It’s fairly new to non-Chinese EV makers. I think a patent had to run out before they could use them or something like that. Anyway, most Teslas have the NMC battery which have nickel and cobalt.
And speaking of non-new batteries, I did some quick research and found the sodium-ion I mentioned above is actually about as old as lithium-ion, but it wasn’t as good. Some recent developments may make it good enough for use.
The “solid state” refers to the electrolyte, which in conventional cells is a liquid or polymer ‘gel’. In theory, any semiconductor material could be used but the highest energy densities in a manufacturable material are still in lithium and will likely remain so until we can make really high quality doped carbon nanotubes at scale. The advantage of being solid state is that greater energy density but the downside is that they tend to be more fragile and prone to short circuiting, requiring not only better processing and design but packaging that shields them from impact, high vibration levels, and thermal shock as well as dealing with aging effects that create dislocations. They’re certainly possible and have been produced in small quantities but manufacturing them at production scales will require many innovations.
I am not at all as sanguine about lithium-air batteries. This is a formulation that works in the lab but because of impurities in air and the overall fragility of the system seems unlikely to be workable in the real world. I do not think we will see this technology reach a sufficient level of maturity in decades if ever, by which time it will probably be overtaken by other chemistries based on practicality and manufacturability even though it probably offers near maximal energy density of any electrochemical battery. In particular, the fire and explosion hazard of this formulation are so high that it is difficult to see it ever being approved for use in passenger or commercial vehicles.
Stranger
Doh! I mean 100A (240V) service. So a charger using 40A (80% of a 50A circuit for steady load, per code) is using a significant part of the house’s maximum capabilities. 26A - less so.
The thing about new battery tech is it’s like fusion energy, it’s always just around the corner. most promising tech runs up against the problem that either they are too heavy (energy density per kg) or they fail too soon with recharge cycles. There are stepwise refinements that keep making batteries slightly better each year. Allegedly one of the advantages of dry batteries is not using oil in the electrolyte. When a battery fails catastrophically (now less and less likely) the resulting “Telsa catches fire” meme is due to that oil burning from the heat, and then igniting the oil in the rest of the batteries too.
Another way to look at mileage/power is - the Tesla Model 3 (LR) has a 75kWh battery pack and allegedly gets 300mi/500km from 100% to 0%. That’s 0.25kWh per mile. Usual vehicle warranties go by 12,000mi/year, so about 1000 miles a month or 33 miles a day. Assume with less regular use distribution, many days you will have 2 or 3 times that. 100 miles in a day is 25kWh and about 4 hours’ charging. For me, that’s less than $2.50(Canadian dollars - so $2.00 US). 1000 mi - $25 a month. If a kWh is $1.19, then by all means skip the EV and buy solar panels for your house.
Another significant factor with EV’s is that stop-and-go city driving is far more efficient. There is no “idling” - you use the power needed to move, and recapture a significant part with regen when you brake. The AC (and with newer Tesla’s, cabin heat) is an electrically driven heat pump, does not require an idling engine. You are not constantly turning a huge V8 just to advance another 30 feet in a minute in a traffic jam. That has the bonus of no exhaust fumes in the street, either.
These figures are wrong. If they were correct, you could only drive 40 km on a 60kWh battery.
Typical figures are more like 5 to 7 km per kWh (15 to 20 kWh per 100 km).
If I charge at night, at a typical night rate of €0.10/kWh, my “fuel” cost is about 2c/km.
Er, yes. Actually I had it the right way around, but I was thinking about capacity in my head, not indicated charge. A Tesla charged to 100% (indicated) is using 100% of the capacity. Another make charged to 100% indicated is only using 90% of the capacity (approximately speaking, of course, with some caveats for what the true capacity actually is).
Tesla recommends charging to 80% (or maybe 90%) and avoid habitually letting the battery go below 20%. You can exceed these guidelines occasionally - in a recent road trip I moved the upper limit to 95% to ensure range and never had a problem- the lowest it got was about 15%. I could have charged to 100%.
