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Sandy Munro Talks Battery Battles, Calls Solid State “Kiss of Death” for Gas

55 points| 1970-01-01 | 2 years ago |sae.org

138 comments

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[+] aynyc|2 years ago|reply
I think the biggest gain is actually EV in commercial vehicles. Like delivery vans, construction vans and work vans in the bigger cities. Those vans are quieter, NEVER IDLES!!!, less polluting, and don't required 300 miles range (I read average miles driven is 75 miles per day), usually return to shops where they can be charged. Given the right incentive and competitive pricing, I definitely see a huge win there both in global warming and quality of life in neighborhoods.
[+] amalcon|2 years ago|reply
Work vans and cargo vans are two of the best markets here, since work vans spend a lot of time parked at jobsites and cargo vans spend a lot of time parked loading/unloading. Ford has even had some brilliant marketing on their electric transit: it's got an inverter built in, so you can just plug your tools into the van.

Issues are the same as always, though: up-front sticker shock, and even at the too-high up-front prices, they just can't manufacture enough of them to meet demand. That type of incentive can help with the former, but have a limited effect on the latter. This is why some of these new battery technologies are so exciting, even though we all know most of them won't pan out.

[+] rektide|2 years ago|reply
Just to add on, many of these vehicles actually get a lot more daily mileage than a there-and-back commuter. Their effective usage can be much much higher, which makes any efficiency/pollution savings proportionally more prevalent.

People buy long range cars not for commutes but because they want to be able to go on trips. If we can right-size EV's for commercial usage, the up front expense might be lessened even more.

[+] cs702|2 years ago|reply
By all accounts, battery technology sure looks like it's about to hit the fastest-growth portion of the usual "S" adoption curve -- "gradually then suddenly," to paraphrase Hemingway. By implication, demand for fossil fuels sure seems to be at risk of falling, also "gradually then suddenly," in a mirror "Ƨ" curve.
[+] cubefox|2 years ago|reply
Could this lower oil prices, or would cartels like OPEC just reduce oil production to keep the price stable?
[+] seydor|2 years ago|reply
So, brownouts are about to happen?
[+] hcarvalhoalves|2 years ago|reply
This is great and all, but still really stupid if you stop and think a lot of EV use is just replacing ICE use that shouldn’t exist in the first place. A lot of daily commute isn’t necessary, or not necessary by car with public transportation, but the economic incentives aren’t there to build cities for that - need to keep selling cars.
[+] AlotOfReading|2 years ago|reply
Perfect is the enemy of good. Public transit is great in many respects, but realistically the people who are in place to push EV adoption aren't meaningfully involved with public transit and vice versa. It's the collective consumers who influence both sides with their preferences. Planners could induce demand with better, more useful transit systems, but that's not hindered by increased EV adoption.
[+] dv_dt|2 years ago|reply
Whatever percentage of all vehicle use you think will potentially replaced, lets give you a generous 50%. A lot of remaining percentage would still be of benefit to transition from ICE to EV.
[+] martythemaniak|2 years ago|reply
1) The differences between transit and car oriented places aren't as great as you think. Poland has 7% fewer cars, France 20% fewer cars, Germany has 24% fewer cars, etc. Poor countries have much fewer cars, people with money generally like personal vehicles.

2) Public Transit will benefit immensely from car electrification. Batteries for busses will get better because of investments and economies of scale made for car battery manufacturing.

3) Buildings and cultural habits have generations-long duration. Even the shittiest houses last 100 years. Cars last 10-15 years, so the vehicle stock will be renewed many many times faster than memes like "rebuild our cities"

4) Autonomous EVs will likewise also arrive far sooner than "rebuilding cities". Cruise operates 24/7 in SF. Their "Origin" EV will be the basis for surface-level public transit in the future.

[+] moolcool|2 years ago|reply
Solving a part of the problem is better than solving none of it.
[+] epistasis|2 years ago|reply
As somebody who doesn't want to drive as much as I have to, advocates locally and vocally for permitting life with out cars by enhancing bike trails, building housing close to jobs, eliminating parking minimums, and increasing density, it's a slow route.

It seems like small changes in regulations should be easy to accomplish, but it's actually far far harder than inventing entirely new technology and building entire industries around it.

Social change is the hardest change to accomplish, despite it getting the most attention from so many.

