Slashdot Mirror
U.S. 5X Battery Research Sets Three Paths For Replacing Lithium
dcblogs writes "One year ago this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $120 million plan to develop a technology capable of radically extending battery life. 'We want to change the game, basically,' said George Crabtree, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a physics professor who is leading the effort. The goal is to develop a battery that can deliver five times the performance, measured in energy density, that's also five times cheaper, and do it in five years. They are looking at three research areas. Researchers are considering replacing the lithium with magnesium that has two charges, or aluminum, which has three charges. Another approach investigates replacing the intercalation step with a true chemical reaction. A third approach is the use of liquids to replace crystalline anodes and cathodes, which opens up more space for working ions."
Year-old news, right here on Slashdot!
What about Carbon nanotube Super Capacitors? MIT Nanotube Super Capacitor
More for me!
Has....well way the !@#$% too many charges. :-P
Magnesium?
Who doesn't like a 3,100 C fire in his pants!
How am I going to connect the battery cables to it? /snark
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Yeah, like the internet, space rockets and satellites, radar, jet engines,nuclear energy, they all came entirely from free enterprise. And I bet you think Ayn Rand is the greatest thinker of all time.
Another liquid battery concept for grid storage was mentioned here: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/511081/ambris-better-grid-battery/
OK, Lets use an Enerdel 12s block. 3000 cycles by 1300 watt-hours gets us 3.9 million watt-hour-cycles.
The cost is $711. So 3.9 million w-hr-cycles / $711 is 5485 w-hr-cycles per dollar. What is the w-hr-cycles of gasoline again?
Depends on where you live. In Phoenix we're powered by hydro and nuclear, and even have enough electricity to spare that we sell to California who has a shortage. Ironically we're also probably the last place you'd look for hippies or "greenies". I think the main thing is that we just don't have NIMBY syndrome (meanwhile the federal government seems content that we be the kidnapping capital of the world because they won't allow us to take the border situation under control because it bothers the hippies, who themselves would never allow a nuclear plant anywhere near them.)
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I think we should call it Obamabattery and have IRS fine anybody who doesn't use it.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Is that the little basket with buns wrapped in a towel you get in good restaurants?
Mostly random stuff.
OK, Lets use an Enerdel 12s block. 3000 cycles by 1300 watt-hours gets us 3.9 million watt-hour-cycles.
The cost is $711. So 3.9 million w-hr-cycles / $711 is 5485 w-hr-cycles per dollar. What is the w-hr-cycles of gasoline again?
That's an interesting question:
Gasoline gives us only one cycle.
$ units
You have: (114000 btu / gal) / (3$ / gal)
You want: W hr / $
* 11136.701
Sounds bad... but car engines are only about 20% efficient and electric cars are more like 80% efficient.
If we normalize that way, the gas car is 2227, and the batteries are 4388.
Looks like the batteries win, even with current temporary lull in gas prices.
how does the heat dissipation compare to said to-be-replaced lithium batteries?
all the same, it's good to see progress in the energy storage field.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
In part, you are right. Batteries have to be competitive with traditional fuels. While some people may want EVs for "green" reasons that only they can understand, they do not represent any significant part of the market. I bought my car (Prius) not because I wanted to save the planet, but simply because I needed a new car, and Prius was a very good choice in many aspects - comfort (CVT rules!) and mieage, and reliability, and price, and cargo space, and passenger seats, and cost of service. Saving the planet? Not on my salary. Let Al Gore do that on his.
But moving pollution elsewhere, in itself, is not such a bad idea. First of all, even if the volume of pollution is unchanged, moving it away from cities helps already. However large power stations are more efficient, such as they produce less pollution per kWh of energy, compared to a car. It remains to be seen what effect the transmission losses have; but the losses are present in both cases; an ICE is not very efficient, and it is largely heating the Universe. At the same time, charging of an EV is not a lossless process either, and the batteries do not last forever - they contain polluting chemicals, and they need energy to be produced and recycled.
