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Solid-State Battery Startup Claims Breakthrough For Electric Vehicles (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Now a startup developing all solid-state batteries (ASSB) secured backing from several high-profile investors, including several automakers, as it claims a breakthrough for the technology that will enable better electric cars. Solid Power is a Colorado-based startup that spun out of a battery research program at the University of Colorado Boulder. The company claims to have achieved a breakthrough by incorporating a high-capacity lithium metal anode in lithium batteries -- creating a solid-state cell with an energy capacity "2-3X higher" than conventional lithium-ion. They have already attracted investments from important companies, like A123 Systems and more recently BMW, which planned to validate their battery technology for the automotive market. Now they are announcing this week the addition Hyundai, Samsung and several others to the list as they close a $20 million series A round of financing. They are now working with two automakers and two battery cell suppliers for the auto industry. Some of the advantages that they claim their technology has over current batteries, as mentioned in their press release, include:
- 2-3x higher energy vs. current lithium-ion
- Substantially improved safety due to the elimination of the volatile, flammable, and corrosive liquid electrolyte as used in lithium-ion
- Low-cost battery-pack designs through: Minimization of safety features and elimination of pack cooling
- Greatly simplified cell, module, and pack designs through the elimination of the need for liquid containment
- High manufacturability due to compatibility with automated, industry-standard, roll-to-roll production
Solid Power plans to use the funds from its Series A investment to "scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in 2019." The battery cells produced at this new facility "will be utilized for preliminary qualification of the company's solid-state cells for multiple markets including automotive, aerospace and defense."
- 2-3x higher energy vs. current lithium-ion
- Substantially improved safety due to the elimination of the volatile, flammable, and corrosive liquid electrolyte as used in lithium-ion
- Low-cost battery-pack designs through: Minimization of safety features and elimination of pack cooling
- Greatly simplified cell, module, and pack designs through the elimination of the need for liquid containment
- High manufacturability due to compatibility with automated, industry-standard, roll-to-roll production
Solid Power plans to use the funds from its Series A investment to "scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in 2019." The battery cells produced at this new facility "will be utilized for preliminary qualification of the company's solid-state cells for multiple markets including automotive, aerospace and defense."
Wish I get a $ every time a breakthrough is announced within these pages.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
How do these compare to the Goodenough solid-state batteries?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
How much did taxpayers invest in the research at University of Colorado Boulder? How much can they expect in return? Will they be reimbursed by the IPO or do they have to wait until the profits roll in?
Research is typically paid for by you and I through our taxes. When a great discovery is made, all the profits go to private parties. When do we get reimbursed?
...omphaloskepsis often...
There's been so many now.
Even if the energy density per size of a lipo cell is already pretty dang high.
Besides, for cars the density isn't even now so much important. take a look at a tesla battery pack. how much of it is not battery? quite a lot!
the weight and safety and most importantly PRICE is the key for making a better battery technology for a car. there's just so much of these announcements that it's really hard to take any of them seriously - and frankly, we shouldn't even care before they have a production line running. they do these media announcements to boost up their visibility to have something to show to potential investors. the smart money doesn't care two fucks if it's featured on wallstreet times or whatever though - they care if it a) works b) can be produced at a good cost.
this makes it an automatic suspect when they go for high media visibility - because really, in their line of technology it's not needed. for actual breakthrough there's several billions of parked cash waiting to be dumped on it to bring some factory online. without any need to shoot for media visibility to get some investors onboard to keep the company going.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
possibly.
1/3rd of the price at same weight would already be something.
even electrek.co advices to remain skeptical about new battery innovations, and that sites trash.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
aw you're on to them, okay they duct taped 3 of the other guy's batteries together
Probably just another con-artist trying to scam venture capitalists. Extraordinary claims like 2-3x better energy density requires extraordinary evidence.
Not to mention the fact that the current power grids of the world cannot support everyone having a plug in car.
Fire back up the coal plants I guess since nuclear is politically not possible in most countries.
That is a big reason hydrogen is a good option. Ammonia can be created in bulk offsite using renewables and transported using current infrastructure then using membrane tech, which is not that power intensive, converted to hydrogen onsite at a filling station.
So ... to paraphrase ....
Problem: electric grids do not produce enough electricity to power all electric cars. This scares me because we will need more coal power plants.
