To geeks, "production hell" sounds like "they're in the process of mass producing, and they're running into all sorts of problèms, but we'll see something any time soon." Kinda like the 6 months of crunch before a AAA game is released after 3 years of production.
Except, the rest of the article makes it very clear that as far as production grade, mass marketable models of solid state batteries, we're more in the Hollywood version of "production hell", where no one has anything good to show, everybody is making press release, and we're rewriting the script until it barely looks like anything.
But, hey, we'll get more "breakthroughs" headlines any time now, so that's what matters ?
As an SRE... Production Hell to me is we already have a product in production with paying users and we are breaking things faster than we can fix them. If we don't change something quickly we risk losing our user base.
Basically our Error Budget is approaching 0, fast.
As a geek I disagree with your interpretation of "production hell". I interpret it as a state where things either can't be built or never pass spec and we're outputting nothing but a series of one-offs that we hope won't get us sued with no real end in sight except for some vague "breakthrough" we're sure to hear from R&D any day now.
Essentially your description of Hollywood but with things
I guess that is the different between Hardware and Software. In hardware Production Hell definitely means they are in trial production but things are not yielding.
production hell for a capitalist is when everyone is buying your product, but it's turned into a commodity that the government has to treat like a strategic resource and contemplates nationalizes, but refuses to buy out and prefers to give just enough incentive that there's no justification to quit.
Post like these always make me go into the rabbit hole of how energy dense gasoline is.
The energy density of gasoline is higher than liquid hydrogen! It does not need to be super cooled and is liquid state at atmospheric pressure and ambient temperature.
Gasoline is an absolute miracle fuel. Sort of feels under appreciated to casually pump it at the gas station ha.
One thing to keep in mind is that the energy density of gasoline is a chemistry measurement.
The energy density of a gasoline power train is a different measurement taking into account chemistry and physics.
Specifically car engines can only turn 33% of gasoline’s stored energy into motion. Which still puts gasoline ahead in terms of efficiency relative to hydrogen or battery powertrains but reduces the difference a lot.
An important point EV advocates often gloss over is that you don't get to burn battery. In aviation, especiaslly, this really matters - over half an aircraft's weight at takeout is often fuel. The later in the flight it is, the more fuel has burned off, the lighter the plane is, and the more efficient the rest of the flight will be. You have to lug that empty battery around at full weight.
Well now you've just made me an engineering scenario of aircraft equiped with drop tanks full of heavy batteries used to extend range. Drop tanks that they let go mid flight 'bombs away!' as they discharge.
So all we need then is parachutes, some kind of GPS based glide guidance control, and a network of aviation battery collection stations :)
I guess overseas flights will just have to absorb the cost, unless it happens to be economical somehow to operate floating stations for the purpose of collecting dropped batteries.
Rocket Lab's Electron rocket actually does this with the batteries that power its electric turbo pumps.
> The electric pumps are powered by lithium-polymer batteries. The second stage uses three batteries which are "hot swapped", two of the batteries are jettisoned once depleted to shed mass.
Energy density of gasoline is literally 12900 Wh/kg and 9500 Wh/L, Li-ion(not combusted) is ~250 Wh/kg and ~700 Wh/L. That's 50x/14x raw and 17x/13x at 33% efficiency without hybrid/ICE optimization gains.
(23222915000 Wh/kg and 370000000000 Wh/L for Pu239 btw, source[1])
Had a double take on reading Li-ion (not combusted) and then immediately went looking at EV battery fires. A rabbit hole of solid fuel and it's considerations followed. I have become a trained monkey. Well done internet.
And thank you for the 'x' factor. Had never seen that, outside of everyone stating ICE is only 33% efficient.
Thank you for the math. But I don’t think you really tried to understand my point.
Firstly, the newest solid state batteries (relevant because that is what I was responding about) are 2x the density so that is quite good (8.5x/6.5x). Which is already pretty close. They are also going to get better through iteration likely to 3-5x or so (but let’s ignore that for now).
Secondly, the power train also includes regenerative breaking, reduced weight from transmission, in hub motors (reducing axcel weight), reduced center of gravity allowing better drag profiles, no external coolant systems, no engine oil compartments, no fan belts, etc.
I’m happy for you to keep doing the math, but the reality is XXX km or miles per “full tank” is the best measurement because it takes all those factors into consideration.
Oh I'm not so against EV, I'm just being pro-nuke as I personally always has been. Honestly I don't get why some sort of EV supremacy theory has to be defended at all costs. Those are just facts that density and recyclability of Li-ion is just atrocious. Gasoline particles tho NOx bad for health yeah I get that part.
