US Bets on Faster-Charging Battery in Race To Catch Energy Rivals (wsj.com) 38
The U.S. is far behind its global rivals in the race for energy supremacy in a low-carbon world. To catch up, it is pinning its hopes on companies such as Ion Storage Systems, a next-generation battery company started in a University of Maryland chemistry lab with a $574,275 federal grant. WSJ: At a new factory outside of Washington, D.C., Ion Storage will be among the first companies in the U.S. to produce a new kind of faster-charging, longer-lasting battery. The company's batteries also don't catch fire; combustibility is a problem that has bedeviled the industry's batteries for years. The U.S. government and private investors have poured cash into battery startups hoping to catch up to the Chinese, Japanese and South Korean companies that dominate battery manufacturing. The goal is to leapfrog their rivals with better technology.
There is an urgency for U.S. battery makers to get products to market because big customers such as auto makers are lining up long-term suppliers. If there are no U.S. options, the buyers will go abroad. "This is our last chance to get it right" in the U.S., said Ricky Hanna, Ion Storage's chief executive and the former executive director of battery operations at Apple. [...] The company is one of several startups focusing on solid-state lithium-ion batteries. These batteries differ from most lithium-ion batteries today because the electrolyte that conducts a charge between cathode and anode is solid, rather than a flammable liquid. That allows faster charging, less risk of fire and longer battery life. Ion Storage scientists demonstrate their batteries' durability by cutting them open with scissors or putting them before an open flame.
There is an urgency for U.S. battery makers to get products to market because big customers such as auto makers are lining up long-term suppliers. If there are no U.S. options, the buyers will go abroad. "This is our last chance to get it right" in the U.S., said Ricky Hanna, Ion Storage's chief executive and the former executive director of battery operations at Apple. [...] The company is one of several startups focusing on solid-state lithium-ion batteries. These batteries differ from most lithium-ion batteries today because the electrolyte that conducts a charge between cathode and anode is solid, rather than a flammable liquid. That allows faster charging, less risk of fire and longer battery life. Ion Storage scientists demonstrate their batteries' durability by cutting them open with scissors or putting them before an open flame.
Low what? (Score:2)
The U.S. is far behind its global rivals in the race for energy supremacy in a low-carbon world
What low-carbon world?
No country on Earth can be said to be low-carbon. Some mostly rich countries are slightly less carbon-obscene at best...
Efficiency? (Score:2)
The best batteries now are 90% efficient in storing power. If that remains true and you increase the charging rate dramatically then I would expect that these should get dramatically hotter than a normal battery even if they don't catch fire.
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Natural Gas has a peak efficiency at around 80%, Coal has around 45%. These power sources are prone to massive fires (often much worse than battery fires) because fire is needed as part of the process.
Engineers are rather smart in the areas of their specialties, issues of heat from fast charging, just seems like an engineering issue that just needs to be factored in the design than a reason why it won't work. Battery technology is more expansive than just the Battery Technology in you phone, which is des
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(but I still question Star Trek Energy, as they have the power to propel a ship the size of a city, faster than light, however when they need more energy, cutting life support seems to be the best way to get a real amount of energy, where I would think that would very low)
The easy out for the writers might be how much power the inertial dampeners and artificial gravity (same systems?) consume. I would think those would fall under "life support".
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Not only that, but in those days, the people pulling/pushing the doors were also required to make the "swoosh" sound themselves.
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No we don't live in a Star Trek world, where energy is nearly 100% efficient with cold Matter and Anti-Matter energy generation. (but I still question Star Trek Energy, as they have the power to propel a ship the size of a city, faster than light, however when they need more energy, cutting life support seems to be the best way to get a real amount of energy, where I would think that would very low)
So, what really got me in Star Trek (mostly after TOS) is that, in their massive - and extremely roomy - starship, weighing 4.5 million tons and with something like 2.47 million cubic meters of habitable space it somehow gets cold and hard to breathe after just a few hours of life support being off with only about 1000 people on board. The mass is canon, but the habitable space are estimated based on canon dimensions and deck plans. Still, that would be about a fifth of an acre with about 2,470 cubic meters
Re: Efficiency? (Score:2)
None of these are as bad as that show the 100 where the artists went out of their way to make a spaceship with a big spinning wheel to simulate gravity, only the crew areas were in the middle where there would be no simulated gravity, but they stuck to the ground anyways.