Remote power stations have yet another advantage - they can use cheaper or cleaner fuels. Coal is cheaper, and is plentiful. Sunlight, hydro, wind, geothermal, tide, etc. are cleaner. Those are options that you can exercise. You have no such options with gas-powered cars; they only can run on oil products by definition - and supply of oil is, apparently, limited.
OK, lets try the math:
Battery:
(1 kWh/ $500) * 1000 cycles / (300 Wh/mi) = 6.67 mi / $
Gasoline:
(1 gallon / $3.50) * (30 miles / gallon) = 8.57 mi / $
There seems to be lots of uncertainty on battery cost. Several car makers say their packs are under $500 / kWh (One article said Elon Musk expects sub-$200 "soon"). The Tesla Model S 60 kWh battery is warranted for 125k miles, which would seem to be at least 625 cycles is expected.
This certainly seems to me like it is within a factor of 2 of gasoline. A 5x change like talked about in this article would make gasoline not at all competitive.
This is the type of stuff the governments all over the world should be doing to combat global warming if they actually thought it was real and a threat instead of using it as an excuse to raise taxes.
Now if we could just get them to extend this into other areas like internal combustion engines being more efficient while not tripling their costs or maybe even a drop in replacement for a standard ICE motor in existing vehicles as well as industrial processes and such and I don't think most people who think global warming is a crock would object so strongly.
Maybe moving this to areas other then just batteries is what the economy needs.
The Germans are spending tens of Billions getting batteries into homes to smooth out solar power. Their idea is simple; by encouraging people to actually buy the stuff it will create a market and get the companies moving on research and development. I am willing to bet that 90% of the American money will go to a select group of companies and universities that lobbied hard for that money. Then over the next few years we will read in Popular Science and here on Slashdot about "BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH! New battery tech is 100x better and 100x cheaper!!!" but when you read the article it will be a pile of hype over a test-tube battery that is the size of a postage stamp that can barely power an LED and requires 3 hours of CERN LHC time to make.
The real (boring) article will be about a German factory employing 8,000 people that is selling 3 billion in home batteries per year that work quite well and provide good value to their customers.
NIMBY isn't associated with the hydro, which is far from Phoenix in terms of production.
Further, the nuclear plant (largest in the US, a sight to see) is 45 miles west of Phoenix (a bad location to be honest, north and east of the city would have been safer given prevailing winds).
Did you know it's cooled by sewage (I didn't until a moment ago via Wikipedia):
The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant is located in the Arizona desert, and is the only large nuclear power plant in the world that is not located near a large body of water. The power plant evaporates the water from the treated sewage from several nearby cities and towns to provide the cooling of the steam that it produces, as dictated by the laws of thermodynamics.
I love the comment about thermodynamics laws, and I wonder where the dried up sewage goes.
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
There's a lot of NIMBY north of Phoenix (Scottsdale, Cave Creek), try installing solar in a neighborhood (obviously if you have acreage no one will care). HOAs are terrible in the Phoenix area. Been there, done that.
BlameBillCosby.com
"Are you CRAZY... You cant put acid in consumer controlled devices."
Yeah. Who knows how much excess reality it'd end up consuming.
You can't replace Einstein with 100 scientists.
Hmm, there is a joke about monkeys and typewriters in there somewhere, just can't quite put my fingers on it...
I think we should call it Obamabattery and have IRS fine anybody who doesn't use it.
"If you like your current battery, you can keep your current battery!"
Can you re-do that calculation and include the dollar cost of the electricity, since you included the dollar cost of the gasoline? :P
I love the comment about thermodynamics laws, and I wonder where the dried up sewage goes.
I'd probably feed it into industry - a mix of producing fertilizer and incinerating it(done right it can generate more power).
It's more likely that it works a bit like standard desalination where you only remove SOME of the water, discharging the now higher-salinity water back into the ocean(or in this case more poopy sewage).
