I’ve seen so many “this new battery technology” articles over the past decade, I can’t bring myself to care until it enters production.
from the first paragraph of the article, it sounds like they share your feelings:
Battery technology is one of those areas that is getting a lot of promising research results but very little in the form of commercial products we can use to power digital devices, electric vehicles, or off-grid homes. That may soon change thanks to sodium-ion batteries that are safer, more durable, and cheaper to manufacture when compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries.
This is an ignorant opinion. My first cell phone (about 30 years ago) had a battery pack about as big as my current cell phone, and had a capacity of 500 mAh. My current phone has a bigger screen, the rest of the phone, and a 4000 mAh battery. How do you suppose that happened if none of those new battery technologies ever panned out?
Of course battery technology improved, but the amount of news articles claiming XYZ will change technology forever outnumbers the actual number of innovations 100 to 1
Your standerd science article is written by someone with a half remembered high school science education rephrasing another person with the same background who has on rare occasion actually talked to the people who wrote the study. Both of these people don’t understand what’s actually happened but need to make it sound like it’s as big a deal as possible to get clicks.
We’ve found a incremental improvement in sodium ion that may do something becomes sodium ion is going to take over the world in very short order.
It’s about scalability and all the options on the table. We’ve got self-recharging diamond batteries that contain plutonium from refined nuclear waste estimated to last a minimum of 20,000 years. Theoretically this could entirely replace batteries needed for pacemakers and any small cell battery. There could be ways to scale it up even further, we’ll just have to figure out a way how.
That’s just as promising as sodium power because it gives us another opportunity. It’s a way to reduce waste (nuclear waste is tricky to get rid of). It’s just about ability to deliver. Diamond batteries have been in production and were supposed to be available this year - chances are slim that will still be the case though lol.
sodium ion that may do something becomes sodium ion is going to take over the world
almost like new technologies need to compete to get funding
Except it’s rarely the actual scientists who are hyping this sort of thing like that. At least in the media. It happens occasionally, but typically the hype and sensationalism comes from the article writers, especially the ones who haven’t even talked to the paper’s original authors, much less actually read the thing.
I agree that the technologies did pan out, but I don’t think it’s an ignorant opinion.
I also feel blasé about the new battery articles because they tend to promise orders of magnitude changes rather than incremental change. Batteries did get much better, but it doesn’t really feel that way I suppose. Our experience of battery power hasn’t changed much.
It’s really about getting excited about the article or the tech, it takes so long to see its mild effects that there’s no real cashing out on the excitement, so it’s not very satisfying.
Our experience about internal combustion engines are the same. We get lower emissions, better mileage, more horsepower in a given form factor, and vehicles get bigger, have more features, and maybe a smaller gas tank and they feel like they have the same capacity as 60 years ago.
Likewise with phones. The phone I described had a 24-hour capacity, just like the one I have now. But the old one could only do phone calls and SMS, and had an amber LED display. Now my phone has more power, capacity, and connectivity than my first home computer…and needs to be charged daily.
People become accustomed to new things, and manufacturers design their products to utilize new capabilities in the way they think is most marketable. My phone could have a 10000 mAh battery, but then people would complain about weight and thickness.
Sounds to me like those new battery technologies entered production.
That’s just how media works. Sexy titles about revolutionary new technologies attract clicks, whereas titles about tiny incremental improvements don’t.
Most likely, the incremental and practical improvements have also been documented in special magazines and journals written for battery experts. It’s just that those articles tend to stay in the bubble of the battery experts.
Many of them are also like these announcements, just 5 or 10 years before they show up in batteries.
Until then take it with a grain of salt.
I see what you did there.
Well then, good news! Sodium ion is in production.
Factories are being built for sodium-ion batteries right now.
Every battery breakthrough you’ve heard of in the last 30 years contributed something. It might have shown a method of what not to do, or it might have contributed a 1% boost. Stack several of those 1% boosts on top of each other, and you get a workable EV.
Molten salt reactor vibes
Man I wonder how conservatives will justify still driving fossil fuel cars now, because we all know they will. They keep using “Dangerous and terrible lithium mining” as their first and foremost excuse, if we get cheaper and easier to make batteries I wonder what the next scapegoat will be.
I know, lithium mining is terrible, but we all know that they don’t actually care about it being terrible. They’re just regurgitating what Fox has told them
As a leftist, the fact that everybody has just gone along with the concept that battery-powered vehicles are an everyday necessity is pretty frustrating. Long-haul trucks with batteries instead of freight trains. There’s a trial in Germany powering trucks on freeways with overhead lines. People with range anxiety dragging around a 500km-range battery for their usual 40km daily driving, just so they can do their once yearly road trip. When better public transport could solve this. We don’t need new battery technology, we just need to actually spend the money to improve public transport.
We can have both - they aren’t mutually exclusive. I both want better public transport - but also acknowledge there are towns with populations of 800 people in the midwest where it’s going to take a century before they even start thinking of having bus routes - let alone rail lines.
