Western Australia, the Saudi Arabia of lithium, currently producing half the world's lithium and more coming on line.
Albermarle are building a LiOH plant in WA that will add 33% capacity to current world production on it's own, plus the Tianqi plant adding maybe 15% is half finished construction right now.
We are the also the Saudi Arabia of gas/LNG, plus as a state produce a metric fuckton of the worlds gold and iron ore, but a pity our state and federal governments practically give all our minerals away for trivial royalties and tax the sheeple to the hilt on personal tax...
(plus we have a homeless and public mental health problems due to "lack of funding"" in one of the richest mineral states in the world with only 2.6 million people in an area almost size of Western Europe).
* We absolutely squandered the previous boom, once the tap was turned off it almost felt like it hadn't happened at all, outside of new developments in the CBD.
* Created an absolutely venomous environment for the workforce. I know dozens of FIFO workers or industrial workers servicing the industry, and I can only think of a few that don't suffer from either substance abuse problems, crippling debt despite massive salaries, depression or other mental health issues, or chronic physical injuries they can't get comp for, not to mention the great strain it puts on their family, and toxic workplaces (Not everywhere, but its not uncommon)
* We've let country towns supporting the industry wither on the vine. If you take Kalgoorlie for an example; Quite a lot of money is being spent in town, and if you take a drive over to the industrial estate most people will tell you that business is booming. The same people have been saying the town is just about ready to pick back up for a couple of years now, but it hasn't, and I don't believe it will. The industrial activity just isn't bleeding over into the town like it used to. The money washes straight back to Perth, back east, and overseas. Half the storefronts in the main drag are closed, and prime showrooms sit empty. The industry has raised the cost of travel to Kal so high that tourism is basically non-existent, and people who used to maintain two households in Perth and Kal are now having to chose one or the other, invariably leaving Kal for Perth
I honestly don't have the expertise to offer a solution to any of these, my gut says collecting fair royalties and using the money to fund services would be a start, but I don't have the background to really make that argument. But what I do know is, for the average punter on the street, it hasn't amounted to much, and one day it'll be gone. I look around sometimes and imagine where we'd be if the prices dropped and the sector closed up shop, and it's a pretty grim picture.
Lithium is vastly abundant and is not really the problem. If all else fails you can extract it by distilling sea water. The problem is Cobalt which is essential for working LiIon batteries and is required in equally vast quantities.
I find it astonishing how much iron ore is shipped from Western Aus to China, it would be far more ecologically sounds to smelt it there, same is true with most of the things dug out of the ground. I suppose in the scheme of things this is the thin end of the wedge but shipping unrefined iron ore at a 30% weight premium is desirable so that China has a steel industry without depleting their own reserves of Iron ore.
I think Australia benefits from royalties AND taxes. The best way is taxes and a tough audit. In addition, the wages paid to the employees are also taxed, so add it all up and Australians do very well on their minerals.
Royalties are bad because they flow constantly and when prices fall and the mine makes zero taxable profits, they then close the mine until the price goes up. With non royalty, just the taxes, production can carry on and wages get paid. Wages BTW, are far more than any royalty or taxes.
Hostility to migration might be one of the reason. I have heard story but nothing concrete. Mining is quite difficult industry and without secondary or ternary industries, you can not keep most of the profits to yourself. So perpetual investment needed and people needed to execute that investment. Where is people to do the work coming from ?
Is this going to be the next plastic that's going to destroy & pollute nature? Maybe authorities should invest into developing a good refund solution sooner than later. I already see some destroyed batteries on streets sometimes, and I wonder what they will do to our environment.
TIL that WA is the Saudi Arabia of lithium. And I even live here! And yes: I feel like we absolutely missed a once-in-a-century opportunity by not establishing a sizable sovereign wealth fund off mining royalties.
Australia isn’t communist. If you want to own the land that the minerals come from, buy some shares.
Just be aware that the mining industry isn’t unusually profitable, in fact it is expensive and risky, and owning (part-of) a gold mine isn’t a ticket to unlimited wealth.
There are plenty of applications where Li-ion is not the optimal solution. Li-ion is not the defacto standard for a myriad of reasons in various sectors. Certain massive installations have requirements that li-ion cannot work for. For consumer electronics, maybe li-ion is the best thing we have but for other applications there are breakthroughs made on yearly basis.