[+] prpl|2 years ago|reply
I’m not sure quite certain I understand your viewpoint. It seems like you are hinting at remote work obviating much of the daily commute. The issue I’ve seen with that is that public transport becomes useless since it’s largely oriented towards getting people into metro/city centers - not running errands or entertainment - which becomes the primary reasons you leave the house. While not true in HCOL urban areas - which probably includes much of NYC proper and probably half of SF proper, at most this is especially true in urbanized suburbs in or near those places. Beyond that, it’s generally hopeless.
[+] eastbound|2 years ago|reply
Probably most of European citizen live in 6-story high cities, aka Paris, Barcelona, Lausanne… and 6-story is the optimal density for having a lot of choice of officrs (second floors), a lot of commerce (ground floors), and a lot of housing (the rest). With that, you walk or bike to work while still working for a high pay.
[+] wilg|2 years ago|reply
It’s much less stupid if you think about it as a way to halt global warming and reduce pollution and noise.
[+] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
I tune out opinions like yours because I know they're extremely unlikely to lead to anything real.
[+] zmnd|2 years ago|reply
Now let's just agree on who is going to decide what is stupid and what is not.
[+] numbers_guy|2 years ago|reply
It will be interesting how this develops. Right now EVs are just starting to become affordable. I wonder what would happen, once they reach the second hand market. What about people who live in apartments with only street parking available? Cars are parked bumper to bumper. Will there be a charging dock every 2 meters on every single street?
[+] toomuchtodo|2 years ago|reply
Majority of housing in the US is single family homes. Some jurisdictions have mandated EV charging installs at multi family/apartments. More can. Tesla places superchargers in lots of places at grocery stores (conveniently allowing you to charge while you shop). Walmart is rolling out charging at thousands of stores. Power is everywhere, this is straightforward to solve for.

20% of EV sales in California this year, so far, are EVs. They are the 4th-5th largest economy in the world. Extrapolate accordingly.

My previous comment on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463224

https://electrek.co/2023/04/06/walmart-to-launch-coast-to-co...

> Walmart already has nearly 1,300 EV fast-charging stations through a partnership with Electrify America installed across over 280 US retail locations. The new initiative will promote a coast-to-coast network across thousands of Walmart and Sams Club Stores by 2030, according to the retailer.

> With a Walmart store or club located within 10 miles of roughly 90% of Americans, the EV fast-charging network will help increase access to affordable charging solutions as demand grows.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-07-29/biden-has... (Biden Has a $5 Billion Plan to Eliminate America's EV Charging Deserts)

https://supercharge.info/map

https://www.plugshare.com/

(scope to your location on above maps)

[+] mabbo|2 years ago|reply
We should be careful about "but-what-about"s.

There will be edge cases not covered. Fortunately, society and the economy are very good at adjusting to them. Buildings that don't offer charging stations will eventually be unable to find tenants unless they do something about it. They will find options.

[+] yamtaddle|2 years ago|reply
> Right now EVs are just starting to become affordable.

We're lucky ("lucky") that the bar for affordable changed a whole bunch in the last few years. Used ICE cars getting wildly more expensive has made EVs seem like a less-terrible deal.

[+] fallingknife|2 years ago|reply
Norway hit 80% EV market penetration in 2022. The problem is solvable.
[+] wilg|2 years ago|reply
I think the incentives are well-structured for both public utilities and private industry to offer solutions for EV charging for apartment dwellers. A power connection with app-based billing (or something) on most streets seems perfectly doable. The electricity is probably already right there, relatively simple equipment, relatively easy to manage charging times and speeds for grid stability. I'm excited to see these solutions roll out, but I don't think it's going to be a big hurdle at all.
[+] nicoburns|2 years ago|reply
> Will there be a charging dock every 2 meters on every single street?

This exists on my street (residential neighbourhood in London) right now! Some of them are coming out of lampposts, others sprout from the floor. It's just a pilot scheme, so this doesn't exist in many places in the UK yet, but it seems to work pretty well. And the works to put them in didn't take very long.

[+] mikewarot|2 years ago|reply
So, the question I always have, is, can the grid even support this... surprisingly the answer is yes, but just barely:

"The record high level of finished motor gasoline consumption was about 392 million gallons per day in 2018."[1]

"Petroleum liquids–12.69 kWh/gallon"[2]

So, that's 12.96 * 392 Million kWh/day --> 5.08 Billion kWh/day

Smoothed out to the same rate every hour --> 211 Million kW

"At the end of 2021, the United States had 1,143,757 MW—or about 1.14 billion kW—of total utility-scale electricity generating capacity"[3]

So, in theory, we could run everything, and charge the cars when the demand was lower, at night.

---

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10#:~:text=In...).

[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=6#:~:text=Co...