Electric vehicles are a now solution. Public Transport is a solution that will take centuries in areas like that.
Okay, I was with you in the first half. I live in Australia, there are plenty of places that you need a car. I clearly wasn’t talking about those situations though.
Electric vehicles are a now solution.
In my part of Australia, the grid is powered by burning brown coal. One of, if not the most, dirty form of power generation. We have no plan on how to stop burning it either. So electric vehicles are just going to make things worse.
Electric vehicles as a solution is the exact same brainwashing as recycling making a difference. When the biggest impact would be made by targeting corporate polluters.
Also, seriously, centuries? I forgot that trains were invented in the 1600s and that’s why the midwest finally had them by the late 1800s.
Unless you buy the most extravagant and silly EV on the market (the Hummer), EVs are still a win over ICE when powered by coal plants.
And yes, it would be incredibly difficult for these towns to transition to usable public transportation. There are decisions literally set in concrete. You’d have to tear down perfectly good buildings and replace them with higher density housing. The concrete you would need is itself a major CO2 emitter. You could basically let everyone drive ICE cars for an extra decade for the amount of concrete you’d need.
CO2 neutral concrete (or even CO2 negative) is out there, but it’s not scaled up enough yet.
Meaning that electric vehicles are something that the average person can do right now to ebb climate change. However if your local power authority hasn’t gone green (mine is a combo of hydro, wind, and nuclear) then you should also push them to go green asap.
Please don’t call it brainwashing. I’ve researched the subject from a lot of angles and have come to the conclusion it’s the best for me, while I still push our local governments to build out transport. I’m trying to lower my carbon footprint the best I can as an individual.
They’ll probably never get there. Those small towns are losing population.
That said, more people should consider e-bikes. It’s OK if you come to the conclusion that it won’t work for you, but do some research. It might be that your objections aren’t as insurmountable as you think.
Yes public transit.
But also the improvements in battery technology are helping make grid-level storage viable, which is making renewable energy like solar more useful.
Ironically, the US by some metrics has more freight rail than anyone else.
We’re just using it to carry around rocks and coal and shit, and putting literally everything else in trucks. We SHOULD be using the trains for rocks and coal and shit, don’t get me wrong, but it’d be nice to put some other stuff on it.
But the class 1 railroads mostly own the actual track and right-of-way. Norfolk and all their moronic lot. They’re slaves to the lines going up and pass on good, sensible business expansions that would make them lots of money just because it would lower their profit percents by some tiny margin. Everywhere else in the world, the rail and right of way is a public good even if the service on them is deregulated.
Meanwhile Cincinnati just sold the Cincinnati Southern Railway to Norfolk Southern for a short-term cash injection. Fucking idiots. Norfolk TOLD them they were undervaluing the line by offering to buy it and they sold it anyway. And now that’s one more route that has 0 chance of ever having meaningful passenger service.
My perspective…in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we’re looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that’s a staggering change in energy delivery…largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.
I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car’s lifespan or the battery pack’s lifespan in that car. So…joe six-pack’s rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.
Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state’s mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.
I don’t see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.
I mean, the Australian mines are terrible for the environment, not like the nice and clean coal mines next door; and i mean, you can only recycle like 97% of the lithium with modern processes, not like gas where you can use it over and over again./s
Obviously this newer technology is only marginally better for the environment, so it’d be stupid to even try it. Who cares if it’s only partially better? So I’m completely justified in using my outdated fossil fuel vehicles that we know are 100% terrible for the environment.
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I’ve already had these conversations online…
- At the moment, they’ve already shifted to claiming EV cars are worse for the environment…
- Yanking on about Towing capacity. They still haven’t worked out that literally so few cars on the road (at least here in Australia), even have a towbar. Even less use it (even during long holidays)…
- Range. These guys haven’t worked out yet, that they aren’t going to be driving 16 hrs a day… And, for those applications, if unavoidable, worst case scenario is then Fuel cells.
Agree with all of these. Like they need a vehicle that can tow a semi every day for 800 miles. I’ve had the same talk and for many of them they are at LEAST a 2 car household. I keep saying okay if you need a vehicle that can do all of that… What about the other vehicle. Silence every time. Because they can’t accept that there may actually be a valid use case.
You want a giant truck for towing? Fine. But 90% of them are lying to themselves. Those people need commuter cars, and that’s where EVs are perfect
Range can be quickly resolved by hot-swapping batteries. A company in China, Nio, is already doing it
Ironically, towing capacity is something that EVs have the potential to be better than ICE. They have the torque, and you don’t need a complicated transmission in the drive train being a limiting factor.
You can also put extra battery in whatever you’re towing. It’s extra weight, but if we’re talking highway travel, the weight doesn’t matter much. Air resistance matters more, but you’ve already paid that price by having a trailer at all. High power connection does need to be worked out, though.