Enerpoly for instance have prototyped Zinc-Manganese batteries that have great life-cycle, are rechargeable and have great power output for less than 40euro/KWh. In the next few years you will see more and more solutions targeting specific industries and needs. Li-ion is not a silver bullet as its production cost and lifetime is not the greatest of all the solutions offered.
Full Disclosure: I know the CEO of the company and this is not an ad or anything like that. I just want people to pay more attention to upcoming improvements in the sector.
Not to be the negative-Nancy in the room but there's a massive gap between prototype and commercially viable at a chemical level and then another between chemically stable and commercially producible. I wish them the best, but there a probably at least a dozen similar companies with roughly similar claims with different underlying chemistries (flow batteries, etc.) and many more that haven't panned out for one reason or another.
People are most definitely trying to replace Li-ion but its not an easy thing to do in practice, even if simple enough on paper.
This. For example, for people with old fashioned ICE cars like me, Li-ion isn't going to replace my lead acid battery for SLI (starting, lights and ignition) any time soon in -30 degrees C temperatures ;)
I also wanted to make this note about the application matters. Lithium ion are great, especially for electronics and EVs. They are pretty good for grid scale, but we need other technologies there. Currently the largest source of storage on the grid is pumped hydro (about 95% of storage on the grid) and it will continue to be the largest source of storage for a long time.
>The raw materials that we use are nearly 17 times lower cost than materials used in lithium-ion
which suggests they could end up cheaper than Li Ion when production scales up. Nant who claim $100/kWh say:
>We feel that $100/KWh is just the tipping point, as our fundamental raw material cost of zinc is just $2-$3/KWh. Today, commercially available zinc batteries are already below $30/KWh. Long term, we see a clear path to a very low-cost battery option that would be disruptive to the entire energy industry.
I guess the 30/KWh are non rechargeable ones. Enerpoly say 40euro/KWh but I've a feeling that's projected rather than realised.
Hey Tim, you linked to my Enerpoly post from earlier.
Enerpoly actually have a working massively rechargeable prototype produced for way less than 40. We´ll have to wait and see the final cost at scale but the whole thing certainly looks promising!
1. The price of Lithium will drop by half in the next five years: "prices, which averaged $1,160 per kilowatt hour in 2010, reached $176 per kWh last year and could drop below $100 in 2024".
2. Tweaks to the formulation "could boost the energy storage of a lithium-ion battery by 20 percent or more".
3. Supply is going to increase: "Capacity now stands at 302.2 gigawatt-hours, and plants with another 603.8 GWh are planned to open within the next five years."
So there is something better coming: in a few years we will have vastly more batteries, which worker better, and cost much less. It's just that they'll be an evolution of lithium-ion rather than a brand new technology.
I went to article hoping to read some story like researchers have spend X million hours looking at Y thousand chemicals and nothing better is found. Instead the article sounds like directly published by lithion-ion lobby essentially saying that there is too much legacy now with us and nothing new would be accepted so don't even try. Right. If someone found battery that produces 10X more kWh in 10X less form factor, I'm sure this can easily be changed.
Here's an interesting argument WHY you still might choose lithium ion (or whatever you use for automotive storage) for stationary storage instead of some other technology.
Total electricity generation in 2012 was ~21k TWh. Say you need ~8 hours of battery storage daily (i.e. 1/3 of daily use). That works out to about 19k GWh of battery storage, assuming you can recharge daily. For reference, Tesla's Gigafactory produces ~35GWh of batteries per year currently.
Total oil consumption for road transport was ~2k Mtoe in 2012. That works out to 23k TWh of energy. Assume you only need half of that when you go from a heat engine to an electric motor. Now you've got 11.5k TWh of total use. Now assume that you recharge your vehicle nightly. The world would need ~32k GWh of batteries to hold all of the energy currently used for road-going vehicles (given the above assumptions).
The market for whatever battery technology that works for automobiles is the same order of magnitude as the market for grid-scale storage. If you're a battery maker, you can increase your total addressable market by selling into both automotive and grid-attached storage.
The good thing is we don’t really need anything better than lithium ion for most applications (aerospace excluded). Solid state electrolyte lithium ion will get us to 400Wh/kg, which is more than enough for cheap cars with 400+ mile range.
> The good thing is we don’t really need anything better than lithium ion for most applications (aerospace excluded).