Solution: ditch the relatively efficient battery and switch to a much more inefficient hydrogen fuel cell. Further reduce efficiency by having to create an intermediary gas and membranes which then convert that gas to a different gas. Make sure to waste a bunch of energy moving that liquid all over the place in trucks. It's OK that you're consuming way more energy than by just using batteries; the extra energy will be magically created "off site", which doesn't require any new coal power plants.
Sounds great. You get started on that, I'm sure the money will just pour in.
Agree. Perceptive. Brutal, not breathless view of life. There should be some kind of "conservation of impact" law in operation saying you cannot just change technologies and all of a sudden the balancing "bad" for the "good" you get is gone. It just changes to something else. No technological free lunches. If global warming from carbon dioxide were to go away tomorrow, something else equal in negative impact would take its place.
E Proelio Veritas.
I'll believe it when I'm flying my quadcopter for an hour
This is not news. Let us know when a startup company tells us they have nothing and close shop. This before they went public or received money in any other way than from the owners of the company itself.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
At 3x higher mass or volume that would be boring. Or did they possibly mean energy density?
They mean "Look at us! Invest in this company so I can pay my mortgage!"
This is a PR stunt of an article that literally is nonsense, but sounds to the nontechnical like something worthwhile. This is just an attempt to garner some venture capital to keep the lights on and pay salaries is my guess. Where they might have some interesting ideas, they sure didn't promise anything solid with the 2-3 times whatever statement, which is weasel wording if you ask me. It would let the VC money believe something that wasn't true, without actually having to technically lie to them and get sued for fraud.
Personally, if I had capital to invest, such a PR campaign would turn me off... But I'm guessing they might catch some funding by some greedy soul who doesn't understand and falls for the PR.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
> for actual breakthrough there's several billions of parked cash waiting to be dumped on it to bring some factory online.
Who had that parked cash waiting for better batteries? Large car companies like BMW? Major electronics manufacturers like Samsung? I'll wait until companies like that put their money into something before I think it's really that promising.
> When a great discovery is made, all the profits go to private parties.
Uhm, no. The company already paid the school to license the technology, and they'll keep paying royalties.
> When do we get reimbursed?
Starting in 2011, in this case, and continuing forever.
In addition to giving the (taxpayer owned) school stock in the company name(profits), the company pays:
Up-front license fees for the technology developed at the school
Minimum annual and/or milestone payments
Royalties on net sales
Sublicense royalties
More information can be found here:
https://www.colorado.edu/techt...
> How much can they expect in return?
Annual reports are available at the above link, showing exactly how much return was received each year from the various spinoffs.
> Will they be reimbursed by the IPO or do they have to wait until the profits roll in?
Founders don't sell their stock at the time of an IPO. That would basically be announcing "we, who know the most about it, don't want this stock" at the same time you're trying to sell it to others. The financial equivalent of "ewww this milk is nasty, smell it". You wait until some time after the IPO. The (tax payer owned) university has founders stock. The up-front cash to the university is a license payment, the stock is one of several ways the taxpayers get ongoing long-term returns.
Ammonia is less energy dense than most compressed gas fuels.
It also required temperatures in the range 400-500 degrees to break it down. About 5-6 more than the majority of your car engine components and their cooling systems.
It also creates an extraordinary hazard - ammonia (as a gas, typically, compressed to a liquid) with catalysts heated to beyond-your-oven temperatures producing a highly flammable gas, often with a lot of flammable by-products or catalysts too. It's a horribly nasty and destructive bomb just waiting to go off.
Now all energy-dense materials are bombs. But that's what we're trying to curb. Lithium is so dangerous BECAUSE of the run-away reaction problems. That's what we need to eliminate to make them safer. Lead-acid can be a bomb if you do it right, and you they put warning labels about throwing alkaline batteries on a fire for a reason.
Then when you get the ammonia out, convert it to hydrogen, etc. with all the safeties required that Joe Spanner at the local garage knows what to touch and what not to touch, it's less efficient than just about every other power source.
Ammonia is classed as an "extremely hazardous substance" for a reason, where even all the petroleum and lithium (except hydride) products aren't.
Trust me, you don't want a tank of liquid ammonia sloshing around under your back seats. In comparison, petroleum derivatives are positively safe.