If they can already double the energy density of LiFePO4 in the lab and a 25kWh prototype is already in use and rated for 250km, while getting rid of cobalt and removing all the explosive hazards with a cathode base material one-tenth the price that can be made on existing lines, why is research into lithium ion even continuing for this application?
Either the story is connecting lots of dots that actually have yet to be drawn, or Big Lithium is up to shenanigans.
I highly doubt that Lithium mines have that sort of power. More likely there are either more mundane suspected downsides that aren’t being so breathlessly reported, or simply that it’s too new.
It takes time to switch production lines, and actual demand from battery consumers. Of Lithium Ion is good enough to meet thier requirements than why rush to something that hasn’t been proven in the field yet? If thier already struggling to meet demand with thier current output why risk taking a bunch of lines down to maybe see demand there?
Oh, I’m not saying switch production until there’s maturity, but if that’s the starting point with sodium-ion, clearly the research is better suited there.
It’s worth noting that research tends to lead manufacturing by ten to fifteen years. Mostly just down to the fact that making a few kilograms of something in a lab is a far cry from making and assembling tons an hour. Research also tends to take time to move between technologies, as most scientists don’t like to abandon projects half way though just becuse someone else published something interesting.
Also, while I don’t watch the battery space to closely, from my understanding there has traditionally been safety considerations stemming from large quantities of sodium given its tendency to react rather hot and fast when exposed to water.
I think we’re trying to make different points. I’m not in manufacturing but get that lab to product for batteries is glacial; what I was pointing out was the way the story is written – all strengths, zero drawbacks – would leave a credulous reader with that conclusion.
Take CPUs for example, ARM CPUs where kind of a joke 20 years ago, but now they are taking over X86. So its actually not bad working on competing technologies. Even about cars there is an example like that, also maybe 20 years ago battery cars where kind of a joke, while hydrogen fuelcells where all the hype back in the day. While now it seems battery is definitely winning. Although maybe in the next 20 years this turned out to be completely wrong again.
There may be an ARM “takeover” of x86 at some point, but that day is very much not today unless you believe the PC market consists solely of Macs.
The hydrogen issue seems to continue being storage. Even if you have all the green electricity you want for electrolysis, the product cannot just go in a tank at anywhere near sea-level pressure and temperature.
There may be an ARM “takeover” of x86 at some point, but that day is very much not today unless you believe the PC market consists solely of Macs.
I’d argue that overwhelming majority of people in the world use their phone as their primary computing device. ARM took over years ago.
The PC market is shrinking. More and more of our general computing needs are being met by ARM based tablets, phones etc.
With all Macs now using ARM CPUs, Microsoft and Qualcomm making a very real ARM push and cloud compute companies pursuing ARM servers. Long term ARM dominance is looking more and more likely.
“in the lab” is always a dangerous one. If the Tokyo U people only just demonstrated that hard carbon electrode, then who knows if it can be produced at an industrial scale and if that can be done economically. Even if it can, maybe there is still enough time until production picks up that one more technological refresh on the LiFePO4 production is justified in the mean time.
Besides, there is some inherent inertia, in research, in the markets, in politics. Even if a clear technological winner emerged suddenly some researchers would still have a year or two to finish their grant and publish their findings, some production lines would produce until their eventual superior replacements come online and the stocks would be sold off, and some subsidies would still be payed out until a new law could redirect the funds to only support the acceleration of the new best thing.
Because we don’t know for sure what will work. It makes sense to pursue multiple lines of research with the expectation that only one needs to work out.
Sodium-ion chemistry, material sourcing, and manufacturing techniques are still in flux. Longevity is still an issue. They’re still a breakthrough innovation, not a solved problem.
As it turns out, capitalism is better at driving iteration than innovation. Research into groundbreaking tech is expensive, risky, and the benefits tend to be spread out over entire industries, so private investors find it difficult to capitalize on (read: privatize) the benefits.
There is still investment in optimizing NMC and LFP batteries not because “big lithium” has its hooks in people, but because low-risk patentable iterative improvement is all the private sector is really good for.
This is why, if you dig deep enough, almost every “world-changing” technology you use today has its roots in government research or grants – microchips (US Air Force and NASA), accelerometers (Sandia Natl Labs, NASA), GPS (US DOD), touchscreens (Oak Ridge Natl Labs), the internet (ARPA), and even the lithium battery itself (NASA). The list goes on, and it gets particularly impressive when you look at medical breakthroughs.
Today, the US DOE has its net spread wide, funding dozens of different battery chemistries. Argonne Natl Lab is working on Na-ion right now, among others. For mostly political reasons, US-funded research doesn’t “pick winners,” so they won’t ever truly go all-in on one tech.
TL;DR: Na-ion batteries are still a breakthrough technology, so expect funding/research from state actors like the DOE or CATL to push it over the line before the private-sector investment floodgates open.
Yeah I’ll believe it when I can buy one off the shelf with an xt60 connector, and strap it to my drone.