I’ve only increased the charge to that much maybe 3 times in the last 3 years. Lowest I’ve gotten was 55km remaining, which is a bit more than 10%.
The thing about the damage is that it’s apparently proportional to the time spent at the high charge level. Keeping it at 100% all night, every night is bad. But Tesla supports “scheduled departure”, so you can charge to that 100% just before you leave. Since you’ll eat that last 10% within about half an hour, there will be close to no additional degradation.
This is probably sounding more complicated than it really is to non-EV drivers, though. In reality, I just keep mine at 80% on a day to day basis, and bump it to 100% for the few times a year I go on a long trip. Less difficult than checking the tire pressure and topping off the washer fluid, which I also do.
For those interested in the latest developments in energy storage and battery technologies, Dave Borlace is a fellow who rather kindly reads all the technical papers and summarises the interesting bits into a short talk on each new development without the intrusion of ads.
A copy paste of a previous post I did on EV’s.
I work in the fossil fuel industry. At the initial process of looking for the stuff. Seismic exploration.
I know this industry will have to mostly die out. I see it from start to finish. The costs are huge. But so are the benefits. Transition will be difficult.
Specifically about electric vehicles. There are two large negative aspects. Our lack of infrastructure to charge them. Both it’s structure and the sources. Then the batteries.
The city I live in calculated 25 Million kilometers a day driven on it’s streets in 2007. It was a steadily increasing number at that time. That is a lowball figure due to how they calculated.
A new Tesla model recorded best energy efficiency of 12 KWatt hours to go 100 kilometers. Actually 11.9. So about 0.12 KWatt hour to go one Kilometer. 120 Watt hours.
So if everyone in my city was using a top efficient Tesla right now, that would require at least 3 Billion Watt Hours a day extra electricity. 25 Million Kilometers times 120 Watt Hours.
3 Billion Watt hours divided by 24 equals 125 Megawatts per hour. That is 7% of the peak record electricity demand for this city that hit 1793 Megawatts. As I write this mid afternoon on a Saturday, -1 C outside. The demand is 1152 Megawatts.
So we need to have at least 10% extra capacity. Taking into account transmission losses and energy losses of the charging systems. Maybe more than 10% may be required.
Our newest gas fired plant can produce 800 Megawatts, more than 50% of the city’s power. It cost $1.4 Billion. So actual cost of extra generating cappacity is not terribly high, for say 15%.
The city also uses 231 Megawatts of wind power. If the wind farms were operating at maximum capacity, that is more than enough to charge the vehicles. Of course that source is wildly variable. But clean and renewable.
The basic expansion in generation required seems to be the easiest step. Distribution is more difficult. Expensive upgrades and installations at many steps out from the generator.
Batteries. Solid state batteries are probably coming on line soon. They are a lot better. This will make a big difference in the ease of use and lifetime of the pack. It will also impact the ability of storage for renewable power generation. Although flow batteries are already a good solution. Battery component reclamation methods are quickly being perfected.
An electric car is also way better on longevity terms. Maintenance is less costly. An electric motor is so reliable. Even the brakes last longer due to regenerative braking. No oil changes. No filter changes. No plugs. So many things that consume resources, that will no longer be consumed.
There is a big investment required in infrastructure. But that has happened several times. One notable one was with the introduction of fossil fuel powered vehicles.
None of them would have solar panels? True, I live in SoCal, but still everyone I know that has a EV or even a plug in hybrid has them.
Sure the city might have to get a few windmills or a solar farm or something, but it won’t be a disaster. Beside, the 8mpg PU owners will only switch when you pry the keys out of “their cold dead hands”.
Residential solar here is less effective, but would still help. I like it. Unfortunately most of our street layout has housing oriented for poor solar capture. Blocks longer north to south. New residential areas have the plate of spaghetti street layout which also makes for poor roof orientation.