I highly doubt that you can achieve decent flight times on battery powered plane. The extra battery weight is managed by increasing wing size which in turn translates to higher drag. Higher drag is compensated by more power meaning bigger batteries. It's an engineering nightmare.
Sure the current ~250Wh/Kg LiIon battery tech gets many jobs done that could not be done with earlier battery technologies.
That is not the same thing as saying that further improving the technology would accomplish nothing (as seems to be implied).
Gasoline is about 10X that at 2500Wh/Kg (albeit also requires carrying around fuel storage tank(s) & a combustion engine, which is only ~40% efficient on a good day).
Getting battery technology up to nearly those energy densities would completely revolutionize everything.
Current phones would have 1-2 weeks of battery life, or you could power a pocket workstation (if you could cool it). Ordinary multirotor drones would fly for hours instead of 15-30min. Electric airplanes would be quieter and more efficient.... the possibilities are nearly endless.
Solid state has serious issues with power density and IR heating, the next battery chemistry for cars isn't going to be solid state Li-ion.
Magnesium-Air or Zinc-Air are interesting for automotive applications, since they have high specific capacity without sacrificing too much on power. Li-Sulfur also has potential, but it currently suffers from the same problems as Solid State Li.
That doesn't include the weight of the liquid cooling system which is substantial and which might even INCREASE in weight as the cell energy density increases.
I think the average BEEFY desktop PC uses 300 to 600 W in practice (idle or full load). Let's call it 400 W.
1 kg is 2 lbs.
Also, an iPhone 5 is 0.112 kg.
If 400 Wh/kg is the best lithium will take us, then we'll never have iPhone 5-sized or weighted devices capable of the same power as a desktop PC, and if we did they'd need to have a battery weighing 1 kg to be capable of it for even one hour. So the mobile and desktop ecosystems will be forever apart. That's sad.
Also, what kind of mileage does 400 Wh/kg get you for artificial hearts? (It may be good; I don't know; but, whatever it is, you'd probably like it to be better if you had one.)
I predict this title will not age well. The progress is accelerating. Material science is getting revolutionized by cheap computation and large-scale simulations.
I think maybe you missed the point of the article, which is the scientific breakthroughs alone aren't enough. Even if you create a battery technology that is, on paper, cheaper and better performing than li-ion, the advantages inferred by incumbency mean the odds are stacked against the newcomer.
I do think li-ion will be disrupted eventually, but it will be more like the process of solid-state drives replacing hard-disk drives. Only a combination of diminishing returns on incremental improvement of li-ion tech, and a competitor technology that is fundamentally superior, battle-tested in high-performance niche applications, and mostly a drop-in replacement, will create the conditions necessary for an industry switch. And even then the process will likely take many years to complete.
Yeah. Agreed. Also, new technologies tend to come along and disrupt things from completely outside the scope of the people working within the industry.
The problem isn't that we don't know how to make more powerful batteries right now, the problem is safety. The more powerful your battery, generally the more dangerous/flammable/explosive it is when it fails. The only reason we can even use lithium ion batteries as much as we do is their exceedingly low failure rate. So not only does any new and better batteries need to hold more power, they need to be more stable and have more graceful failure modes.
We may have to wait for utility scale storage using Li-ion to become big, to spur investment for alternative utility scale storage which could beat Li-ion cost at scale.
I remember hearing about a sugar powered fuel cell battery that was being developed a few years ago. Supposedly would be able to bring energy density up close to hydrocarbon fuels. I guess it didn't go anywhere, though, as there doesn't seem to be any news around it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_battery
It is useful to look at what it took for Nickel Cadmium to be replaced. (NiCd used to be the dominant rechargable battery tech which had replaced PbSO4). Nickel metal hydride came in and replaced the "big" negative of cell memory for NiCd (so it took out a big user facing 'gotcha' to the tech.) LiOn replaced the weight of NiMH which was a big user facing gotcha.
The next battery technology will have to be as light as LiON, have similar power densities, and be impervious to catching on fire I think (that is the current 'gotcha' of using LiON batteries today).
Didn't we just see last year that a stabilized sodium-ion battery is partway through productization work[0] and proofs of concept are available? I can't find any mention of this fairly important and rapid work in the article?
