Posted on 11/04/2023 12:19:12 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
Have batteries PEAKED? Of course not, but they’re awfully good.
How much BETTER can BATTERIES get? Considering that they’re already pretty good.
I have a youTube channel called “My Tesla Weekend” . . . I’m a tech analyst who happens to be on youTube. You may see me on shows like “Best in Tesla,” … Randy Kirk . . . a lot of them.
Electric cars were made a hundred years ago, but the battery chemistry just wasn’t there yet. They cost three times too much.
So then get to cars like the EV 1, where they just put car batteries in. So they just put lead acid batteries in. Those batteries were supposed to cycle 500 to 1000 times. They don’t - I don’t know where that number came from; that was just ridiculous. So this was discontinued in 2002. By 2003 they were all gone. And WHY?
In 2002 there was no battery in the whole world that you could possibly make an electric car out of. You know - laptop batteries hadn’t come along yet. Oh yeah, they had,. Laptop batteries were already lithium-ion, and they were already awfully good.
But there was a problem with them in that if you wanted to put them in a car, you needed to put thousands and thousands of them. So if you tried to put them in a car you needed about 6000 of them, and even if you got them for $10 apiece, that’s 60 grand. And it wasn’t $10 apiece it was more than that - even if you got them at volume. So you would have had to have been crazy to try and push forward with this good battery, THAT WORKED.
So - modern battery longevity - who’s making good batteries today?
LG. Panasonic. CATL. Samsung. SK. Everybody. Chevy had some problems with their LG battery; they got it sorted out. SK makes the battery that Ford uses - SK, out of Korea. They are one of the bigger players in the world . . .
Toyota doesn’t want to use batteries in EVs “because that’d give them too much reliance on China.” OK, you’ve got options. And all of them are good options.
Auto makers BY LAW are required to warrant their batteries for 8 years or 100,000 miles. At the end of that time, if you don’t have 70% of your original capacity, you get a new battery. That’s a win-win. Because if your battery fails, you get a newer, nicer one. And if your battery doesn’t fail - your battery didn’t fail.
. . .
How good are the batteries actually? [Shows a graph whose average battery capacity starts out at 10%, and tapers down to about 85% at 250,000 kilometers.] . . . A lot of these batteries didn’t have good battery management [of temperature] - and that’s most of what’s gonna save your battery, prolong its life.
. . .
So now we get to the lithium-iron-phosphate, which is the new, exciting one. And it’s not exciting, it’s very boring, and that’s what I want, I don’t want exciting, I want boring! It’s a little bit heavier, it’s not as fast - but it doesn’t wear out. And it doesn’t doesn’t some of the problems of earlier batteries. It doesn’t catch fire the way lithium-ion batteries do. It’s cheaper to make. It doesn’t have any cobalt or nickel, and it lasts a LONG time. Making it environmentally sustainable . . . I mean, they all are - but this one is especially so. . . . Four million mile battery is now a reality. Because LFP cycles like crazy. It doesn’t mind, it doesn’t wear out like traditional Li-ion does. So you get a whole lot of life out of it. And this isn’t lab, unproven, “miracle breakthrough,” this is stuff that exists. Four million miles? That means your battery is going to outlast your car.
So what’s next? Slightly better chemistry. Slightly better range. Slightly cheaper manufacturing. Whole new chemistries. Sodium ion is coming. We don’t know how good they’ll be, they’re in test vehicles in China right now. They have even less power per kilogram than LFP, so these may go into stationary storage, while the Li-ion goes into automotive.
So what’s NOT coming? If it’s miracle battery, it goes a thousand miles on a charge - THAT’S not how it works.
… Solid state. Toyota’s been telling us solid state is only two years away for eleven years. Please, just buy one more Toyota. And that’s not a great way to do business.
Big dumb myths: “Batteries die in ten years” - ever heard that one? . . . A lot of gas car companies spent a lot of money convincing people that that’s the truth. And now they’re realizing that they can’t sell electric cars because people believed them! The required warranty on batteries is enough to mean that there would be too much warranty replacement if the batteries were dying in ten years.
“Batteries can’t be recycled” A lot of people believe that. “We’re gonna be jammed full of worn-out Lithium batteries!” We’re not - because the CAN be recycled, and they’re NOT [being recycled] because they don’t wear out like we were told they would.
Those cars last a lot longer [than some predicted], and batteries often get a second life [as stationary storage, where their weight per watt-hour of capacity isn’t so important]. In Japan, they’re using old Leaf batteries to back up power in case another Tsunami hits.
“There’s not enough Lithium.” There is - maybe not as cheap as we’d like, but . . .
Most of the batteries in new cars worldwide are Lithium-Iron-Phosphate, but there’s been a problem with a patent issue which has prevented their being used in America. LFP batteries are nominally less energetic per kilogram than more traditional Li-ion, but as a practical matter the traditional ones are more sensitive to deep cycling than LSP - so it’s recommended that they not be charged above 80% routinely. Meaning, for routine use LSP batteries are as good or better on ACTUAL energy per kilogram.
You’re welcome to believe what you wish. I only tell you what I know.
There is a limit on how many electrons you can store in a battery. It is physically based, because electrons have mass and can only be pushed together so close.