Seriously, if we could just build 2-3 air-cooled Plutonium fission per each megalopolis core and use e-Fuel on existing hybrids we'd solve everything in modern society ever. The reactor could double as cityscale thermojet ventilation system as well, eliminating heat and atmosphere problems once and for all. It will of course work as a training exercise for coming real Space Age in which humanity builds bunches after bunches of cylindrical habitats fabricated and populated in space. The only two roadblocks towards that path are some NIMBYism/NPT fears and cost.
Fair enough! I’m just on board with the electric ground transportation thing.
I’m very happy for there to be really nice and safe fission reactors everywhere for grid scale generation. Including efuel generators for air and space transportation.
If you dont like him doing the math why do you bring up the thermodynamic efficiency instead of the max range? It sounds like you just like math tidbits that make EVs sound better than they are. And dislike math that shows gasoline is superior from a purely practical standpoint (its far worse environmently)
I remember people saying that hybrid vehicle used ICE not to generate car scale torque, thus being build differently to improve the efficiency (mostly due to better control of thermal constraints ensuring better chemical reaction, higher conversion and less pollution). Do you know how true that is ?
As of this year, and limited to three models exclusive to Japan: yes this happens.
The new 2023 model year Serena from Nissan uses a generator optimized engine in a series hybrid setup. The engine runs at a fixed rpm (except in extreme situations like accelerating a bunch on the highway going from 110 to 140) then it switches to a second higher rpm mode. I bought one, it's a lot of fun to manage the engines heat and battery room. My record is 38km per liter using local driving up and down our hilly community. Pretty incredible when you consider hills are the natural enemy to none hybrid millage.
The car accelerates like an EV. And with Japan's expensive electricity I'm paying only about double the millage cost of an EV. Despite the full size minivan costing us about 20k USD new.
Most hybrids, and all Toyota ones, are not using a special fixed rpm engines. They use a regular motor with different timings. The Nissan fixed rpm engine is actually less powerful than the electric motor powering the wheels. Thus at max acceleration you can deplete the battery faster than it is charged.
If we are just using it as a generator, a turbine engine makes more sense. Very efficient at fixed rpm. Many trains use that sort of hybrid setup. But if you put in enough battery to warm up a small proane fuel cell to warm up a larger propane fuel cell you could just fill up at the propane pump and still get battery efficiencies but with a lightening tank. And they think they have propane generation from environmental co2 over 90% efficient now too.
Turbine in a car is completely impractical. Some tanks, like M1 Abrams use a turbine and they are painfully loud and the exhaust is so hot it can literally set on fire anything too close to it. Imagine sitting in a traffic jam and lighting up a car behind you :)
This is the “series hybrid” or “range extender” approach and the issue is that all of the engine’s power needs to be converted into electrical power and then back into mechanical power, even when running the traction motor directly off the generator output. This causes significant losses in efficiency which more or less cancel out the gains from being able to optimise the engine for a specific constant speed.
No, it means that you can leverage a more efficient part of an engine’s torque curve by supplementing with electric power at the low and high end (since motors have a flatter torque curve).
Not just that. It does require Atkinson cycle to reach the efficiencies they have. It just means that the compression stroke is shorter than the power stroke.
Basically with that cycle they can get massive compression ratios. As an example newer Toyotas are at 14:1 ratio with 41% thermal efficiency. That’s close to diesel territory on a gasoline car.
Naturally when you floor it it goes to Otto cycle and efficiency drops.
And, in the case of Toyotas eCVTs, keeping the ICE in the most-efficient-rpm sweet spot longer by allowing the ICE RPM to be pretty much independent of the wheel RPM. It's somewhat strange because RPM noise barely correlats with speed or acceleration anymore.
Also: start-stop-automatic for free ... I am still somewhat spooked when the motor just turns off going 70 km/h because the ECU decides that the ICE is not needed anymore.
I personally wonder how much more the 33% would be if we had continued the focus on ICE. I believe there is no business case anymore to invest significantly in advancing technology, if everyone wants a new shiny toy.
There's not much more you can get out of current fuel blends. Methanol is potent but very expensive to mix, the even more expensive nitromethane is so powerful it strains the science of metallurgy and thus is some of the most dangerous stuff to handle, and hydrazine is so energy dense but so unstable it's used as rocket fuel. Porsche's E-Fuel is just barely more efficient than gasoline because of the density at point six megajoules a kilogram, versus point five four for one hundred octane gasoline.