Lithium Ion batteries will be cheaper for a while, but once sodium ion batteries can be produced at scale it'll greatly reduce global dependence on very specific regions for high yield lithium mines. The net result will be cheaper batteries.
When could we get a Lithium-Ion Solid Battery or is that a pipe dream? I once read it was used in extreme small quantities, sort of in AAA Battery size for Military purpose, but it was not a well known source of publication. And I could not find other evidence.
While it is important to further drive down the price for EV adoption, the price of battery makes little different to devices I am interested in, such as Phones, Tablet and Notebook. We want higher energy density, and even the optimistic projection we could get only 30% more from better formula in the next 5 years.
Battery is already the taking the largest volume in these devices, Not only do I want my iPhone thinner, ( The current iPhone is thicker, I prefer it to be iPhone 6 ~6.7mm or even iPad Pro 5.8mm thick ) I want it to have more battery. Which means we need to increase the battery density by at leat 50% compared to today to hit a useful battery life improvement while having a thinner design.
Then there is other improvement we want such as rapid charging and higher cycle counts.
Still the most promising I've heard of is Solid Energy Systems. They claimed to be selling batteries to the aerospace field already. In their last presentation it seemed like their challenge is cycle life, but that it's improving. But there's been a while since there's been any news from that company.
If a new battery tech like fluoride batteries has much more capacity but is more expensive because it's not produced at scale yet, a solution is to do exactly what Tesla did in the first place: put it first in expensive high-end cars and gradually work down the value chain. It'd be easy to charge a premium for an electric car with a 1500-mile range.
In terms of electricity, this company is still refining its design, but most energy used in industrial is heat energy and these guys are solving it. https://1414degrees.com.au/
"The annual output of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory, could store three minutes’ worth of
annual U.S. electricity demand. It would require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days’
worth of U.S. electricity demand. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of materials are mined, moved, and processed for
every pound of battery produced."
“It’s not going to handle a day, a week, a month, a season,” said Moniz
I believe that way solar thermal based approach is going to be future; energy stored in form of intrinsic heat of a liquified salt solutions (by the concentrated solar beam), or may be for that matter simply inside heated stones (by solar CSP), and then passing water to convert in steam and run turbines!!
But ya that will be for grid level solution, not the mobile electronics' power source.
[+] [-] airbreather|7 years ago|reply
Albermarle are building a LiOH plant in WA that will add 33% capacity to current world production on it's own, plus the Tianqi plant adding maybe 15% is half finished construction right now.
We are the also the Saudi Arabia of gas/LNG, plus as a state produce a metric fuckton of the worlds gold and iron ore, but a pity our state and federal governments practically give all our minerals away for trivial royalties and tax the sheeple to the hilt on personal tax...
(plus we have a homeless and public mental health problems due to "lack of funding"" in one of the richest mineral states in the world with only 2.6 million people in an area almost size of Western Europe).
[+] [-] RobertoG|7 years ago|reply
"I don't think anyone expected the fund to ever reach $1 trillion when the first transfer of oil revenue was made in May 1996."
From: https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/19/investing/norway-pension-fu...
[+] [-] mwill|7 years ago|reply
* We absolutely squandered the previous boom, once the tap was turned off it almost felt like it hadn't happened at all, outside of new developments in the CBD.
* Created an absolutely venomous environment for the workforce. I know dozens of FIFO workers or industrial workers servicing the industry, and I can only think of a few that don't suffer from either substance abuse problems, crippling debt despite massive salaries, depression or other mental health issues, or chronic physical injuries they can't get comp for, not to mention the great strain it puts on their family, and toxic workplaces (Not everywhere, but its not uncommon)
* We've let country towns supporting the industry wither on the vine. If you take Kalgoorlie for an example; Quite a lot of money is being spent in town, and if you take a drive over to the industrial estate most people will tell you that business is booming. The same people have been saying the town is just about ready to pick back up for a couple of years now, but it hasn't, and I don't believe it will. The industrial activity just isn't bleeding over into the town like it used to. The money washes straight back to Perth, back east, and overseas. Half the storefronts in the main drag are closed, and prime showrooms sit empty. The industry has raised the cost of travel to Kal so high that tourism is basically non-existent, and people who used to maintain two households in Perth and Kal are now having to chose one or the other, invariably leaving Kal for Perth
I honestly don't have the expertise to offer a solution to any of these, my gut says collecting fair royalties and using the money to fund services would be a start, but I don't have the background to really make that argument. But what I do know is, for the average punter on the street, it hasn't amounted to much, and one day it'll be gone. I look around sometimes and imagine where we'd be if the prices dropped and the sector closed up shop, and it's a pretty grim picture.