There are a lot of profitable spun off from universities and the (taxpayer owned) university DOES get money back, someone's a pretty hefty sum. Obviously not every idea is commercially successful, but some are are. The payments back to the university help pay for the school, which reduxes the amount taxpayers pay. In this case we're talking about CU. They get about $5 million / year in royalties from spinoffs.
See also:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
I believe the Electrolyte is a plastic polymer and will not vent as a gas when punctured. It also prevents dendrites? from forming which is the reason they use lithium ions vs a solid bar of lithium in lithium ion batteries. Using a solid bar of lithium increases the charge capacity.
Netflix has a show about this actually. they went in depth as to the benefits. they even showed some one cutting the battery as it was being used. did not explode but kept working.
> I'm still waiting for those 1TB optical disks that've been promised for 15+ years.
This link is the 3.3TB version. Near the bottom you'll see buttons for 1.5TB, 600GB, etc.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c...
The are used to replace tape drives, primarily enterprise backup and archiving.
Blu-ray video means millions of those discs are produced, so economic of scale make the Blu-ray format the economical one. Blu-ray is currently available in 25GB, 50GB, and 100GB.
But according to this it just brings the specific energy into the range of Li-Po and Li-Sulphur. So why is this better?
Li-Po is volatile and LiFePo is expensive. Li-Sulphur batteries are not commercially available and they must be larger than Li-Pos for a given amount of energy storage. And since I can't find anything about their volatility, I assume it's in the same range as Li-Po. A solid electrolyte should be much safer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The easy way to know is to drop the other person from the sentence and try it. In this example:
Research is typically paid for by you and I through our taxes.
Research is typically paid for by I through my taxes.
You would write:
Research is typically paid for by me through my taxes.
Therefore:
Research is typically paid for by you and me through our taxes.
Call me when it actually goes commercial. Until then it's vapourware.
Elon Musk: "My top advice really for anyone who says they’ve got some breakthrough battery technology is please send us a sample cell, okay. Don’t send us PowerPoint, okay, just send us one cell that works with all appropriate caveats, that would be great. That sorts out the nonsense and the claims that aren’t actually true.” - 2014
While it is unquestionably true that /. publishes <wild_exaggeration>an average of 2,000 "battery breakthrough" stories per hour</wild_exaggeration>, this one is different from the sludgepipe of ordinary hype in two important ways:
We never see that with any of the other battery-breakthrough hype pieces. They're all either announcements of tabletop-scale demonstrations (at best), or simply theoretical extrapolations of what some newly-discovered phenomenon could, eventually mean for increaing power density and/or rechargeability, making batteries out of less-expensive materials, incorporating unicorn scat, or other examples of wishful thinking in search of investors.
This one, by contrast, is an announcement unveiling a startup that has convinced some solidly-credible major corporate investors who have (at in Samsung's case) undoubtedly heard presentations on gee-whiz battery "breakthroughs" from a raft of wannabes and scam artists in the past - and have obviously passed on all of them. It's real enough that the bean-counters in these multi-billion-dollar enterprises have signed off on those investments. That's a completely different thing than the pure hype that virtually every other story on the subject consists of.
It's certainly still possible that their pilot plant will reveal scalar problems in manufacturing that eventually will relegate Solid Power's claimed breakthrough to "nice try, but no cigar" staus. It appears that we'll have to wait until 2019 to see if that happens (although, if the actual product doesn't live up to the investors' expectations, I kinda doubt we'll see a big, public announcement about it - more likely, it'll just quietly close its doors and disappear into the investor's writeoff disclosures in their annual reports to the SEC). But I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt - at least, until their Series A financing runs out ...
(Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Solid Power. I have no financial interest in any tech or automotive company whatsoever, nor do I advise any such entity. Hell, my wife and I own a grand total of ONE share of stock - and it's a legacy of an employee profitsharing plan from her employment in the retail sector almost 20 years ago. And, fwiw, hype of any kind tends to make me break out in acute scepticism.)
Check out my novel.
might drastically improve EV performance in bends...
We need to stop posting these unless there is an actual product on the market.
There have been so many "battery breakthrough!!!!111oneone" posts that we never hear about again. Shouldn't we be a bit less naive by now?
Like: 1) Cost? 2) Number of usable charge cycles, and rate of charge degradation? 3) Charging rates (how fast can it safely/practically be charged)?