The major issue is parasitic drivetrain loss from having to push the cylinder which pushes the cam which turns the flywheel which friction fits against the clutch which friction fits against the transmission flywheel which turns dozens of metal gears which rotates the driveshafts. Direct drive implementations where the engine's output shaft is mated directly to the axle are much more efficient and have been used in massive ships, but are entirely impractical for use in passenger vehicles. There's the Otto, Atkinson, Wankel, Scuderi and diesel cycles for liquid fuel combustion, and all have tradeoffs leaving them competitive with eachother instead of having a clear best solution thanks to everything else required to transfer the power from the initial combustion.
In short, we've hit the mechanical engineering dead end for massive efficiency gains with ICEs. It's all chemical from here, and thus gets much more expensive to run.
Modern ICEs are already insanely sophisticated, in pushing the boundaries with all kinds of tiny tricks, just to get a small percent extra. There is only that much you can get by changing the valve timing, freevalve, compression ratio, air boosters, electric turbos, fuel injection methods, mixture ratio, how the fuel get sprayed most efficiently into the chamber, predictive hill cruise control, balancing rods and whatnot. Everything has been tried and the improvements for each new trick is only marginal.
Something more radical has to be done about the entire crankshaft and a 4 piston design. Believe me, lots of smart people have tried that as well, for many decades. Because the payoffs if you did find something are huge.
There are lots of YouTube channels needing into all of this. Engineering Explained is a good one if you want to understand the level of how advanced modern engines really are.
ICE is kind of a dead end, you convert energy from chemical to thermal to mechanical and every conversion is lossy. You want to use chemical energy directly instead, like some kind of "hydrocarbon/air cell" and we don't know how to do it. At least not with mixed hydrocarbons.
Yes, it is a 'miracle' fuel, if you ignore these factors:
(a) Global oil, gas, and coal supply chains. The resulting complex network has 6.09mn nodes and 15.70mn edges: https://github.com/Lkruitwagen/global-fossil-fuel-supply-cha.... And the defense budgets of all the countries protecting these assets and supply lines.
Keep in mind that the subsidy figure quoted includes more than direct government support. It also considers a lack of climate taxes or surcharges to be a “subsidy”, something that falls outside of the ordinary meaning of subsidy for most people. This makes it misleading even if the aim is good.
For example, the highest income tax rate in the UK is 45%. If I estimate that it should be 60% can I truthfully say that right people are getting a 15% (of pretax income) income subsidy? There is 0% VAT on books, if I think it should be the standard 20% can I truthfully say the government is subsidising the purchases of books? When people were campaigning to abolish the 5% VAT on tampons and STs would it have been a valid counter argument to say they were being subsidised by not being subject to the 20% rate?
Yes the government is subsidising the purchases of books when it puts a 5% VAT on it, where its substitutions are not. The state is financially supporting the product in order to incentivise its use. A tax incentive is an example of a subsidy.
Marginal tax on income is far higher than 45% in many cases. For starters there's national insurance, but then there's also extra tax for people earning between about 50 and 60k pushing marginal tax for many above 60%, even 70% (and that's assuming they didn't go to university)
A graduate with 3 kids on 55k, with their employer spending £1138 on a bonus, gets
* £138 on NI (employer)
* £20 on NI (employee)
* £90 graduate tax (student loan payments which in the UK are income based)
* £400 income tax
* £290 child tax (the uk government give one parent about £1k a child per year, but then takes it away for those earning between 50 and 60k. Two parents can earn 50k each and receive the full amount, but a single parent on 60k gets nothing)
Leaving them with just £200, or 17.5% of the money their company spent on them.
For those of us earning 150k, who have paid off that student loan, have been fully taxed for the kids, get to keep about half of that £1138.
All true, but not relevant to the point I was trying to make. There are far too many quirks in the tax system to take account for everything, so my example is 45% but you think it should be higher ceterius paribus.
If you are suggesting the tax system is unfair or that NI is a way of disguising the fact that earned income is taxed at a higher rate than unearned income I agree with you!
> considers a lack of climate taxes or surcharges to be a “subsidy”
Aww.. the Government are such a lovely, benevolent bunch, what would we do without them.
Pull out yet another ridiculous tax out of your ass, then slap it on everything and the things you didn't slap it on (yet)... call that a subsidy. Just government things * chefs kiss *
That's a drop in the bucket compared to the plausible future deaths from climate change. Burning gasoline moves carbon from the ground into the air, and we basically have no idea how to undo that operation at an appropriate scale.
