this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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I've been reading about various breakthroughs in battery world for past decade or so. So far none ended up in a consumer product.
You can go and buy sodium batteries already. They're not competitive with Lithium ion batteries in many mobile applications, but very much competitive for everything where price is more important than size or weight.
Lithium has decades of research and industrial scaling behind it, it's hard to break into that. But especially sodium is on a pretty good path to replace it in large scale storage applications.
Sodium-ion batteries have been in development since 1970s and the lithium-ion batteries have been in development since 1960s. Not much of a difference.
It's not just the amount of time. The portable electronics market and the electric car market both settled on lithium batteries, which created a huge demand for that particular technology. Over the past 2 decades there has been a massive incentive to develop smaller, denser lithium batteries.
There may be interest in developing other battery technologies, but nothing like the amount of money and effort being spent on lithium batteries.
And before that there were several decades of massive incentive to develop smaller more powerful ICE engines.
Lithium probably has some room to grow, but it also has a lot of problems like volatility and materials sourcing. EV manufacturers have been searching for ways to make better/cheaper/denser batteries, not better/cheaper/denser lithium batteries. They've been actively searching for alternatives.
Sure, it's the lithium battery manufacturers that are invested in making better lithium batteries. Everyone has been buying their products for decades and they want that to keep happening, so they pour resources into research and development. And they have a lot of resources, because everyone has been buying their products.
Once a market settles on a particular technology it becomes self-feeding and tends to accelerate. It's difficult for a competing technology to break in primarily because of momentum - it's hard to catch up.
A device manufacturer might be interested in using a different battery technology, but if they have a whole design and production process already built around lithium batteries then it's not just the battery that they have to change. It's their logistics chain, on-device electronics, design theory and possible regulatory concerns. Changing an established system is expensive, so that has to be justified somehow.
I'm not saying that it can't happen - I'm sure that it will eventually. What I'm saying is that in order for a different battery technology to really change the market and push lithium out, it will have to be significantly better (not just marginally better).
Similar deal with LCD versus other display technology: once something is dominant, a metric shitload of money is spent pushing from its practical shortcomings toward its theoretical limits. Even twenty years ago, LCDs suuucked. Plasma would save us from their high latency. OLED would save us from their low contrast. And then, uh... neither did much of anything. LCDs were just so damn cheap that consumers didn't care for much else, and manufacturers attacked the technical problems keeping them slow and dim. Nowadays - they're still not ideal. But nothing else is a drop-in replacement, because nothing else has enjoyed the same firehose of revenue-fueled R&D.
Lithium has problems. But after a couple decades as the technology for laptops and smartphones, those problems are mostly jokes about that exploding Samsung phone, and the fact gasoline still has higher density. If something can be cheaper - it will gradually disrupt and displace this highly-regarded standard.
Expect a similar outcome for RISC-V versus ARM.
I've been reading about battery breakthroughs for decades. And I remember when the latest in battery tech was alkaline, then Ni-Cd, then Li-Ion, and now LiPo. All of those have ended up in consumer products.
Also, the battery pack for a cell phone 30 years ago was about the same volume and weight of an entire smartphone, with a capacity of about 500 mAh. They are also far cheaper if you account for inflation.
Batteries have improved incapacity by about a factor of 10 and the cost per watt-hour has reduced by about 99% in the last 30 year. All without a single advancement in the technology, apparently.
/s
I wouldn't call it a single advancement but hundreds. The materials might be largely the same but manufacturing is huge. When you roll up some metal to make a battery then increasing the number of layers is a huge challange when they're already tiny.
What do you mean by that?
I would say there have been a great many advancements in technology. I mean, that's what all these improvements are, right?
It was sarcasm, which seems to be harder to convey in text than any number of battery advancements.
You skipped Ni-MH there, that was major for not having the memory problems of Ni-Cd. We still use those in AA and AAA rechargeable batteries.
Ni-MH production for EVs was effectively shutdown by Texaco and later Chevron through patent acquisitions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries
Holy shit. I had no idea.
Chevron is pretty fucking evil for a lot of reasons, but we’ll add this one to the pile, I guess.
totally TIL worthy
Ni-MH ~~is~~ was also in a lot of hybrid cars.
Are they still making NiMH hybrid packs?
Lithium is far superior
I don't know in general. I was recently shopping for a UX 250h and I know they only just switched to lithium for the 2025 model with the nx name change.
Toyota switched the camry hybrid from NiMH to lithium for the 2020 model year.
In my head I meant hybrid cars on the road, not necessarily in new production.
A little pedantic note, LiPo is still a type of Li-Ion (maybe I got that right)
and the bigger recent breakthrough was LFP (Lithium iron phosphate / LiFePO4)
And probably safe to call Sodium-Ion and solid state the next big phases of development
LFP is actually a relatively old battery technology, it's only now that the patent is expired that it's starting to breakthrough (outside of China, they somehow got a license if I understand it correctly).
You can buy sodium ion cells online right now. It's not the next phase, it's here.
Hey! Don't screw up Lemmy's Debbie Downer vibe!
/s
LifePo4 batteries aren't Star Trek levels of advancement, but they sure have changed my life and those of a lot of people I know.
But I do get your drift. It seems like everyday there's some new breakthrough, and all we see of it is unnecessary AI.
The same thing happened with a lot of awesome things you're using right now. But I understand your impatience.
QuantumScape is currently building the mass production line for a solid state battery and has been sending prototypes out to their auto manufacturer clients for testing.
This Undecided with Matt Ferrell video has a good breakdown.
Disclosure: I own 100 shares of QS
$5.05 a share. So for a mere $505 I could also own 100.
It takes around a decade to scale up a process. You’d be shocked at how long it takes to discover something, get investment, file patents, acquire licenses, construct facilities, manufacture the product, and sell to customers. And that’s what it takes to get to just the starting line of being in business.