I’ll believe it when I can buy a car or a laptop with a solid state battery.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
170 points (93.8% liked)
Futurology
1801 readers
55 users here now
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I'd be happy to buy a big, bulky, heavy, early version of any of these batteries for my house, as long as it's affordable, high capacity, and has a good cycle life.
It doesn't even have to fit in a car, it can be the size of a shed. Hell, I'll build a shed for it.
Yet this magical product has yet to materialize!
Isn't lead acid better for you then ?
Unfortunately the cycle life of lead-acid is TRASH to the point where in any country except for Canada, LiFePO4 or even Li-Ion are more cost effective due to their far better depth of discharge, cycle life and absolute lifespan.
Even a "deep cycle" cell can only withstand tens of actual deep cycles. To get the rated 200 cycles, you can only discharge to 80%, which makes your 10kWh bank effectively a 2kWh bank. Suddenly it doesn't look cheap anymore, especially when you're lucky to get 2 years out of it micro-cycling. Lead acid is only good for rare emergency deep discharges i.e. UPS usage and it's even questionable there now due to time degradation putting a short limit on its lifespan.
Here in Canada we can't get lithium in any form other than overpriced packs, so I do have a dying lead-acid bank that I'm hoping to limp out until we get better chemistries. It's basically a big capacitor at this point. I compensate by dumping surplus solar power into my boiler or air conditioner depending on the season, and shedding all but essential loads during outages.
Would be really cool to have good, affordable batteries to store self produced solar.
Some people might scoff at the 2027/28 timeline, but I doubt this is vaporware. Toyota is the world's biggest car maker, so their claims have some credibility.
Toyota's breakthrough is with mass-producing these types of batteries, they still face challenges in real world use - "Problems include the extreme sensitivity of the batteries to moisture and oxygen, as well as the mechanical pressure needed to hold them together to prevent the formation of dendrites, the metal filaments that can cause short circuits."
It's not vaporware, it's anti-EV FUD.
Don't buy one of those EVs, we're going to have much better EVs really soon now and you'll be stuck with something inferior. Same with their talk about hydrogen: EVs are just a fad, hydrogen is the future! ... and it'll be viable real soon now, so stick with gasoline until then!
Toyota is constantly in the news about battery advancements or hydrogen because it's defensive FUD to protect their fossil fuel vehicle sales.
Yeah this type of news makes people think current EVs are not enough and need to stick with gas. The realistic approach would be to be relying on consistent charging network that people can plug into for long periods of time and there needs to be more than two chargers per location. Yet right now people don't realize the necessary infrastructure upgrades to make our live more green and viable.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
The size of the company making the claim has no correlation to the veracity of the claim.
BP, Exxon, Shell spent decades claiming global warming wasn't real.
Philip Morris & British American Tobacco spent decades telling us smoking didnt cause cancer.
All of whom are or were as large as Toyota.
Look at their track record and judge their words against their actions.
Toyota has spent considerable sums over many years campaigning against Electric Vehicles.
https://electrek.co/2021/09/22/toyota-facing-boycotts-over-fight-slow-electric-vehicle-progress/
So should you believe a company that says it's about to table the next huge EV breakthrough when it fouht tooth and nail to slow that transition ?
Your choice, but I won't until I see something more substantial than press releases
Also look at thier pathetic EV offerings at the moment: they're obviously still in the "build compliance EVs until the hydrogen ones are ready" mindset: https://youtu.be/yOeDJ7s_LCc
They'd be better off if they just took an off the shelf battery pack and put it in the muria instead of a hydrogen fuel cell...
I don't think it's vaporware, but they keep pushing the timeline. Years ago there was advancements and we were going to see it in 2026. Now it's 2027/28. In 26 it'll be 29/30
They'll get there eventually, the tech is real, it's just super new tech at scale is hard.
I don't think time affects a companies ability to reinvent physics. At the end of the day you are limited by the laws of nature
I doubt they're using pressure to prevent the dendrites. Honda figured out a while back to separate the parts in some sort of polyplastic mix of some sort in order to prevent the formation. I bet toyota is also going more that route.
Assuming efficiency of ~4 miles per kWh (on the high end of current EV efficiency), that's a 200kWh battery. charging that in 10 minutes would require 1.2MW's of power, enough to power about 50-100 homes simultaneously. Now imagine a handful of vehicles charging simultaneously, consuming as much power as a small city.
Imagine putting your tongue on the charging plug
Spread it over enough people and it's the same energy. For one person it's a much shorter charge. Over a population with random charging times it's the same consumption off the grid. The problem then becomes a distribution issue, not a production issue.
Likely these kind of chargers will be expensive and at supercharge stations. Homes will use lower over longer.periods as it's rare you want to pop home for 10 minutes needing a full charge.
This is a big step forward, no matter how you look at it.