> (extracting oil -> refining fuel -> burning fuel -> sequestering carbon -> storing said carbon underground), the whole cycle probably provides negative energy
Very straightforwardly true. But if you add some steps: having an industrial revolution -> developing technology -> manufacturing solar panels or other renewables on a massive scale -> collecting energy for the carbon sequestration - you could imagine the human race coming out ahead.
Renewables can replace fossil fuels as an energy source. To undo a century plus of burning fossil fuels, you'll need a revolutionary energy source that outputs an order of magnitude more power. Maybe fusion, or maybe something that we cannot yet fathom. You can imagine this all coming to a happy ending, but at this point it's all up in the air. Both the CO2 and whether it'll ever come down again.
so using those 10 million air pollution deaths/year figure without the context of the deaths that would've occurred had we not have good fuel for transportation etc, means it's just a piece of statistic meant to misinform you about the argument.
I already said upthread that pollution deaths are a drop in the bucket. Modern gasoline engines are pretty clean, if you ignore the enormous future effects of CO2.
I hope you're not forgetting to factor in the positive effects of those 10 million people not being able to cause any more pollution </sarcasm>...
Before gasoline and gas people burned wood to stay warm, in houses with very primitive chimneys. Lots of people died from air pollution then, but maybe less because the populations were smaller.
Same with cars: if you take accidents per driven mile most cars are extremely safe compared to horse riding.
I don't think returning to the 1700's with the current world population is a viable option.
You'll need a lot of trees close by then, which is not an option in some densely populated countries. If you're hauling trees using diesel trucks and chopping them up with petrol chainsaws you might as well just pump natural gas to houses.
(e) Thousands of person-years wasted bickering over how real climate change is and what the magnitude will really be, when it ought to be obvious that renewable energy sources are preferable to non-renewable ones.
I was under the impression that death certificates only list the immediate cause of death, and maybe occasionally some immediate biological confounders (e.g. pneumonia caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis).
: Pollution has been recorded as a cause of death for the first time in the UK at the inquest of a nine-year-old girl.
: A coroner concluded air pollution made a "material contribution" to the death of Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah after a severe asthma attack in February 2013, in the landmark ruling.
: The schoolgirl, who lived in Lewisham, South London, was rushed to hospital at 2am before she died.
: Her family has long argued that pollution caused her death, and it has emerged that levels of nitrogen dioxide where she lived were unlawful.
I believe air pollution can be a contributing factor but rarely the principal cause of death. If it was, everyone in the area would die from air pollution. Stating that an elderly person or someone who is already very sick died from air pollution is disingenuous.
: In a study funded in part by EPA, researchers from Johns Hopkins University found that children exposed to outdoor coarse particulate matter (PM10-2.5), were more likely to develop asthma
: Coarse PM can come from roadway particles such as brake and tire wear, and mixtures of road dust and metals.
: This finding is significant because while researchers have generally found that exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is associated with the development of asthma and other respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
: While researchers do not fully understand how air pollution exposure increases asthma prevalence, evidence suggests air pollutants suppress genes that regulate the immune system’s ability to differentiate an allergen from a dangerous foreign substance, such as a virus or bacteria. The immune system then goes into action, setting up an inflammatory response whether the substance is harmful or not, which leads to asthma.
: In the study, researchers from the Children’s Center at Stanford University examined the impact of air pollution on two genes involved in immune tolerance in children from an area known to have high air pollution levels. Researchers found that short-term and long-term exposures to high levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and PM 2.5 were associated with alterations to these two genes and those alterations were significantly associated with asthma.
Energy density of gasoline is deceptive because of how inefficient ICE engines are in practice. A Prius getting 50mpg is only the equivalent of 1.5 miles per kWh when many EV’s get ~4 miles per kWh.
Where gas really shines is ultra cold temperatures where you can make use of the waste heat. But even here it’s still not very efficient.
Do the EV measurements take into account the energy used to thermoregulate the battery during charging? They should, because there are conditions under which the battery won't charge at all, in which case the efficiency goes to zero.
That’s not directly relevant in terms of energy density. We can do an apples to apples comparison for the full lifecycle efficiency, but here gas comes off even worse.
Extracting, transporting, manufacturing, and distributing gas takes quite a lot of energy. ~30-50% of gas CO2 emissions occur before you burn it though exact number depends on the specific source etc. But what we care about is vehicle ranges etc not this wider picture.
