Comment by laxisOp
9 hours ago
We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
9 hours ago
We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
I can - it’s called a bomb. Some of the problems with batteries are heat dissipation (one of those problems that superconductors would mostly solve), fire safety, and end of life disposal. Higher energy density makes it even worse.
A good place to start would be a BMS on individual cells that monitors them for general degradation, unexpected discharge, unexpected temperature changes, and can remove a failing cell from the array.
Gasoline has 10x the energy (MJ/Kg) than TNT, but it's not a "bomb". Being a "bomb" is about energy release rate. A battery is still controlled by its chemistry.
Liquid gasoline does not have anywhere near the energy of TNT, or even a battery for that matter. It contains basically zero releasable energy. It needs oxygen or another oxidizer to react with to actually release any energy. TNT and batteries' energy density calculations include the oxidizer and the oxidizer is in close proximity to the fuel (molecularly so in the case of TNT). If you 10x the "energy content" of gasoline it's still rate limited by access to oxygen. If you 10x the energy density of a battery (the type with the oxidizer contained within the battery, not a fuel cell or metal air battery) you've got 10x the energy ready to be released quickly if oxidizer and fuel mix in unfortunate ways
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One of the problems with gasoline is its explosive nature, which the fuel storage and delivery system of a car attempts to mitigate. It has a better profile for burning off than a battery though since it will spill out and burn away from the vehicle.
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> Gasoline ... it's not a "bomb"
My teen years would beg to differ, when some neighborhood friends and I decided to experiment with gas and bleach. The neighborhood residents, fire department and local police also had an opinion, too. (We all got into BIG trouble. Definitely one of the dumber things I did as a teen.)
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Poorly stored gasoline can spontaneously combust, though. So more like a firebomb.
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Some heavier elements have hilariously high energy densities and aren't bombs (on their own), but the catch is the energy release is a trickle. Point is it's not an automatic follow that high density = high discharge.
Have a look at Electric impedance spectroscopy- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_spectroscopy
Theres a handfull of Tier 1 BMS chips that support it already. though, half of them are meant for traction/EV packs instead of BESS.
Making it require air (or some other kinetic / transport process) would help with that. E.g. zinc-air battery.
The past 20 years have made lithium ion 2-3x more dense, both because of some chemistry changes and because of better pack level design.
And it's still improving at about 5% per year.
Tesla has been around for nearly 20 years. Model S (12 years) has gained 17% of range due to chemistry (rest is system efficiency and simply bigger battery).
BMW i3 went from 60Ah to 120Ah of battery capacity (and slightly more voltage) in the exact same chassis through the span of its life (2014-2022, RIP). It is even possible to put the later 120Ah batteries in the early 60Ah cars and reap the rewards, and is a practice that is actually supported by the cars' software natively.
Range is not a real issue for electric cars. Charging time is, though, and there are massive improvements happening for that right now.
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I don't think 10x density is possible without getting into nuclear, at least not with the chemistries we know of today, everything at a certain point becomes an explosive.
Speaking of nuclear, getting tons of the material that powers mars rovers and putting them in every home would generate enough power for decades... At the cost of being able to build a nuclear bomb in a garage.
The next revolution will be small scale generation. Fuel cells, extremely efficient cheap solar, even smaller modular reactors, etc.
I live in western Pennsylvania and have both natural gas and electric service, a roof and 1/3 acre of land to utilize. I would love to get rid of at least one of my utility bills and I’m becoming more interested in decoupling from the electric grid than natural gas service. I dream of a future where competition comes to monopoly utilities by way of direct competition with each other as there is a not so far off future where I can utilize solar, batteries and a natural gas fuel cell to cut ties with my Electric Utility. If that kind of competition can exist then the game is on for those utilities to start fighting for customers.
With modern heat pumps and induction stoves getting off of natural gas is fairly easy for most people and saves money in the long run. Meanwhile the grid is switching to renewables so getting off gas is your best investment. You can get of electric too, but on your 1/3rd acre that probably means significant lifestyle compromises - I will be impressed if you are willing to live with them.
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I seem to remember recent advances in TMSR research and construction. Those tend to e much safer and have safer byproducts than uranium or plutonium fueled water-cooled reactors.