It might be also useful for excess storage when we have wind and solar energy that the grid doesnt need. Being able to do so rapidly will mean a smaller array of batteries required for grod storage.
It's a big step forward IF it enters production.
As thevenin links elsewhere in the thread they've been promising this is "any day now" since 2010
I'm not sure people are going to be interested in paying for megawatt-capable chargers, anyway. There's a couple of sites near me that have old 50 kW chargers and new 250 kW chargers, and have higher prices on the 250s. I expect that sort of thing to continue - providers are going to want to cover their costs and higher powered chargers are more expensive to buy and operate.
Assuming efficiency of ~4 miles per kWh (on the high end of current EV efficiency)
Why should we assume this?
It's a fairly achievable efficiency.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm getting close to 8m/kwh on the high-end. Realistically, I'm ranging between 3.6 to 5 m/kwh. But when I drove for Uber, I did 200 miles using only 34.1 kwh, I drove slow, and it was mostly city driving. So I could only need 137 kwh for 800 miles. Still prohibitively unrealistic to charge in 10 minutes. It's about 1.4 MWatts to charge from empty for 10 minutes.
the charge power needed for the 200KWH is not 1.2 MWatts for 10 minutes, it's 2MWatts. Mostly because you can only charge fast at lower percentage.
load more comments
(4 replies)
I wouldn't want and keep burning gas till then though. With new manufacturing processes like this, delays are common, and it'll likely be pricey at first. I'm excited, but don't use this as an excuse to keep burning gas.
Look at Toyota's lobbying history. It's a load. They push the hardest against EV mandates.
Nice. I hope they do the same for phones.
I, too, eagerly await the release of phones with a 1200km range.
Transformers! Robots in...phones
It's just a matter of throwing it hard enough.
I wouldn't mind charging my phone only once every few days
Toyota's been claiming solid state batteries are just around the corner for 13 years.
- 2010: Toyota unveils prototype LiCO2 solid state cell. Predicts use in hybrids.
- 2012: Toyota unveils prototype Li10GeP2S12 solid state cell. Predicts mass production of 1000-km EVs in 2015-2020.
- 2014: Toyota claims to have achieved 400Wh/L in solid state prototype cells. They adjust range estimates to 500 km.
- 2017: Toyota predicts commercialization 2020-2025.
- 2019: Toyota predicts it will have functioning solid state EV prototypes by the Olympics.
- 2020: Toyota claims it already has a mostly-functioning prototype.
- 2021: Toyota's solid state EV is a no-show for the Olympics.
- 2022: Toyota claims solid state hybrids will be commercialized by 2025.
- 2023: Toyota claims it will have solid state batteries commercialized by 2027-2028. They still claim 1000-km range, but with the qualifier that the BZ4X is understood to have 500 km range today instead of the 300 km measured by 3rd parties. So they are effectively sticking to their 2014 range prediction.
Toyota may well produce a solid state battery, but they've moved the goalposts enough times that it would be foolish to take them at face value now.
Toyota last week announced a partnership with energy group Idemitsu Kosan to jointly develop and produce a solid-state battery material called sulphide solid electrolyte, which the companies said was most promising in addressing the durability issue.
I won't put too much hope considering so mucn time they've wasted ignoring the EV market. However, given that they are having a partnership with Idemitsu Kosan, they might be up to something.
People keep saying that but they've been using batteries to make wheels spin longer than any major manufacturers. The Prius came out in 1997!
The original Prius had been eligible for antique plates for like 6 years :)
Someone should do that
Almost is a big word
How big will the chargers have to be to push that much energy that fast?
you could understand it as: the technology has the capacity to receive power that fast without breaking or catching fire
They don't need to be big.
The physics of electrical conduction mean that you can't cram thousands of watts of power down any given wire without issue. This is why appliance cords are thicker than phone charging cords.
Pushing enough electrons to drive a car a thousand km through a wire in under 10 minutes is going to take a THICCC cable.
That's not completely accurate. The limiting factor is the resistive heating of the cable, relative to the cable's ability to shed that heat. If heat can't leave the cable faster than it is being added, it will eventually melt or burn through the insulation.
If you wrap the cable strands around a cooling tube, you can use water, oil, or a refrigerant to carry away the heat and push a lot more power through a similar sized cable.
Large underground transmission lines have used such methods.
It may be that the charging station will need to actively cool its cables , and the vehicle's air conditioning system might need a second evaporator coil to actively cool the battery and charging circuitry. But it's certainly possible to deliver that amount of power in that short a time frame, without having to resort to "THICCC" cables.
A cable with integrated cooling pipes would be pretty THICC
Probably about as THICC as the fuel hose at a gas pump.
The cables that power trams and electric buses aren't that thick.
Not to mention some serious electronics...
just three to five years guys!
view more: next ›