[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

[+] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
There does seem to be a lot going on right now on the solid-state battery front:

https://www.electrive.com/tag/solid-state-batteries/

In particular, more on the sodium-ion battery discussed by Munro:

https://www.electrive.com/2023/02/23/hina-launches-sodium-io...

The ICE will probably go the way of the Stanley Steamer for cars and trucks in the relatively near future. Those fossil-fueled steam engines were surprisingly capable, incidentally:

> "A Stanley Steamer set the world record for the fastest mile in an automobile (28.2 seconds) in 1906. This record (127 mph or 204 km/h) was not broken by any automobile until 1911" (wiki)

[+] brk|2 years ago|reply
I doubt this is going to play out as optimistically as the pro-EV crowd thinks.

No personal bias against EVs, but there are still issues with range for towing/hauling, and longer duration "road trip" style commutes that make it impossible to be "pure EV" on the roads any time soon.

Also, the marine and aviation industries don't have viable EV options in the short term (10 years), same with heavy equipment (CAT, Deere, etc.), this will keep at least enough of a market for gas/diesel engine production that they won't go away.

[+] runako|2 years ago|reply
There's wisdom in what you say. At the same time, technology adoption curves only get to 100% at the asymptote. For example, one still encounters a need to send a fax from time to time, and some people still have landlines.

That said, the auto market at 50% or 70% EV adoption will still be a big deal! And we might find out that some of the issues that folks see with EVs are solvable and/or aren't that important anyway. For example: the average American summer road trip is under 300 miles, so the range anxiety might be ameliorated by wider availability of faster chargers than are available today. Similarly, we might learn that users of heavy equipment are in the habit of taking breaks during which they could charge their equipment, etc.

[+] theK|2 years ago|reply
You are right, the hauling and aviation industries will probably stick to burning fuel for a while. Maybe eFuel someday but still burning fuel.

But this don't mean that average Joe transportation (which incidentally makes up 99%ofprivate vehicle travel) cannot be realistically electrified.

Sure, even there people will keep running their classic cars and probably even some sports and muscle cars but for the biggest majority of casual commuters the writing is on the wall. There just is no real upside to sticking with ICEs even today.

[+] legitster|2 years ago|reply
While I think this is largely pretty true, I think in the longer run that if you get to a place where the average consumer is no longer exposed to the price of gas, you can get into a political reality where you could start pricing in the remediation cost of the fuel.

An analogy might be ethanol-free gas. Many motors out there still require it, and you have to go out of your way to find it, and you will pay a premium for it. But it is at least there if you need it.

[+] boveus|2 years ago|reply
Buc-ees somehow manages to have gas stations with over 100 pumps[1]. I am usually skeptical of claims that the free market will sort it out, but it is easy to underestimate how powerful financial incentives can be. I don't think it will take long for EV "gas" stations to exist.

1: https://www.archpaper.com/2018/08/gas-stations-steroids-tota...

[+] dv_dt|2 years ago|reply
There are already niches where EV aircraft will be likely wins - right now for frequent takeoff/landing, short hop travel it looks like some form of EV aircraft will take up that space.

Very heavy construction and marine equipment is already electric propulsion. The question is what will be the source for that electric. Even if diesel fuel is much more energy dense, IC engines thermodynamically lose a majority of that energy. So the gap to make up is smaller than a superficial look.

[+] dotancohen|2 years ago|reply
Actually, EV drivetrains are more suitable for heavy equipment than are ICE drivetrains. They are far less sensitive to weight, and operating costs are far more of a factor than initial purchase costs. Not to mention the incredible torque and power of electric motors.

Additionally, solar charging is far easier to get out to a remote jobsite than is diesel. If you've never seen diesel logistics for e.g. remote mines, you'd have no idea. And even for the far north (or far south) where solar is not an option, often they'll have provisions for electricity or alternative methods of generating it on site.

[+] nordsieck|2 years ago|reply
> Also, the marine and aviation industries don't have viable EV options in the short term (10 years)

With high enough energy density, I suppose it's possible for short haul aviation to go electric. If they can overcome the energy density difficulties, I'm sure it'll be great for reliability and cost. And maybe even noise.

I have serious doubts that it'll ever be feasible for long haul aviation to run on anything but hydrocarbons. Although I suppose it's theoretically possible.

[+] giantg2|2 years ago|reply
I believe that CATL battery is supposed to hit 1kwh/kg in the next 5 years. That's enough to quadruple range of current EVs if maintaining the same weight. I would be interested in this, or at double the range with half the weight (so about 800mi in an EV truck).

I don't think production will ever go away. But I do think that if you hit densities 500wh-1kwh and at a cheaper price, it will be relegated to niches. Maybe that will take 20 years.