[+] [-] sprash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aurizon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamgopal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benmarten|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ropable|7 years ago|reply
Entrance to the rabbit hole: http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/minerals/mineral-reso...
[+] [-] techslave|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robdachshund|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mr_toad|7 years ago|reply
Australia isn’t communist. If you want to own the land that the minerals come from, buy some shares.
Just be aware that the mining industry isn’t unusually profitable, in fact it is expensive and risky, and owning (part-of) a gold mine isn’t a ticket to unlimited wealth.
[+] [-] wesammikhail|7 years ago|reply
There are plenty of applications where Li-ion is not the optimal solution. Li-ion is not the defacto standard for a myriad of reasons in various sectors. Certain massive installations have requirements that li-ion cannot work for. For consumer electronics, maybe li-ion is the best thing we have but for other applications there are breakthroughs made on yearly basis.
Enerpoly for instance have prototyped Zinc-Manganese batteries that have great life-cycle, are rechargeable and have great power output for less than 40euro/KWh. In the next few years you will see more and more solutions targeting specific industries and needs. Li-ion is not a silver bullet as its production cost and lifetime is not the greatest of all the solutions offered.
http://enerpoly.com/technology/
Full Disclosure: I know the CEO of the company and this is not an ad or anything like that. I just want people to pay more attention to upcoming improvements in the sector.
[+] [-] thereisnospork|7 years ago|reply
People are most definitely trying to replace Li-ion but its not an easy thing to do in practice, even if simple enough on paper.
[+] [-] indentit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barney54|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oliveshell|7 years ago|reply
(A zinc-manganese chemistry is what most disposable alkaline batteries use.)
[+] [-] HoochieKoo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
>The raw materials that we use are nearly 17 times lower cost than materials used in lithium-ion
which suggests they could end up cheaper than Li Ion when production scales up. Nant who claim $100/kWh say:
>We feel that $100/KWh is just the tipping point, as our fundamental raw material cost of zinc is just $2-$3/KWh. Today, commercially available zinc batteries are already below $30/KWh. Long term, we see a clear path to a very low-cost battery option that would be disruptive to the entire energy industry.
I guess the 30/KWh are non rechargeable ones. Enerpoly say 40euro/KWh but I've a feeling that's projected rather than realised.
[+] [-] wesammikhail|7 years ago|reply
Enerpoly actually have a working massively rechargeable prototype produced for way less than 40. We´ll have to wait and see the final cost at scale but the whole thing certainly looks promising!
[+] [-] spenrose|7 years ago|reply
1. The price of Lithium will drop by half in the next five years: "prices, which averaged $1,160 per kilowatt hour in 2010, reached $176 per kWh last year and could drop below $100 in 2024".
2. Tweaks to the formulation "could boost the energy storage of a lithium-ion battery by 20 percent or more".
3. Supply is going to increase: "Capacity now stands at 302.2 gigawatt-hours, and plants with another 603.8 GWh are planned to open within the next five years."
So there is something better coming: in a few years we will have vastly more batteries, which worker better, and cost much less. It's just that they'll be an evolution of lithium-ion rather than a brand new technology.
[+] [-] Latteland|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torpfactory|7 years ago|reply
Total electricity generation in 2012 was ~21k TWh. Say you need ~8 hours of battery storage daily (i.e. 1/3 of daily use). That works out to about 19k GWh of battery storage, assuming you can recharge daily. For reference, Tesla's Gigafactory produces ~35GWh of batteries per year currently.
Total oil consumption for road transport was ~2k Mtoe in 2012. That works out to 23k TWh of energy. Assume you only need half of that when you go from a heat engine to an electric motor. Now you've got 11.5k TWh of total use. Now assume that you recharge your vehicle nightly. The world would need ~32k GWh of batteries to hold all of the energy currently used for road-going vehicles (given the above assumptions).
The market for whatever battery technology that works for automobiles is the same order of magnitude as the market for grid-scale storage. If you're a battery maker, you can increase your total addressable market by selling into both automotive and grid-attached storage.
