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A Chinese Startup May Have Cracked Solid-State Batteries (engadget.com)
hackingbear writes: According to Chinese media, Qing Tao Energy Development Co, a startup out of the technical Tsinghua University, has deployed a solid-state battery production line in Kunshan, East China. Reports claim the line has a capacity of 100MWh per year -- which is planned to increase to 700MWh by 2020 -- and that the company has achieved an energy density of more than 400Wh/kg, compared to new generation lithium-ion batteries that boast a capacity of around 250-300Wh/kg. Details beyond this are sparse. The headline news here, if accurate, would be that the company has managed to put solid-state batteries into high volume production, but it's not clear how Qing Tao Energy Development has achieved this, nor what price points are involved. Furthermore, while a capacity of 100MWh is not to be sneezed at, it still only equates to fewer than 2,000 long-range EVs per year. Nonetheless, the news demonstrates that progress is happening in the solid-state battery arena. We might not feasibly yet be at high volume production, but we're on our way.
It's not BS, but it is hype. The founder and CEO is this guy, who just recently published this paper on their tech. The cells reportedly lost 25% of their capacity in just 50 cycles. They also reported a "high" ionic conductivity of 3.15e-3 S cm-1, which is an order of magnitude less than traditional liquid electrolytes. They conducted their discharge tests at a mere 0,1C.
You people make me envy the deaf and the blind!
This would not be useful for electric cars, although mainly due to the cycle life issues (and presumably cost issues, but we can't know that yet). This would be most interested for various "specialty" applications - applications where power is drained only slowly (thus rendering the ionic conductivity issue moot as well as the cycle life issue). Perhaps remote sensors or the like. I'd think they'd also be quite desirable in military drones designed to circle over a given location for as long as possible. For applications like that, you don't need a huge number of cycles out of the batteries, and cell cost is not a limiting factor, but what you need above all is energy density.
For the mass market, though, it's more of an issue of how the tech (particularly cycle life and cost) evolves. Hopefully investors in this company realize that they're betting on where this tech might go rather than where it is as things stand.
You people make me envy the deaf and the blind!
"Ching Dao." Geez.
If you are going to be pedantic, at least get it right.
The modern standard pinyin spelling is: "Qingdao".
The Wade-Giles romanization is: "Tsing Tao"
"Tsing Tao" is what is printed on the bottles, for reasons of tradition and marketing.
"Qingdao" is the name of the city in Shandong where the beer is brewed, and is what the Chinese call the beer.
"Ching Dao" is not correct under any romanization scheme. "Ch" and "Q" may sound the same to monolingual English speakers, but they represent different phonemes that are distinguishable in many languages.