I don't read AC A human right
It sounds awfully like the Soviet "quinquennial" plans :-/
The nuke is surrounded by hundreds of square miles of cotton fields. That's where the dried-up sewage goes.
Of course not... the EPA would have stepped in and prohibited use of your current battery.
Aren't the commercial implications of such an advancement enticing enough to make the private sector throw many more millions, if not billions, into this research, if they haven't done so already? Granted, they would only allow new batteries to come to market if they lasted for fewer charge cycles.
The problem is that as gas, lithium is a finite, and pretty rare resource... unless you create a fusion reactor which *produce* energy, in which case you may hope to walk up the element ladder and actually produce that lithium...
1.3KWh * $0.12/KWh * 3000 cycles= $468
468+711 = 1179 cost. 3.9E6/1179 = 3307. 3307*0.8 = 2643 vs gasoline's 2227, so electric still wins.
Or w/ California electric costs the figure for EV is 2270 so even at their electricity prices EV squeeks past gasoline. (though their gas may be more than $3/gal)
This is, of course, before you account for the externalities of pollution.
The headlines seem to always point to more power/weight or power density. No one seems to be concerned with robustness. Mobile power systems operate in a harsh environment... Extreme temperature ranges, Extreme vibration, contamination (from water, salts, abrasive sands, etc). I would like to see more effort towards versatile and survivable power systems over more "power vs weight" speculation.
trasgu
then the cotton gets turned into toilet paper?
Car engines may be more than 20% efficient in the best case, but in real world operation including idle and jack rabbit starts, probably not. That's why they introduced hybrids: you pay extra for some batteries in order to keep the engine closer to its theoretical maximum efficiency.
IIRC, the electricity to power a car is well under half the cost of gas per mile, especially if you meter it at off-peak hours. So it would still come out ahead. The car costs more to buy mainly because of the batteries, which is the cost that we were analyzing in the first place.
The limited range is probably the main show stopper for electric cars right now.
I bought my car (Prius) not because I wanted to save the planet, but simply because I needed a new car, and Prius was a very good choice in many aspects - comfort (CVT rules!) and mieage, and reliability, and price, and cargo space, and passenger seats, and cost of service.
I bought my car (pure EV Nissan LEAF) for similar reasons. I needed a new car, I liked the LEAF, and it was cheaper than any new hybrid or ICE vehicle I compared it to, and I compared a lot of them. Yeah, the LEAF costs more up front, but I estimated that, given my driving patterns, I'd break even in just under six years due to the much lower fuel cost -- and that's without considering tax credits. With the tax credits (which which I disagree philosophically, but that's not going to stop me from reducing my tax liability in any way I legally can), the break-even point was just over two years. And I didn't even consider the much lower maintenance costs (the LEAF's maintenance schedule is hilarious... basically you rotate the tires every 7500 miles, and every 15000 miles you have someone look it over to make sure nothing is wearing or breaking).
Of course, the EV isn't usable for road trips, and there are a number of other limitations. But that's okay because I need more than one vehicle anyway. It does a great job in the role it fills, and it's cheap to own and fun to drive.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I think we should call it Obamabattery and have IRS fine anybody who doesn't use it $5 less than the companies charge and end up getting the same thing if we need to go to the store to get one.
fixed that for you
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
An all-liquid formulation is probably the most worthy of these goals, for increasing energy density still further without losing the seriously impressive power density and charge rate of LFP batteries. The voltage will also be a factor in some devices -- already many devices can be powered by single cells, simplifying charge circuits (no need for balancing or detecting a failing cell) and possibly improving reliability (since one failed cell = a dead pack).
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I am a battery scientist, and while I think that Argonne is one of the places where great work is done, they have set very ambitious goals for themselves.
1) Replacing Li with Mg is a lovely idea, but currently there is no fully stable electrolyte and as far as I know nobody has good candidates for electrode materials. Don't even get me started on Al.
2) Lithium-air batteries have been debated to death also here on /.. The current status is again that there seems to be no stable electrolyte, no clear idea of what exactly happens, and if we factor in the weight and complexity of adding various components to the battery assembly to make a real device out of it, the great theoretical energy density of Li-O2 is reduced to Li-ion levels, if not even less.