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That's always a fun one. Also pretty common is for a space station to be depicted with a rotating wheel for gravity, but for down to be in the wrong direction in interior scenes.
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Sorry, that was a bit of a rant, but that sort of thing has always bothered me. It seems to get worse and worse over time. Anyway, in short, minus the rant, just wanted to say that you're exactly right, not every potential issue with a technology is a showstopper, it's often just something to work around.
When I watch SciFi I mostly turn off reasoning about physics and focus on social interactions, or visual effects. Rarely movies get every science aspect right. One could argue that science-perfect movie would be boring one. Just like science perfect shooters would be boring games (single shot in the leg and you are out).
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When I watch SciFi I mostly turn off reasoning about physics and focus on social interactions, or visual effects. Rarely movies get every science aspect right. One could argue that science-perfect movie would be boring one. Just like science perfect shooters would be boring games (single shot in the leg and you are out).
Willing suspension of disbelief. Sure, I do that about certain aspects of science fiction. For example, the FTL paradox is a pretty big one. It's easy enough because it's an unresolved question. Superman can fly? No problem with that. However, if I'm watching a Superman show, cartoon, whatever and Perry White gets out from behind his desk and grabs his briefcase and flies out the window to head home and no-one bats an eye or provides any explanation, then that dings my suspension of disbelief. Basically, fo
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The best batteries now are 90% efficient in storing power. If that remains true and you increase the charging rate dramatically then I would expect that these should get dramatically hotter than a normal battery even if they don't catch fire.
Ok, but do the math on that. The typical EV battery has 2 to 3 gasoline gallon equivalents of energy. That's enough to keep an ICE going for 40 to 60 minutes of highway driving. In an ICE, the majority of that energy ends up as heat that has to be dissipated. Let's say 70%. So, basically the entirety of the car battery contains as much energy as an ICE will bleed off as heat in 57 to 86 minutes of highway driving. 10% of that would be equivalent to 5:42 minutes to 8:36 minutes of highway driving. So as long
okay some alternative estimates (Score:2)
Okay I like your reasoning but here's another envelope calculation. it takes about 30KW to push a honda civic at highway speed. So if I have a 10 hour range in a battery and I want to charge it in 6 minutes then it requires a 3 megawatt connection. That's pretty impressive to think about a consumer connecting that to theit car safely or how much a filling station would consume with a lot of cars present. But ignoring that, if the battery is 10% inefficient in charging that then there is 300KW of heat be
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it takes about 30KW to push a honda civic at highway speed. So if I have a 10 hour range in a battery and I want to charge it in 6 minutes then it requires a 3 megawatt connection.
A 10 hour range at highway speed would be what? 700 mile range? That's not typical of the vast majority of vehicles. Also, for the typical EV you're looking at more like 18 kW. Not quite half what you're suggesting, but less. If we look at actual battery sizes of typical EVs, they're more around 85 kWh. To charge that in 6 minutes would be about 850 kW. That's a lot, but less than you're suggesting. There are 250 kW superchargers, so that would only be a little more than 3 of those. Sure, you might have hig
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An electric Civic would not have a 300kWh battery. Even 100kWh is pretty high-end, you only see those numbers in very expensive cars.
Also, if you're using a proper charger you're not losing that much to waste heat. It's somewhat inefficient to charge with household AC power because the car has to convert it into DC and a different voltage for the batteries. High-voltage DC chargers are much more efficient, e.g. Tesla's superchargers report 99% efficiency.
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The best batteries now are 90% efficient in storing power. If that remains true and you increase the charging rate dramatically then I would expect that these should get dramatically hotter than a normal battery even if they don't catch fire.
Heat generated depends on the internal resistance of the battery, nothing more.
If you halve the resistance, you halve the heat. It's Ohm's law.
If you lower the resistance enough and you can charge one in a nanosecond with no heat at all.
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The U.S. is far behind its global rivals in the race for energy supremacy in a low-carbon world
The one that's coming. The one that has to come. No choice.
ie. The one the USA ought to be preparing for, but is dragging it's feet over thanks to people like you.
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Oh no no. You misunderstand me. I despise the US' attitude towards climate change issues with a passion. But the truth is, while the US looks really bad and doesn't really seem to care about looking bad, at least they're honest about not doing jack shit about it - unlike most other countries that talk a lot and do little.
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I have nothing against moving towards renewable energy sources, but I don't think it wise to cut off fossil fuel exploration and processing TILL we are fully ready to switch.