In term of dual use nuclear seems culturally radically different from everything else, wondering why.
Agreed, but I think people can imagine and companies are very motivated: powertools, phones, laptops, watches, backup UPS, cars, hospital equipment... there's high demand for durable, long-lasting batteries. I think the research is there, it's just complex chemistry. We'll get there. Impressive to see the progress in EV batteries and they've actually turned out to be more durable than first feared.
hard core lipo user here(for DIY). battery is great but it gets balloon after using some time
How is billions every year on R&D not enough, especially when you measure consistent improvement year over year in the technology?
10x energy dense does not mean 10x safer. Gasoline is still widely used because it is considered one of the safest options around!
The problem is more nuanced than just "let's do all the battery density"
maybe you are right . I was thinking a world where battery improvement is the rate as chip performance improvement ,
I think, apart from finding better Batteries altoghether, we should build multi-tier batteries inspired by biology. Humans have bloodsugar, sugar in the Liver and then fat. All of them have their respective properties with availability and amount. This way, engineering tradeoffs could be allocated much more fine grained. For example, a while ago I read about a startup building an energy storage where they heat up large amounts of sand to store the surplus of renewables. This could serve analogous to the fat in humans.
Biological power is marvelous, but really inefficient. All that sugar and fat in entire human body only generates 50-150 Watts.
Humans do that because we're big and extra complicated. The closest analogue is probably a hybrid car, though ideally you'd want one that can create synthetic fuel from its battery. But I suspect cellphones are properly analogous to e.g. bacteria that have much simpler energy storage.
I think I've heard of sodium, lithium hybrids. But that's only 2, what's the fat? Gasoline, LPG hybrid? Shit gets expensive fast. Probably 2x cost of just a sodium or ion EV? The human body is too amazing.
I look to a future of regularly servicing the immune system of my battery.
That reminds me of the gel packs in the USS Voyager. At some point they became “infected” and they needed to the raise their temperatures to let them destroy the infection!
sorry in advance , but my POV is .
Most of the things that we copy directly from humans do not work in terms of robustness.
Its like instead of harddrive use human DNA to store the data for 3T years,but no-one is mentioning the bandwidth speed here(which is the most important thing) etc,
I know it has some usecases.Also "one spoon butter is more energy dense than a battery"
but how we are gonna use butter(I dont know enough bio) but it is way harder to convert energy .
The good news is that humans already exist, so you can already use them. It will give them something to do with AI replacing them elsewhere.
You might not like the efficiency of that type of battery, though.
The article says $4B was put into solid state research/companies as of 2025 in the US alone. Seems like they are working on it
maybe, but not enough.
but if there is level 1 to 10 and the chips are level 10, from transistor to today.
the battery would be level 2-3 . if this continues the battery cant keep up with more advance tech,where energy density matters like flying cars,BCI etc .
like people are selling two same products to the same person(same time), because the battery life is bad.
I'm all for more
It should be relatively straightforward to imagine — we already have that in gasoline-powered internal combustion engines.
The Watt-hours per kilogram of good Lithium Ion batteries is around 250-280 Wh/Kg; for Lithium Iron Phosphate it's about 180 Wh/kg, and for Sodium-Ion about 170 Wh/Kg.
The raw energy in gasoline is about 12,300 Wh/Kg but automobile internal combustion engines get only about 20-30% efficiency yielding about 2500-3600 Wh/Kg. For aviation piston engines it is a bit better at 25-30$ so 3000-3600 Wh/kg.
So, the batteries, instead of being 10-12X the weight of the gasoline for the same net driving/flying range, could weigh about the same as the gasoline. So, a typical car with maybe a 16 gallon tank and 30 miles per gallon fills up with 128 pounds (58 kg) of gasoline to get 480 miles of range. The Li-Ion battery for that range would weigh something like 1300 Lbs (590 kg). That is a substantial additional weight for a car that could be 2800-3800 Lbs in ICE configuration, so 35-45% added weight (a bit less because of savings on the ICE engine, etc). This requires everything else to also be heavier, from the structural frame, the suspension system, and even the wheels and tires (which is also unsprung weight, further impairing performance).