3) The liquid slurry electrode is an interesting concept which at least recycles materials that are available and known to be working. This is more of an engineering problem than a scientific one, and could see quick advancement in 5 years.
I hope the community as a whole will be able to find the breakthrough to finally have people stop cursing batteries.
Batteries: you hate them since 150 years!
This is Slashdot, where it is trendy to hate on anything America does. Also there's the risk that the DoE might succeed (the DoE has some top research labs, Ames, Argonne, Fermi, Livermore, Los Alamos, NREL, Oak Ridge, Sandia, to name a few). In this case Argonne is leading the battery project, working with Berkley, PNNL, Sandia, and SLAC. There are also some public universities participating as well. So gotta get that hate in now!
As you say, the reality is that all this battery research is beneficial. Doesn't matter where it is developed, it'll be sold to the world. Nobody is going to drop millions or billions in the tech and say "Ya, that was neat, no reason to sell it though!"
Did you include the cost of electricity?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Year_Plans_for_the_National_Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union
Just saying... :D
It would be great if this worked. I just fear that the government might kill some of this technology instead of helping it along.
There are various ways they can do this unintentionally.
1. Take all the profit out of dominating the market removes most of the profit incentive to developing new technologies. If the government just owns this thing or gives it away then the factories that tool up to build it might not be able to recuperate capital expenses to produce the tech because they won't be able to initially charge higher prices.
2. Possibly they'll put all sorts of regulations on the production, pricing, distribution, or installation of these batteries resulting in them being effectively expensive because of regulatory overhead. There are many instances of the government doing this both intentionally and unintentionally. They kind of do it to anything they pay any attention to by default. Given that they are paying attention to this thing... it worries me. I just suspect these batteries might come with forms that have to be filled out in triplicate and then snail mailed to 5 different PO boxes in Washington DC by the end of every fiscal year... or some other such nonsense.
3. They could also give manufacturing rights only to a few companies that are suspiciously campaign donors of whatever administration is currently in power while not permitting anyone else to produce the batteries. Later on it will be determined that the contractors chosen were not actually competent to produce them, cost over runs happened, quality was horrific, and the whole thing will go down in scandalous flames.... with no one getting anything useable out of it. AKA Solyndra.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
For me it isn't range, it is cost. My wife does a 100% city 10-mile round-trip commute. I literally only need 20 miles of charge for that car (to account for accessory use and the occasional shopping trip) - let's go crazy and double it so that when the battery loses capacity we still have the necessary range. Right now, there is nothing affordable on the market. A Leaf, even massively subsidized, would never pay itself back for my wife's commute when compared with something like a Versa (or even an Altima).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If $35 every 6 months tilts the balance, then electric has come a long way, indeed.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Bear with me now. A gallon of gasoline, depending on blending and the amount of ethanol has a high heating value (HHV) of about 120,000 BTU per gallon. At 100 percent conversion efficiency, 3400 BTUs gives you 1 kWHr, so 100% conversion of a gallon of gas gives 35.3 kWHr. That is what the EPA means by "eMPG" -- the EPA is assuming 100% conversion efficiency, but that is counteracted by the eMPG rating being artificially high because of that assumption.
Apart from arguments on whether EPA mileage reflects actual mileage, and whether an electric vehicle (EV) takes a "bigger hit" in efficiency in cold weather than a gasoline car, the gasoline MPG combined with the MPG gives you the cents-per-mile; the same holds true for eMPG combined with the kWHr rate according to how eMPG translates into kWHr -- as supplied to the plug connection to the EV. Thus we have "real word" fuel consumption numbers on current-gen gas cars, "real world" kWHr consumption on current-gen EV's, and we don't have to get tied up in knots over figuring all the energy losses in gasoline cars and in EVs.