[+] [-] aphextron|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danaos|7 years ago|reply
I highly doubt that you can achieve decent flight times on battery powered plane. The extra battery weight is managed by increasing wing size which in turn translates to higher drag. Higher drag is compensated by more power meaning bigger batteries. It's an engineering nightmare.
[+] [-] toss1|7 years ago|reply
That is not the same thing as saying that further improving the technology would accomplish nothing (as seems to be implied).
Gasoline is about 10X that at 2500Wh/Kg (albeit also requires carrying around fuel storage tank(s) & a combustion engine, which is only ~40% efficient on a good day).
Getting battery technology up to nearly those energy densities would completely revolutionize everything.
Current phones would have 1-2 weeks of battery life, or you could power a pocket workstation (if you could cool it). Ordinary multirotor drones would fly for hours instead of 15-30min. Electric airplanes would be quieter and more efficient.... the possibilities are nearly endless.
[+] [-] VygmraMGVl|7 years ago|reply
Magnesium-Air or Zinc-Air are interesting for automotive applications, since they have high specific capacity without sacrificing too much on power. Li-Sulfur also has potential, but it currently suffers from the same problems as Solid State Li.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] systemBuilder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmlnr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shrimp_emoji|7 years ago|reply
1 kg is 2 lbs.
Also, an iPhone 5 is 0.112 kg.
If 400 Wh/kg is the best lithium will take us, then we'll never have iPhone 5-sized or weighted devices capable of the same power as a desktop PC, and if we did they'd need to have a battery weighing 1 kg to be capable of it for even one hour. So the mobile and desktop ecosystems will be forever apart. That's sad.
Also, what kind of mileage does 400 Wh/kg get you for artificial hearts? (It may be good; I don't know; but, whatever it is, you'd probably like it to be better if you had one.)
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stupidcar|7 years ago|reply
I do think li-ion will be disrupted eventually, but it will be more like the process of solid-state drives replacing hard-disk drives. Only a combination of diminishing returns on incremental improvement of li-ion tech, and a competitor technology that is fundamentally superior, battle-tested in high-performance niche applications, and mostly a drop-in replacement, will create the conditions necessary for an industry switch. And even then the process will likely take many years to complete.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d-sc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AngryData|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|7 years ago|reply
https://blog.ted.com/reinventing-the-battery-donald-sadoway-...
We may have to wait for utility scale storage using Li-ion to become big, to spur investment for alternative utility scale storage which could beat Li-ion cost at scale.
[+] [-] travisoneill1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
The next battery technology will have to be as light as LiON, have similar power densities, and be impervious to catching on fire I think (that is the current 'gotcha' of using LiON batteries today).
[+] [-] FabHK|7 years ago|reply
So, probably no useful "flying car" anytime soon.
[+] [-] KirinDave|7 years ago|reply
Lithium Ion batteries will be cheaper for a while, but once sodium ion batteries can be produced at scale it'll greatly reduce global dependence on very specific regions for high yield lithium mines. The net result will be cheaper batteries.
[0]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180912111913.h...
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
While it is important to further drive down the price for EV adoption, the price of battery makes little different to devices I am interested in, such as Phones, Tablet and Notebook. We want higher energy density, and even the optimistic projection we could get only 30% more from better formula in the next 5 years.
Battery is already the taking the largest volume in these devices, Not only do I want my iPhone thinner, ( The current iPhone is thicker, I prefer it to be iPhone 6 ~6.7mm or even iPad Pro 5.8mm thick ) I want it to have more battery. Which means we need to increase the battery density by at leat 50% compared to today to hit a useful battery life improvement while having a thinner design.
Then there is other improvement we want such as rapid charging and higher cycle counts.
[+] [-] audunw|7 years ago|reply
http://www.solidenergysystems.com
[+] [-] DennisP|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Matador79|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vixen99|7 years ago|reply
https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R...
[+] [-] jalajc|7 years ago|reply
I believe that way solar thermal based approach is going to be future; energy stored in form of intrinsic heat of a liquified salt solutions (by the concentrated solar beam), or may be for that matter simply inside heated stones (by solar CSP), and then passing water to convert in steam and run turbines!! But ya that will be for grid level solution, not the mobile electronics' power source.
[+] [-] mrfusion|7 years ago|reply