fundamental to industry, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, etc. There is no path to zero emissions without it. In reality, just a handful of vocal BEV fans oppose this technology on purely personal grounds.

> Literally everyone has a massive incentive to make green hydrogen work.

There is also the reality that certain company have taken a lot of money for a long time without producing many results. Specially if its fossil fuel companies that rubs people the wrong way. Just as giving money to Ford and GM wasn't the solution to get EV going. So its understandable that many people don't love the promotion of it.

I am as anti-hydrogen as anybody but I do believe it has a place. However, it should be limited and only used in places where you really need it. So instead of using it in transportation, using it in the chemical industry makes much more sense. Its simply not needed for the overwhelming majority of transportation applications. And even for the the stuff that is left over its often questionable if its worth developing the new infrastructure. Using it for personal vehicle and most cargo transport is utterly idiotic. Using it for most trains is idiotic. The list goes on.

Some people believe the massive steel CO2 use will be solved with hydrogen, but as with transport, there are better ways forward then that in my opinion. But again, hydrogen is getting the lions share of investment there too.

In general I am much more against they 'hydrogen economy' idea and concept, rather then hydrogen. Using energy to split water is reasonable, but most of the time hydrogen is just a short temporary state until it gets turned into something else. Very different from the hydrogen economy people in-visioned.

Another question is if electrolysis of access renewable production is really a great path forward.

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#67

Post by panick21_ »

_hypx wrote: post #41
craig1f wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Hydrogen is like crypto. It has just enough interesting tech to attract (using D&D terminology here) high INT, low WIS people. Hydrogen will probably never work unless someone comes up with a stable molecule that includes hydrogen, is large enough to not move through solid objects, and still retains enough chemical energy to be useful. Ammonium is one option, but it is highly toxic. Only really practica…

That's a completely ignorant statement. Hydrogen cars actually exist and work exactly as advertised. There are no fundamental challenges. This reads like one of those anti-BEV posts from a decade ago. In both cases, the author is totally oblivious to the current state of technology. > It was never going to compete with electric. EVs have been slandered for so long that people just assumed we would come up with someth…

> Hydrogen cars actually exist and work exactly as advertised.

And if by that you mean very badly and very impractically then you are correct.

> There are no fundamental challenges.

Except, you know building them cheap at volume. Just a small thing.

> This reads like one of those anti-BEV posts from a decade ago.

Except it also reads like anti-Hydrogen EV post from a decade ago and since then BEV have made utterly insane amount of progress and hydrogen vehicles are still in the utterly sorry and embracing state they were 10 years ago.

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#68

Post by birdyrooster »

craig1f wrote: post #25
jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Japanese firm believes it *could* make a solid-state battery... The key word here is obviously *could*. Add one more to the pile of claims and beliefs floating around that have yet to transform into viable products. I have been a Toyota fan from way back. I have owned a number of their vehicles. But in my mind, they lost a lot of technical credibility when they tried to apply political influence in a short sighted at…

Exactly this. Hydrogen is like crypto. It has just enough interesting tech to attract (using D&D terminology here) high INT, low WIS people. Hydrogen will probably never work unless someone comes up with a stable molecule that includes hydrogen, is large enough to not move through solid objects, and still retains enough chemical energy to be useful. Ammonium is one option, but it is highly toxic. Only really practica…

Drive a new Supra and you will be disavowed of this notion. They are hella torquey with no lag. Outperforms EVs in many ways.

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#69

Post by pokepim »

birdyrooster wrote: post #68
craig1f wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Hydrogen is like crypto. It has just enough interesting tech to attract (using D&D terminology here) high INT, low WIS people. Hydrogen will probably never work unless someone comes up with a stable molecule that includes hydrogen, is large enough to not move through solid objects, and still retains enough chemical energy to be useful. Ammonium is one option, but it is highly toxic. Only really practica…

Drive a new Supra and you will be disavowed of this notion. They are hella torquey with no lag. Outperforms EVs in many ways.

[dead]

Re: Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

#70

Post by ProjectArcturis »

_hypx wrote: post #62
moolcool wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-apri...

The author of that article is simply wrong. I've seen this post more than once now and it is becoming a serious mistake on their part. FYI, high energy density li-ion batteries existed since 2009: https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/en091218-2 There is hard contradictory evidence to the claims of that DoE article.

Is there a distinction between the batteries existing vs. being in mass production? A lot of the difficulty comes from scaling production processes.
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