That Enerdel battery "costs" 18 cents/kWHr, and my Midwestern power company sells me electricity at 14 cents/kWHr. That is, the electric cost is 32 center/kWHr or $11.30 per "electric gallon", but for an EV getting 100 eMPG, that works out to 11 cents/mile.
For gasoline at 4 dollars/gallon (it is cheaper now but will probably climb in price next summer), that works out to 13 cents/mile.
OK, I am sold, that at least from a policy perspective, that if this price on batteries holds up or improves, and if gasoline keeps getting more expensive, a given but you never know for sure, and if electric rates don't increase, not really a given with current policies, or if through Smart Grid that EV owners are given a "deal" for charging at night or other off-peak times, this new battery tech is at least putting the EV "in play."
The other consideration is that $4/gallon is what I pay at the filling station and 14 cents/kWHr is what I pay at home as a retail electric customer. Is this $711 the retail price of that battery pack, or is it the wholesale price to an automobile manufacturer? If I want to replace a 30 kWHr battery pack in a LEAF, do I pay 21 grand or do I pay twice that amount at the Nissan parts counter?
new 5 year plan
How ironic that you'd describe a government research project that way on the Internet.
This is a great article that discusses the physics behind energy storage, and why hydrocarbons are so hard to beat in some areas.
http://www.thebulletin.org/limits-energy-storage-technology
Except those numbers just are not true. (Normally we specify the cycle life at the point where the battery still has 60% of capacity and full discharge cycles. )
And of course if your goal was to reduce CO2 you have the opposite effect due to conversion losses.
when it runs out of juice, you're stuck.
yes, that point is totally different from gas!!
yes, you have more gas stations today, but how many gas stations had you 100 years ago? The temporary gas solution for that is a portable gas storage.
with electricity, you can also have portable batteries, and even better you have electricity in almost all places where are people, and you can even generate it your self, or using a solar panel/wind generator if things are really isolated... good luck producing gas!! :)
Higuita
If I'm driving cross country, I can't charge my batteries in 5 minutes.
Once batteries can be charged much quicker, a lot of the range issues will go away, but just converting gas stations to electric doesn't help, I'm not going to stand there for an hour. :)
If the Chevy Volt was $20,000 less, they'd sell like hotcakes...
Or, if it was a useful truck rather than a little car, it might be interesting.
I'd love to see a Suburban version of the Volt technology, but it really can't cost more, or much more, than it does now, or there would be little interest.
That's an interesting idea - a truck or minivan that is economical to run on small trips, but also has long-trip capability. The larger size, weight, and cost of the truck would make the battery less of a problem compared to these ridiculously small things that they battery power now. The fuel savings would be much easier to achieve when you are replacing a 15 MPG truck instead of a 30+ MPG compact.
I suspect the battery pack would need to be astoundingly large. But for me, it'd be great if the minivan could be electric for my 20 mile round trip commute, but could still be filled up when we go on family trips.
People suggest rentals, but the problem with renting a minivan is that they all are spoken for on holiday weekends when everyone gets the same idea as you. I was car-less in NYC for 5 years, so I've been there, done that. Zip Cars were awesome, but relying on them for long weekends was folly.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Advantages to electric cars:
- Move the polluting plants away from the cities (as you stated)
- If some great new tech comes along, you can swap out the plant with that new tech. ICE cars will hang around for 10-20 years after they've been bought. You get immediate effects on pollution reduction, etc
- You can use any power source to charge the car (as you also stated), so it's more like the car is using an API than a copy of the energy generation in every single car. Coal? Sure. Wind turbines? Switch to that. Solar suddenly becomes extremely viable? Now you've just made every car less pollutant overnight, and you didn't need to go around to every car and convert it or swap it out. The side effect of this? We're also not depending on OPEC to be nice or any other country or business to play nice; we can swap out the resource we use and people won't care, as long as they can keep charging their car.
People suggest rentals, but the problem with renting a minivan is that they all are spoken for on holiday weekends when everyone gets the same idea as you.