[+] abfan1127|2 years ago|reply
Do you think the shift to EV will affect long style of commute lifestyles? Or, will the combination of long commutes / EVs / remote work combine to fix this?

For marine, it seems that cargo ships could have large solar arrays for energy regeneration, perhaps strapped to their top layer of containers? I think aviation will lean towards hydrogen cells given the need to rapidly refuel and energy density.

[+] complexworld|2 years ago|reply
Yes and it will take decades to replace the millions of fuel burning fuel machines that exist. I have a 5 year old gasoline car that I don't drive much. From an EROI (Energy Return on Investment) perspective I wouldn't be helping by replacing it with an EV any time soon.
[+] hokkos|2 years ago|reply
I really doubt the analysis of Munro when they praise the Tesla 4680 as it seems a failure compared to the cell to pack batteries of CATL and BYD that have better pack density, thermal and price. He seems to be very biased for Tesla.
[+] stillbourne|2 years ago|reply
I don't intend to get an electric car until solid state batteries are available.
[+] mypgovroom|2 years ago|reply
I dunno how I feel about this guy? I like his positive energy but sometimes I wonder if how much BS is spewing?
[+] Ralo|2 years ago|reply
Serious question, how would we charge these new high density batteries? Just to charge our current EV's, we need to run dedicated circuits at max capacity and it still takes a couple hours. Are we going be running 1000v circuits in our homes? How do we upgrade the local grids to have this amperage in each home? I'm not an EE, but are our current batteries just poor at "absorbing" this energy while our chargers just waste tons? While these new solid state batteries will hold it all? There's high power fast chargers, but I want to come home and plug in my car after work.

It just seems like batteries aren't the bottle neck. It's our efficiency to produce and distribute this electricity.

ICE isn't perfect, but it's an extreme dense form of energy and the output of it rotational energy. Which is exactly what our end goal is.

In electricity production we outsource it, then store it. Basically the same concept as winding up a spring loaded toy then letting it go when we want to use it. The spring isn't the source of power, it's just the energy storage. Just because we made the spring bigger and output more doesn't make it more efficient. Simply mean we need to spin it more, and with more energy.

We cannot even make the electric motors more efficient, we already run at 80-90% efficiency. What will we see? 1% more? 2% more?

It really depends where your energy comes from. If your energy comes from dams/solar/wind, those have low impacts and can be an efficient way to "wind up your spring" but they generally aren't extremely reliable and cannot power an entire city of EVs. If your energy is from coal, those are horribly inefficient. They run around 33% efficency [0].

All this electricity needs to transported but the power lines waste power, the charger wastes power, the AC-DC converters waste power, the EV motor wastes power. It's so many little losses outsourced to someone else.

I like the idea of EV. There's many pros, but far too many cons still. And it's not the cars fault. It's already maximizing what it can do with what it can get.

Personally, the battery pack prices are the biggest killer for me. I drive a 90s Toyota pickup. It's been problem free. I've driven it for years. Unless it rots to the ground, I'll never see a surprise bill in 10-20 years saying I need a new battery pack. My motor could entirely fail and it would be a $500 fix. Not to mention, it's entirely recyclable. People will give me money just for the metal.

It seems like EV is a nice option for rich people at the moment but if the majority switch over, the concept really falls on its face.

Although, high capacity cell phone/laptop batteries would be pretty sweet. However, we already have problems with phones being pretty dangerous.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/fecm/transformative-power-systems#:~:....

[+] fallingknife|2 years ago|reply
Biggest battery on a Tesla Model Y is 81 kwh. To charge fully in 8 hours you need 10kw of power. Sounds like a lot. Central AC is about 4kw. An electric stove is 3kw, and another 3kw for the electric oven. A microwave is 1kw. Can you run your ac, oven, stove and microwave at the same time? If so, you have more than enough to charge an electric car. And that's if you drive 330 miles per day. If you drive 36 like the average driver, you can charge your car for the same amount of power as running your AC for 2 hours / day. Power just isn't an issue.
[+] dv_dt|2 years ago|reply
Average commute pre-pandemic was 40mi. Two cars x 40mi round trip is a low enough draw to charge overnight with no rewiring of anything - grid draw is already much lower an night anyway. Mostly this is a grid issue of providing night time power. Ideally as storage offsets from daytime renewable generation.
[+] formvoltron|2 years ago|reply
That's funny because the inventor of the lithium battery isn't so impressed with solid state.
[+] worrycue|2 years ago|reply
What is he or she not impressed about? Why should we care?