I think we're
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The one that every major economy in the world understands should be the future one, but nobody as of yet has been willing to pay to make happen.
People don't like to spend money to create a better future, but they'll spend unlimited money to prevent things from *changing*. What we need some kind of dramatic event to happen that will convince at least one major industrial power that fossil fuel dependence is a *national security* problem...
top-down (Score:1)
All the power plants that take awhile to start up and/or shut down put a stress on electric systems and end up being primary "base load" generators competing with "green base load" like solar panels and windmills. If such a plant had a battery that could soak up the full power generated during a shutdown, and could then deliver that power during a st
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Well keep in mind this is Science news on a general media news source.
News sources relay information so someone with an 8th grade level education will understand it.
The reason for this is rather simple. After 8th grade, we begin to focus our education towards our own interests and abilities, as we now have electives to take for our education which we can pick from a limited list. Then when you get to Undergrad your focus becomes more narrow, Grad even narrower (as in grad school you no longer have any (or
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The electrical busses look more like plumbing than wiring as it has to be water cooled to keep them from melting under the current.
Water? Not Oil? I know they use mineral oil in those big green neighborhood transformers, and the pole top ones, I would be surprised if that wasn't also continued over to something like that.
Example big green:
https://www.coloradocountrylif... [coloradocountrylife.coop]
with a $574,275 federal grant (Score:3)
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well there is 500k gone. Most companies start with a product.
Even if we take your premise as universally true (and assume that the product they start with sprang forth out of nowhere with no initial investment from anywhere to develop it), then what? They just sell that same product forever and go out of business when demand fades and their competitors have newer, better products? Or do they do research and development to improve their existing products and produce new ones? This is just an R&D investment where the payback on success, rather than being company sh
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"other investors such as venture capitalists" have skin in the game
They have skin in the game, but they tend to work on a principle of weathering a large number of failures for every success. They also do a lot to protect their position. Venture capitalists are well known for doling out less money than is actually required to develop the product/business and using later rounds to acquire a bigger and bigger stake in the company, setting things up to eventually oust the founders. It's not as if the government does not have skin in the game when giving out grants. There's on
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"government funding" heavy on handouts! light on the funding!
I don't even know what you're trying to say here.
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Well, yes, but a successful company doesn't have to do what "most companies" do. This is particularly true in the most high tech fields where companies like Moderna or iRobot are created to commercialize recent scientific advances. Investors understand these companies are long shot bets that will *probably* burn through their capital long before they have a product they can take to market.
The government picking winners is no different from what a VC firm does, and like a VC firm it doesn't expect to hav
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More info about the battery (Score:2)
Here's a site with some additional info about Ion Storage;
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/tech... [energy.gov]
They claim to have a viable battery expected to "outperform traditional Li-ion with no tradeoffs in safety or operating range. Based on internal and third party analyses, our cells will be cost competitive in our early markets once we reach a multi-MWh/yr production scale and drop below $100/kWh at GWh/yr scale."
They raised about $30 million in VC funding this year.
Behind in battery tech? (Score:3)
Since when is the US behind in battery tech? The US is behind in battery manufacture, because they don't manufacture much at all these days. Most of the new battery advances we read about come from large universities or startups, many of which are in the US.
That's like saying the US is behind in Microprocessor development, despite AMD/INTEL/Apple/etc. being located there, but many of their most advanced processors are manufactured elsewhere.
Is SK the best in the world at microprocessor design just because they manufacture them? Even though their most advanced nodes are 100% reliant on equipment from ASML (Netherlands) and are used to build processor designs from the (US/UK)?
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The US is behind in battery manufacture, because they don't manufacture much at all these days.
Oh really? And that's because you declare it?
Top 10 Manufacturing Countries in the World
China – 28.7% Global Manufacturing Output
United States – 16.8% Global Manufacturing Output
Japan – 7.5% Global Manufacturing Output
Germany – 5.3% Global Manufacturing Output
India – 3.1% Global Manufacturing Output
South Korea – 3% Global Manufacturing Output
Italy – 2.1% Global Manufacturing Output
France – 1.9% Global Manufacturing Output
United Kingdom – 1.
Wait! 500k what is that going to (Score:2)
Article pretends one battery type (Score:2)
At a recent battery storage conference at the UW, there were presentations on 22 different battery technologies, not including other energy storage such as flywheels, water up an incline, compressed air, and salts.
This is only one of many potential battery storage technologies. Not "bet the farm on one" battery tech, just one of many.