The other problem with rentals is that only a very limited selection of vehicles can be rented, and those are often base models.
It is pretty hard to rent a Suburban anywhere, and if you can, it is likely the basic version.
Knock me all you like for being spoiled (yea, I am), but I like my air conditioned seats in my truck. I like the power folding running boards, the dual DVD players, and the fact that I don't have to set all my favorite radio stations. Plus, for long drives, I have XM sat radio, something I wouldn't have in a rental.
Would I consider a Suburban with Volt technology? Yes, but they can't charge $20K more for it, that buys a LOT of gas.
Yes, it can't be 20K more. It could easily be 5k more, though. A Suburban could burn through that much in 2 years, no problem. 5k extra on something like a Versa is crazy, since it would take forever to use that much gas.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If it's Pima cotton, probably bath towels.
At $20K extra, it is $333.33 a month, which would require that it never need gas and the power from the wall was free.
Neither of which would be the case. :)
But yes, $5K is fine on something like a Suburban.
There is nothing ironic about it. I think government funding for basic research is a good thing.
Trying to set specific numerical targets for battery performance is what's stupid. It's stupid when private companies do it, and it's stupid when government does it. The difference is that if private companies engage in this kind of stupidity, they go out of business. Politicians like Obama just blame the opposing party for their failures and then raise taxes to cover up for their own incompetence.
We are calculating total cost of a depreciating asset. One can apply the exact same math to a used car - I'm not sure why you'd jump to the conclusion that I buy new cars. I mentioned the subsidy for the Leaf, but only in passing.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If I understand your question correctly, the answer is a fuel-cell.
And yes, they're working on it.
1. Need to add in the cost of the electricity.
2. The battery is not going to deliver full capacitor on every cycle. 80% would be more reasonable.
3. The rated number of cycles for the battery is almost certainly exaggerated by best case assumptions.
Good post, one correction: > gas-powered cars; they only can run on oil products by definition.
Most new cars are E85 compatible, which can be made from any substance that rum can be made from. Corn, srawberries, bananas, potatoes. It does take a heat source to distill... diesiel is even easier with peanut oil...
NIMBY isn't associated with the hydro, which is far from Phoenix in terms of production.
Not sure what you mean here - SRP alone operates 7 hydro dams, several of which are notoriously large, and include the Roosevelt Dam, and several other dams that are located just on the outskirts of the valley.
There's a lot of NIMBY north of Phoenix (Scottsdale, Cave Creek), try installing solar in a neighborhood (obviously if you have acreage no one will care). HOAs are terrible in the Phoenix area. Been there, done that.
That's more a symptom of newer developments. For whatever god awful reason, (pretty sure it has to do with realtors trying to keep property values up by keeping neighborhoods "forcibly clean") new developments everywhere are being run by HOA's for the most part, and the Phoenix area (Chandler in particular) saw the fastest growth rate in the world during the last housing boom. There are plenty of HOA free areas though, I just recently moved into a neighborhood without one. I probably hate HOA's more than you do by the way, they remind me of labor unions. They claim to help you but they just take your money and dictate terms to you.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
If anode is is replaced with atmospheric oxygen, half of battery weight is gone. Altenatives are zinc, lithium and alumininim cathode. Zinc oxide from discharging process can be recharged without using eletricity. By means of carbothermal regeneration. ZnO is heated 1200C, carbon is feeded in the process and the result is gasified Zn. Heating can be done by using biomass, solar concentration et al. ZnO is safe, no fires in car accidents. Contrary to flammable Li an Al.
That already been solved also, you do the exact same thing:
In the deposit, you replace "air" with gas... :)
With batteries, you replace a empty battery with a full one !
while you can manually fill the gas deposit, it's safer and faster to use special equipment
while you can manually remove a battery (ok, you might need some help, they are heavy, unless they already assembled to be in smaller parts) it's safer and faster to use special equipment
yes, the battery are the main problem in electric cars, they still have important limitations, but even right now you can get everything to work, almost like a normal gas powered car
Higuita