It’s not going to get better.
You may have noticed that the climate cultists are doing their best to reduce grid capacity with the insane push to eliminate reliable sources of electricity and replace them with the expensive, intermittent “green” nonsense.
It is (a disjointed, incoherent, mess of an article) but I agree with his positive review of LiFePO. I have six cells in a starting battery for a Buell 1200cc and the pack survived unbelievable abuse after running down then being left in a discharged state for two seasons... Then charged back up practically like it was brand new! It does turnover the bike’s motor just fine.
Sorry, I’m hazy on the cell count. Might be 8: 4s, 2p
I have 2 science degrees.
It’s nowhere close to theoretica limit.
I’m betting it’s a lot closer than you believe it is.
Hybrids, I can appreciate. I do not believe in full EV cars.
The only trustworthy detector you can put in a garage is a thermal rate-of-rise detector. CO detectors are problematic in garages:
1. Carbon monoxide and combination alarms may not function in temperatures below 40 degrees or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit
2. Dust and other pollutants in the air may cause failure of the unit
3. Nuisance tripping. The alarm may go off when a car is just pulled into the garage and left running for a very short period of time. After a couple of times of this nuisance tripping, some people will remove the batteries or disarm the detector.
Same. I have a theory on that one. Modern cars have all kinds of gadgets now that draw power all the time, turned off or not.
I get that, problem is I have the same problem with my classic 1970’s Chevy’s where batteries have a much shorter life now than in the past.
Fair point, but anything is better than nothing! I am going on 6 months with my CO detector in the garage but its already cold enough that it will get sketchy.
When you have a “fuel” that can go from venting to flashover or deflagration in seconds any early warning is beneficial.
I thought about a rate of rise thermal detector but I am not sure they will work well with LIB fires because the batteries often do not display rapid temperature increases while venting (pre-combustion) utilizing high quality thermal imaging and the vapor cloud itself can hide the increase. We have vented and measured vapors for seconds before it shows on a TIC but still not a bad idea.
My primary focus in the last year has been studying the toxicology and contamination. Scary stuff.
It is for the foreseeable future if they keep pinching back oil,gas, coal, and nuclear. Sorry, solar and wind will never do it and only subsidies are keeping them afloat. If you take away the subsidies, the equivalent price for a gallon of gas would be $17 per gallon.
When the article spoke of stationary uses for the incredibly cheap, but heavy for Sodium ion batteries, what did you think that was referring to? There’s plans already underway to build the infra-structure to store hours worth of the entire nation’s energy usage in a network of batteries. There’s enough lithium that’s economically recoverable for the entire world fleet of cars to have lithium batteries, and there’s 1,000 times more sodium available, and the sodium ion batteries don’t even need any of the other rare metals, like chromium.
>> It is for the foreseeable future if they keep pinching back oil,gas, coal, and nuclear. Sorry, solar and wind will never do it and only subsidies are keeping them afloat. If you take away the subsidies, the equivalent price for a gallon of gas would be $17 per gallon. <<
Your data is hilariously out-of-date. It’s like I’m trying to find a 2-gigabyte drive to stick in my USB-C port, and you’re telling me that a single megabyte memory device is the size of a building. Over the last 20 years, the price of solar power generation has fallen from $12/w to $1/w. And the price of energy storage has fallen NINETY-SEVEN percent since the GM car flopped.
Jimmah Carter told me there wasn't enough oil.
When I first heard about solar cells it was in the early 1960s. They were hilariously expensive and wimpy. The only possible use for them was in space satellites where nothing else worked. But, the learning curve works. Wright’s Law says that, percentage wise, you learn about the same amount each time you double the quantity that has ever been produced. This maps to the idea that if you plot the log of the cost against the log of the quantity ever produced, a straight line will be a good fit to the data.The result can be that a technology languishes initially because it just isn’t cost-effective. But even then, since the past production is so low it doesn’t take forever to double the quantity ever produced - with maybe a 20% (plus or minus ten percent) improvement in production efficiency with each doubling. And if that continues long enough, a tipping point is reached and the technology suddenly makes excellent sense - and the production rate accelerates remarkably. And that’s what I see happening in solar and battery tech, and the cost effectiveness “suddenly” gets a lot better than old codgers (I speak as an octogenarian of some years' standing) are used to conceiving of.
While the ICE was not perfect it was light years ahead of Electric and Steam, well steam had a major problem in that you had to start your engine a half hour before you could use it.
The people who were early adopters of technology are people who had to get somewhere quickly. Doctors, police, fire, military. Standing around waiting for the engine to build up a head of steam was not practical. You might as well stick to a horse.
Agreed!
do a quick google search for theoretical battery power density.
The results i get show curren Li-Ion batteries are about 1/10 of what’s theoretically achievable.
BTW, we get about 30% of the theoretical energy of gasoline (most of the energy is wasted as heat)
Your guy is FOS. Few tires weigh 20 lbs in total. Do you see a lot of cars driving around on their rims?
It reads like an unedited transcript of a talk.
No offense, but atomic physics does not seem to be your forte. It's not like cramming a load of potatoes into a truck...
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