With a 130Lb/60kg battery instead, and saving the weight of the ICE engine and fuel system, the overall car design could go much more lightweight, regaining a lot of performance and range, all while gaining the huge torque of electric motors.
In aviation, a battery systems of that weight would enable all-electric aviation to go from small performance niches to the default for general aviation.
So yes, it would be a HUGE benefit to achieve 10X energy density batteries, and we do have reference points for people to imagine it.
> With a 130Lb/60kg battery instead, and saving the weight of the ICE engine and fuel system, the overall car design could go much more lightweight, regaining a lot of performance and range, all while gaining the huge torque of electric motors.
I think you're underselling it, even. A typical like-for-like modern EV is only marginally heavier than the ICE equivalent. If we were able to drop the weight of the battery by a thousand pounds, cars would be lighter than they have been in decades while retaining all the modern safety and convenience features we've come to expect. And if density improved along with weight, we could make EVs with the same form factor as today but with over a thousand miles of range. Not that we need that, but it is just as a tiny example of how mind boggling the game change would be.
As it is I've only recently internalized the notion that the most powerful electric tools are battery powered (what can I say, I grew up when rechargeable batteries were NiCad and they basically sucked). And it will just get better and better as time goes on.
Some people might need that range. If you cannot charge at home and you don't have good public charging infrastructure then you might want enough range so you only have to deal with charging once or twice a month.
Yes, underselling a bit for sure! I didn't even want to get into the optimizations available if cars were really designed for lightweight when the entire motors+battery is only 100-150kg, and the battery can be low and centered.
We could go for performance, trading off some battery for four inboard motors (fully sprung weight) with half-shafts and CV joints, steel space-frame chassis and carbon fiber body — it could put many supercars to shame.
Going for range, same light-weighting, but less powerful motors and adding more battery, the range could get silly long at something like 1000 miles for 100kg of battery.
For the kind of long range options another poster mentioned, with 100 kg for 1000 miles, a few 10-kilo swappable battery packs could make it easy to trade luggage space for range, or bring them to a charge station only occasionally, but not lug them around for most in-town trips.
No question, we could go wild!
If we stop considering ICE , its still a whole new world would created by smaller batteries .
could be some bad examples(right now in mind),correct me . but smart ring , BCI systems is not possible with oil.
An EV doesn't need to have 480 miles of range. Nobody is driving that distance daily. 98% of trips are under 50 miles. Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!
Also, EVs use regenerative braking. That should help a little bit.
EVs should be built with 100 - 150 mile range. All families with 2 cars can immediately switch one of their cars to a daily driver EV and the other vehicle is a minivan. There are lots and lots of people for whom an EV works perfectly well and if they need to go longer, US has a robust rental car industry. What would help is to let people charge anywhere they park. All workplaces should offer free charging, and companies can negotiate to get paid for charging their employees cars. The price of electricity goes negative because of lack of demand, and this is something that they can offer to the grid, demand as a service.
> EVs should be built with 100 - 150 mile range. [..] if they need to go longer, US has a robust rental car industry
As an EV owner myself, no. Absolutely not.
The reason is simple: The mere existence of low-range EVs hurts overall EV adoption, because people aren't going to rent a car just for a road trip. You're talking about adding $100+ per day on what's supposed to be a cheaper method of travel compared to flying.
ICE-holes don't think critically. They don't care that long range EVs exist. They'll just see one that only gets 100-150 miles of range and go "See? EVs have short range. They're not appropriate for road trips. That's why I'll never get one.", despite plenty of 250+ mile options.
Now, I suppose you could argue that this type of person would simply never get an EV and would just come up with a different reason, and you'd probably be right. But the general point still remains: People want a car that satisfies ALL their needs and won't settle for something that works "only" 98% of the time.
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I think people can imagine lighter cars and laptops and things. Is there something bizarre that’s unlocked like battery powered space launches or something?
High density batteries allows us to have dramatically cheaper electricity. Think of it like this, what happens when electricity is 1/10th the cost? Beyond what others have pointed out (electric airplanes, cars that drive thousands of miles), costs for everything would drop as energy is a core driver of it in every good you consume. If you can pull energy where it's very cheaply available and store/transport it anywhere the world millions of lives would be saved. For example;
If energy is cheaper than the price of water you can pull water out of thin air (dehumidifiers).