Being local isn’t particularly relevant because there is such a wide range of transportation efficiency and different crude oil supplies involve differing amounts of flaring etc.
There’s a great deal of oil that can’t be extracted for less than it costs to synthesize it. A deepwater oil rig isn’t going to sit around a well producing 1 barrel of oil a month.
So being local is again basically meaningless here.
Ahh, but once you accept there’s economic limits the economies of scale define those limits.
The rise of EV’s will therefore strand more oil as smaller scale processing/distribution is less efficient. Being local to you doesn’t help because oil is transported to refineries before useful products are sent to you.
The crash continues to strand more production as refineries shut down.
The future is as it is, now is now. And local means closest viable, regardless.
It would seem that preventing local production and extraction for political reasons, would be a mistake. It would also seem that preventing pipelines would be too.
This makes sense. People are trying to stop a thing, via 100 paper cuts, instead of just stopping it. Meanwhile, this results in suboptimal production, which inceeases pollution.
Oil in the ground isn’t rotting, but it is finite so the logic isn’t so obvious. Especially because new local drilling has minimal impact on wholesale prices.
If you expect future prices to spike then the wise choice is to avoid drilling until you can maximize gains.
If you expect future prices to remain unchanged then the wise choice is to avoid harming your local environment and have other countries despoil their own.
Only if you expect future prices will tank does drilling become a good idea.
Your discussion of pricing isn't necessarily wrong, although I haven't bothered to ponder your words, as it has zero to do with political bans on oil extraction.
Canada has roughly 40 million inhabitants, Scandinavia (if you include Finland) less than 30 million.
Even combined, that is pretty much exactly the population of France alone, or about 15 million less than Germany alone - and neither of those is exactly a huge country.
Canada and Scandinavia, on the global scale, are small markets.
Certainly more of a problem for diesel cars (diesel starts to gel not much below freezing). However, if there's any level of condensation in your gasoline tank you do have to worry about the fuel lines developing ice crystals... I wouldn't like to bet my life on starting an off-the-shelf car without any preheaters in -40 degrees
It's true that just about any modern vehicle with a quality battery will start in -40°F , but oil distribution will be suboptimal and you'll put strain in cold, brittle places it shouldn't be. I guess 'need' is a strong word, but every time you start a vehicle in that kind of cold you do a tiny bit of damage to it. Keeping it a little warm during startup is really important for long term health.
I went down a small youtube rabbit hole one night. There are some youtube channels showing guys getting up at the crack of dawn and starting their cold engine diesel engines without block heaters.
It seems if you are sufficiently prepared they are not needed.
I can't imagine there's a lot of extra energy going to heat up the battery while charging? I'd guess the waste heat does the job everywhere except the very coldest climates.
That doesn't result in zero energy efficiency. The energy efficiency is only zero when the heating is insufficient and then it is not the energy that you are putting into he battery that is the problem but the energy needed to keep it warm.
The energy required for charging is the energy input required to fill the battery, plus whatever additional energy is needed to condition the battery. If 50% of the energy you use for charging (which you pay for) goes towards conditioning the battery, then then the energy efficiency of the vehicle is 50% times whatever efficiency you get through the drivetrain. When it gets cold enough, all of the energy draw goes towards conditioning the battery, so the car doesn't charge at all. Since none of the input energy goes towards moving the vehicle, the efficiency is zero, though if you wait long enough it'll take a low value as the temperature increases and the vehicle begins to take charge. It's probably more correct to say that the energy efficiency of the vehicle approaches zero as the temperature drops.
This is different to a standard car, because losses during refueling are negligible, but losses in the drivetrain obviously aren't. And of course for both types of vehicle you have additional upstream effects, e.g. production and transportation of fuel versus production of electricity, production of the vehicle, etc.
The reason I raised the issue is because I hear a lot about well-to-wheels efficiency of BEVs, but I've never heard anyone take into account the effect that conditioning the battery has in certain climates. It's one thing to say that the well-to-wheels efficiency of a BEV is around 60% compared to 16% for ICEVs, but if you're neglecting a large multiplicative efficiency hit in your chain, things like hybrid electric vehicles suddenly compare a lot more favorably.
And if you're comparing mileage on the basis of miles per gallon using energy input at a pump or cable that you paid for, it seems like a reasonable question to ask. Is that mpg figure calculated using the energy of the battery, or the energy that was paid for?