I actually wrote city councilors to have all new residential streets laid out in grids again and oriented East West to encourage best roof orientation for solar. A code change that would enhance solar going forward. No real cost added to constructions, maybe even savings.
I’m conveniently located on an E-W street. Unfortunately the peak of my roof runs N/S so I don’t have a good south-facing roof for solar. For some reason, no consideration was given to this in 1915 when my house was built.
Fortunately the switchover to EVs will be nothing like instantaneous, there will be time to work out ways to make the infrastructure work (the concept of letting the power company optimize what time to charge your car based on a target “ready to go” time is the sort of thing that can help maximize utility of existing infrastructure).
I wonder how Jiffy Lube is planning for the EV future. No oil changes. Are there any fluid changes required in an EV? I don’t see topping off wiper fluid as a long term business model.
BASF announced today they are planning on building a battery recycling plant that can handle 15,000 tons (metric?) of “EV batteries and production scrap” (per year? month? ever?). It is expected to “start” in 2024 (be online, start building, start the permitting process?).
Details are a bit scarce in the press release, but this is a real company that really builds things, so in my very limited knowledge, I don’t have any reason to believe it won’t happen.
This plant will create “black mass” which is fed to other BASF facilities that will refine it into valuable materials.
As for new battery technologies—I see an article about some breakthrough several times a year. They all sound great, but I don’t get excited until I can buy something using the new technology.
Years ago, before more efficient technologies, we were all encouraged to turn lights off when not in use.
Countless times people told me turning on an incandescent light used up an hour’s worth of electricity so it was better to leave them on all the time. Even as a kid this sounded like bullshit to me, it has been debunked as such many times now.
There was also many claims that volcanoes, russians, or some other incomprehensible process was responsible for most of CO2 in the atmosphere, and burning fossil fuels was a negligible factor.
I could come up with other examples.
People always generate all sorts of arguments against changing of the status quo. Some of them are plausible and some are just stupid, but generally a little bit of research debunks them as politically motivated misinformation.
Its tiresome.
Back in the 1960s this was generally true of fluourescent lights. But more that you burned an hour’s worth of lifespan turning them on than an hour’s worth of electricity. Incandescents never had that issue.
And modern CFL or LEDs certainly don’t.
I purchased a window squeegee to clean my windows at home because I never found myself at a gas station with my Kona EV.
Well, Incandescents did have an enormous inrush current, 10-30x the normal running current, but that only lasted for a fraction of a second, so it would only count for under a minute of running time. Turning them on also shortened their life, but not by very much.
And now, CFL and LED use about 1/4 the power. A side effect in Canada is that the extra heat from incandescents for most of the year helped heat the home, so now we use more natural gas heat instead. I suppose with air conditioning in summer, this balances out a bit.
it was only the fluorescents that used a lot of energy to turn on, but from what I read lately, this to was a myth. More interestingly, in the good old days this excuse led to a number of large industrial buildings having no light switches - which probably had more to do with construction wiring costs. the lights would be turned off only at the breakers.
Companies like Jiffy Lube and Mister Transmission have a more dismal future than say, Les Schwab Tires which will still be needed… But then, the buggy-whip makers are a cliché example for businesses nowadays.
I would think that along with solar panels come products like the Tesla Powerwall, a big stationary battery to store that power now that battery tech has caught up to the real world. However, all this does is aggravate the demand for more batteries, if in fact a house now needs an additional helping of batteries over and above the automobile.
I think another issue - which was beaten to death in an earlier thread - is that apartments and older neighbourhoods without garages, simply don’t have a location to charge at home.
It does take some extra energy to turn them on, but it’s not a lot. More significant is that turning them on burns away a small bit of their electrodes. Turning them on and off a lot can really shorten the life of a fluorescent tube. That applies to CFLs too, since they’re a single tube that’s been coiled up into a small space. The rule of thumb is to not turn them off if they’ll be needed in the next 20 minutes or so.