If energy is cheaper you can grow food in areas you normally couldn't.
When you can transport anything for cheap you can move food to areas that are vulnerable to food insecurity.
If you can store energy at large scale you can nearly eliminate grid failures, savings lives in the summer and winter.
Costs for transporting food would go down significantly, imagine groceries being 10-15% cheaper.
Assuming airlines have competitive pressure you could expect plane flight costs to drop 20-30% improving everyone's mobility.
Energy density doesn't matter for electricity since the storage batteries don't move and there is plenty of space for them. Cost per energy stored is what matters. Density is important for transportation especially planes.
Sodium ion batteries have worse energy density than lithium ion but they have potential to be cheaper and more reliable. Iron air batteries have poor round trip efficiency but could be even cheaper.
Batteries are not power sources, but storage. The energy still has to come from somewhere, and power generation won't magically become 10x cheaper overnight. No matter how cheap battery storage becomes.
But it IS crucial for removing bottlenecks & replace fossil fuels.
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Aviation, drones with hours+ flight range, more solar power usage as storage gets easier/cheaper, phones that last more than a day, robots with actually useful battery life, smaller IoT devices. A lot of current tech is severely limited by battery capacity.
Electric long distance passenger planes. Possibly requiring the help of EMALs.
Electric long distance container ships.
Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns.
Even longer range drones.
What point is there in gasoline if we can get better energy storage in batteries?
Not all batteries need to be mobile.
A 1 GWh grid scale battery takes up about 4 hectares at the moment. The UKs total energy use is about 2,000GWh a day.
It would need to use 240,000 hectares to store all energy requirements (eletric, transport, heating etc) for a whole month. Even in extreme cold conditions it would last a couple of weeks.
That would be about 1% of land use.
Storing a month of energy use doesn't make any sense when it comes to renewable grids. Since you don't have to mine/extract and transport an inventory, far far less storage is required.
A month is probably excessive, but there are large regions of the world where its not uncommon for both solar and wind power to be running at <5% for multiple weeks in a row.
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you don't want industry going down coz there has been bad weather for few days in a row. And other alternative is burning gas.
If we want to get out of fossils, we will have to store for longer. Or built a ton of atomics
Which just emphasises the point -- density and thus land use isn't really a major concern
You could store an entire years worth of energy (not just electricity) for a fairly dense country like the UK and still have 95% of the country left for other usage.
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Doesn't that depend on the sources of energy though? Pretty much constant short and mid term supply like geothermal, hydro, tides, etc vs unpredictable or variable in the short term like wind and solar.
As a society relying on solar, I'd want to have more of a buffer than one that relies on hydro.
Instead of batteries, why not green hydrogen or green ammonia? Ammonia is needed for fertilizer, storage/logistics are a solved problem. Emergency plants around that can use ammonia as fuel can solve the dunkelflaute problem?
Another option is natural gas peaker plant on a ship/barge. Have a fleet of these around that can dock at any port and supply electrictity. A peaker powership is essentially a mobile, marine-class version of an onshore peaking power plant.
What would be best long term if we have a few hundred - few thousand nuclear ships/subs that can go anywhere and supply power.
It can be the sharing economy for clean power at scale.
Capital costs and round-trip efficiency are the primary reasons. Even at constant utilization, electrolyzers are expensive enough that it's hard to replace fossil-fuel generated hydrogen at the moment.
Once you 2x-10x the cost of electrolyzer capital by only using it rarely, more generation and throwing away the excess electricity often makes the most sense.
Nuclear ships are similarly super super expensive. The only reason we build them at all are for their unique and wonderful operational capabilities, as in not needing to surface or refuel. Using nuclear ships for power would so expensive that we may need to up our GDPs 10x before such wasteful use makes sense. (Though I'm hoping we do reach such future luxurious lifestyles!)
> Another option is natural gas peaker plant on a ship/barge. Have a fleet of these around that can dock at any port and supply electrictity. A peaker powership is essentially a mobile, marine-class version of an onshore peaking power plant.
Why would you want this?