Conditioning the battery isn’t a year round thing 20% more energy for 2 months a year is 1.7% efficiency loss across the full year. It’s also zero in a heated garage.
But again, as soon as you move up the chain on one car you need to move up the chain on the other or you’ll get as distorted picture of the tradeoffs.
I acknowledged upstream effects, but this is specifically about accurately accounting for the energy input required to run the car. If I purchase X units of energy, whether it be in the form of fuel or electricity, how much of that energy is actually going into the battery, and how is it affected by climate? It's one thing to get an answer from California where it doesn't really get cold, quite another if you rely on on-street parking in, say, New York.
NYC doesn’t really get cold enough to matter, average temperatures in January are above freezing. So you’re really talking about a subset of unusually cold days where it’s even slightly an issue.
Oil leads to geopolitical destabilization since where it is found just happens to be a very volatile region. Even if the Americans somehow detached from the world market for oil (considering they have enough their own), the Chinese definitely aren't willing to forgo energy security by stopping their much more aggressive EV development programs.
Gasoline got us this far for a hundred years, now we can pursue a different path?
Than we can rephrase original claim to: "oil leads to geopolitical instability because it's only found in economically viable deposits in very specific areas of the planet."
This create strong asymmetries and strong incentives to project power.
It's not though, not in terms of oil production or reserves. Extractable resources can exacerbate instability by providing funding to warring groups and giving a reason for outside entities to interfere but none of this is even remotely set in stone.
There was a plant in Missouri to convert turkey offal into crude oil using leftovers from a Butterball plant. It’s been shuttered and the parent company filed for chapter 11.
I think it’s important to remember (and buttresses the upthread points)—the volatility isn’t a coincidence—it’s a direct result of the discovery of the oil and the crucial role it played for imperialism and capitalist expansion.
Before oil was even a thing that region was incredibly volatile. It is the cradle of civilization after all, so I guess it was always bound to be a powder keg.
It has only become volatile after the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Was quite stable and safe before. It's just they didn't have nations before, were colonised and controlled by Ottomans while in Europe we had nation-states and nationalism since ~17 century and had enough time for cleansing to organise mono-ethnic, cohesive states. While even that, was only finished decisively by post-WWII "population transfers" (which was nothing but ethnic cleansing sold as a good thing).
Ethnic states are a things, albeit quite debatable since ethnicity is an entirely contingent and subjective construct. Monoethnic states are the dream of genocides, not ever a reality on the ground (doesn't matter how you define ethnicity).
Well where in a state there's no word in a language to differentiate between a citizen and someone of a title ethnicity, i can call it an ethnostate. Say Armenian or Polish: there's no 2nd word in their languages for that. Because there are so few citizens who aren't of title ethnicity, and they are so marginalised and subject to such a quick assimilation, there isn't even a need to bother inventing a word.
If there is such a word say, "Kazakh" vs "Kazakhstani" or "Russkiye" vs "Rossiyane", existence of such a word shows that this state is an empire.
Sometimes the "ethnic" word simply doesn't exist, say in "Canadian" or "American" for U.S.: it's only citizenship, there's no ethnicity at all - neither the word nor substance - showing a "melting pot" country.
That's as simple as having vs not having a title ethnicity in the country. If there's no title ethnicity it means there's just citizenship, no one subjugates another: it's a melting pot. Kazakhstan in particular, in any case, is moving towards an ethnic state, as every other ethnicity except Kazakh has very low birth rate there so in a few generations it will become homogenous.
Energy density of gasoline by weight is >3x worse. We just haven't been good about putting that to use. RIP VentureStar.
Personally I'm just tired of this discussion around energy density being brought up every time transportation is mentioned. These conversations almost never surface interesting new points.
Don't forget that you can only extract about 30-35% of that energy via combustion, though. Whereas a battery with an electric motor you get more like 90%
Another knock against gasoline is that you spend about 1 EV battery pack of energy to refine a cars tank of gasoline from crude oil in the first place.
You would need a tank 4 times the size of a gasoline tank for liquid hydrogen, not to mention the high pressure tank that is needed to store the liquid hydrogen .
Do those comparisons take into account their respective engine technologies and how much useful work they are able to extract from each fuel in practice?
Ethanol fits your bill perfectly. It is liquid like gasoline, easy to produce, easy to transport, and burns cleanly. It doesn't release any carbon into the atmosphere that wasn't already there, assuming you got it by fermenting plant matter and used renewable energy for distillation.
Only problem with ethanol is that it directly competes with human food production.
- If large areas are deforested for sugar cane plantation, not only CO2 is released but the capacity of fixing future CO2 as well.
- Large scale sugar cane plantations demand synthetic fertilisers, which come from fossil fuels.
- Ethanol burning still produces toxic gases like NOX.
Can you make ethanol from thin air, such as with the Sabatier reaction? I like the fact that you can take electrical energy input, atmosphere, and get methane. This means I could convert excess solar into a mass and volume dense combustible, and then retrieve some of the store energy back later.
Personally I'm principally nerding out about energy storage for sailing cruising yachts. But I have by no means done an exhaustive search of the space.
I'm guessing the parent post means volumetric energy density, and you're referring to gravimetric energy density.
It's frankly inexcusable to not be specific when you're citing an article where both figures are clearly visible. You must have seen it, and consciously chosen to ignore it, causing unnecessary confusion.
They also have to be price competitive. I'm convinced they will be much cheaper than ICE cars eventually. Engines, transmissions, etc. are very complicated things. We've just gotten incredibly good at making them.
There are so many aspects of modern EVs that gas engine cars have no way of keeping up with.
Like, 220V AC outlets are becoming pretty standard on newer EVs. In you can pre-heat or pre-cool the car no matter where it's parked. It's possible and now common to build EVs with a skateboard-like architecture which gives way more interior space than a gasoline car ever could. You can build cars with 2, 3 or even 4 motors, with super fast torque vectoring. It's feasible to have steering on the rear wheels. And we're not even done with the innovations. Look at Hyundai's recently announced Uni Wheel design which frees up even more interior space.
Indeed. For all the shit fossil fuels (rightfully) get, they are pretty damn good for storing energy. When you look into this, it really isn't a wonder that it's so difficult to transition away from them.
They are more expensive than non-graphene batteries so unless you have a need for the extra performance you tend to overlook them when shopping for batteries.
I'm aware of the difficulty Aptera has had getting a product done, but I'm also surprised that there isn't more specialization in EV products. Most cars on US roads are used mostly for commuting, but EVs seem to be striving for 1:1 replacement of gasoline cars. That makes then very heavy and expensive. A commute-optimized EV should be cheaper and more efficient than that 1:1 replacement vehicle. It is less likely to depend on cutting edge batteries, too.
Most of my driving is commuting (say 50 miles roundtrip would be sufficient), but I need/want a vehicle to handle the rest. I do not want to own two vehicles unless parking suddenly became free or the commuter only car model was significantly discounted vs anything available today.
Many have tried, all have failed. Safety regulation encourages the design of all-fits-one vehicles. Consumers prefer to pay the premium for a 'proper' car over a simpler vehicle. It is what it is, for now.
I don’t disagree if you only think about cars, but I’ve seen a lot of smaller electric vehicles gain popularity very quickly. Things like escooters and electric bicycles. For some people these work really well for commuting.
Almost any combination of reagents can work as primary cell - even a literal potato!
But designing a secondary (rechargeable) cell is a different story... Every promising chemistry has been investigated for many decades and yet the successes are few. Magnesium, sodium or aluminium-based rechargeable battery can in theory be just as capable as lithium-based one, but we can't just get them to work.
Isn't the potato thing just differential potential caused by using different metals for the electrode? It'll make an LED light up, maybe, but the actual power available is a rounding error.
Didn't Tesla say they were going to start using solid state batteries at the battery day a few years back? Does anyone know if they actually ARE using them? Or not yet - or will use them?
Technology has actually improved massively since 2010. There's nothing wrong with the batteries on the market today. Relative to 2010, they are safer, provide better energy density, use less problematic materials like cobalt, etc. There are also a few new chemistries like LFP and sodium ion.
Solid state is more or less progressing on a time line that hasn't really deviated a lot from what was projected a few years ago. There are a few companies out there that by now have proven that they can build cells that last lots of cycles and generally perform well. Taking those cells to production necessarily involves a series of increasingly larger plants to produce these cells and testing the hell out of the resulting cells. This is a slow process but it seems like a few companies are ramping up production volumes.
Quantumscape is a good example. They are exactly where they said they would be a few years ago. They've delivered sample cells to a few of their customers (VW and a few others) and the tests came back positive. I think this year they are building small production facility to start producing low volumes of cells. If that's successful, we might see some cars from 2026/2027 onwards or so. But I would expect volume production to be dominated by LFP and increasingly sodium ion batteries for cheaper EVs for quite some time. They are good enough. Higher energy density will come at a premium.
they are getting better. every year there's the promise of a new big leap forward in a few years. but in the intervening few years all the previously announced "big leaps" come to market, so by the time an announced technology comes to market, it's just an incremental improvement.
go back to 2010 and show past you the batteries we've got now, you'd be impressed by what huge progress there was.
Of course affordability remains a problem, but the battery capacity per vehicle has drastically improved, even without world shattering breakthroughs in chemistry.
Did you write this from 2010? _Consumer_ computer products has been barely getting any better for a decade now. (last big WOW for me personally was getting first gen Retina MacBook Pro with SSD).
Did you write this from 2018? There was a huge period of stagnation but AMD started progressing very well and Intel got back on the train too.
"Wow" or not, processors are at least twice as fast per core compared to several years ago, and they have double the cores too. And a 4070 is more than 5x as fast as a 770.
When I see articles talking about electric car improvements that are possible in the next handful of years, 2x is usually at the high end. None of them go near 5x.
I only got around to replacing a 2013 MacBook Air with an M1 MacBook Air last summer. The M1 is better when performance matters, like AI… but most of my experience isn't performance limited anyway. The improvements the M1 brought used to be the normal rate of change each year, and their absence since 2013 was how I was able to keep using that machine all that time.
Now, the phones? Those have improved significantly. The cameras, the on-device AI, and where those two things were blended together - night photography, and translating text within images (even though image translation was first demonstrated on phones in 2010, it's a much better experience now).
I’ve seen people do that with GPUs! But this is an issue with all hardware. The available smartphones will also be better in a few years time but most people tend to settle for what fulfills their current need
It's like any product based on a rapidly advancing set of technologies. There's a trade off financially between needing a product now or soon, and when the next major commercially available version is available.
Yup. Meanwhile, if you did something like a 2011 GM Volt when it came out, you'd be several thousand gallons of gas and a rather larger amount of money ahead over "waiting and seeing."
I've had the same car since 2014 because I don't drive much. From my perspective this is still good advice.
With current EVs I'd have to keep that it a very long time just to break even with the energy used in manufacturing. I think I've heard estimates of about 20,000-30,000 miles to break even.
For a number reasons I don't find the current EV offerings compelling enough to trade in my old Golf yet. Right now I don't think there's anything I need to do for my use-cases that I could do better in a current EV.
Yep and since 2010 I’ve not purchased one. Current EVs are very expensive and I couldn’t really afford one unless it had pretty decent range and was available used for $20k. Notably there is no place to charge them at my apartment complex.
I’m hoping maybe in a few years a 2023 Ioniq 5 will be affordable enough, but we will see.
You definitely won't risk leaving large sums of money in your bank account...
I suppose it depends on what risk you're concerned about, but if you've got the cashflow to flush money down the lease rabbithole, you probably don't care too much about a couple grand difference in value down the road on your car, beyond academically.
The WSJ just ran an article about how it may make sense for consumers to lease rather than buy, at this particular juncture. This is especially true where the vehicle doesn't qualify for federal tax credits if purchased, but does qualify if leased.
Are you and I reading the same article? There's little about it that implies that one should hold off purchasing an EV for the sake of solid state batteries.
Plenty of reasons right now to hold off buying an EV; upfront or operating costs, lack of at home charging, inability to get access to fast chargers for whatever reason, inability to tow heavy loads to desired destinations, etc. I sincerely doubt solid state batteries is one of the concerns on most people's list.
There is no use in hanging out for solid state batteries in the near future. The volumes will be small, the tech will be bleeding edge, and the batteries will be very expensive. The best fit for these batteries right now is drones.
Indeed! But can we actually purchase solid state batteries with higher Wh/kg for drones (or other uses)? It'd be great to see some such on the market, not just in labs for the automobile-makers.
the fuck up is that they will sell you a full new vehicle instead of a new battery. The same way that you can't put a newer more efficient ice in an old ICE car. It's a shame that cars are not more modular.
To geeks, "production hell" sounds like "they're in the process of mass producing, and they're running into all sorts of problèms, but we'll see something any time soon." Kinda like the 6 months of crunch before a AAA game is released after 3 years of production.
Except, the rest of the article makes it very clear that as far as production grade, mass marketable models of solid state batteries, we're more in the Hollywood version of "production hell", where no one has anything good to show, everybody is making press release, and we're rewriting the script until it barely looks like anything.
But, hey, we'll get more "breakthroughs" headlines any time now, so that's what matters ?