Precious little detail on the batteries themselves. As with all solid state batteries, power is the Achilles heel. I'm skeptical this battery can make provide the 1+ C a car needs to run on the highway, but it's possible it may in the future.
According to [1], the specific energy is ~300 Wh/kg- the best li ion cells are ~275 Wh/kg, but only barely. When the OP article refers to 2-3x capacity improvements (2x on the website), it refers to energy density, or Wh per liter. That's not really considered an important metric except for phones. Unfortunately, the battery has to be over 150 Celcius for the solid electrolyte to work, so don't expect better phone batteries any time soon.
The way this would work is that cars would have a small conventional battery of ~15-30 kWh that could supply acceleration power and preheat the solid state battery. The larger battery would just back it up on long trips. How attractive this is depends 100% on how much power they can crank in the battery, since it isn't that much bigger than a normal battery.
Lots of people think solid state batteries will eventually replace liquid electrolytes, but it's effectively anyone's guess. We've had a lot of trouble finding high-power solid electrolytes for a looong time. The main benefits are safety related right now.
The basic reason is that conventional cathodes are highly oxidizing, so when a liquid electrolyte gets too hot it steals that oxygen and breaks down, causing a runaway reaction. Solid electrolytes and metallic cathodes don't have extra potential energy, so when there's damage to the cell like a short or overtemperature it simply burns itself out. The solid electrolyte is also far more stable and isn't very subject to breakdown from overtemperature or overvoltage.
With current batteries, there are just many tiny 18650 cells connected in parallel / series to get the desired power and voltage, right? Are you saying there are some unstated engineering limitations that would hinder getting to the desired "C" by connecting more battery cells in parallel?
> Are you saying there are some unstated engineering limitations that would hinder getting to the desired "C" by connecting more battery cells in parallel?
When connected in parallel, each cell has to discharge at same rate within a small margin. That means you have to match cells by capacity and internal resistance during manufacturing process. The more cells you put in parallel, the more chance some of them will age differently and cause whole battery to underperform or fail spectacularly.
Because the load is spread equally if there is a difference in the capacity / internal resistance of the battery it can cause a higher load on it than it can safely discharge at that moment.
Without this we wouldn’t ba able to make battery packs with 100s not to mention 1000s of cells and even smaller battery packs would die much much sooner.
A good analogy would be if you have a boat with multiple people rowing and one of them can’t hold the same pace if you don’t adjust for it you aren’t going to hold course and if you don’t let the man catch a break they’ll pass completely eventually.
> And why the batteries have to discharge at the same rate in the first place?
It's the definition of the cells being in parallel. Since they all have the same voltage difference (as the fronts and backs are all tied together with wire), they have to discharge at the same rate. The balancing dogma1138 was describing is done to allow some batteries to run at slightly different voltages so they all are at around the same state of charge.
> Are you saying there are some unstated engineering limitations that would hinder getting to the desired "C" by connecting more battery cells in parallel?
Two batteries in parallel have the same C rating! You double the output current, but you also double the capacity. When you put cells in series, you change the voltage but the current capability and capacity stay the same. In both cases the C rating doesn't change[1].
The C rating is just how quickly the battery can discharge itself, so it is entirely dependent on the chemistry and battery conditions.
[1]: there are finer points; more batteries in series lowers output current slightly in practice, and batteries in parallel are quite complex to deal with. Cell size, construction and cooling all have large impacts on the C rating as well but at the end of the day it's simply how quickly a square centimeter of battery material can carry out its chemical reaction safely.
A built-in battery header would serve as a workaround in many circumstances, and is already being worked on.[0] The heater would draw power when the car is charging to either keep the electrolyte above room temperature or preheat prior to expected use. You could even run the heater off standard 110v or 220v outlets, for instances where the car is parked but doesn't need to actually be charged (a garage might not be willing to deal with EV charging, but be fine with the relatively minor draw of a car's built-in battery heater in comparison). And when that doesn't work, you could probably run the heaters off the battery if you keep it from dropping too far, or a secondary battery as suggested by the grandparent.
There aren't really any perfect solutions, but cold temperatures are a problem we've dealt from the beginning with both batteries and internal combustion engines. My dad used to tell me stories about his time in Alaska as a teenager, and a bush pilot who would talk about when he'd have to pull the drain the oil from his plane, pull the battery, and take both inside overnight to keep them from freezing.
Those are nominal rms values, the range is plus or minus 10%.
I am not sure where it comes from but in the US it's not uncommon for supplies to be referred to as 220/110 rather than 240/120. They're generally understood to be the same thing.
i believe that's the case with current batteries too. Car batteries, such as Tesla's, require both heating and cooling elements to keep them in an acceptable temperature range. Unsure what the exact temperature range is, but my guess is it's not too far off of those ranges.
Interesting fact: Tesla achieves their ludicrous mode (2.3 seconds 0-100kph) by pre-heating their batteries so that more power can be drawn. During my test drive, it took an estimated 40 minutes to heat the batteries to do this...
Capacitors are blindingly fast in both charging and discharging compared to chemical batteries, and are much less susceptible to thermal variance in performance to boot. Their downsides are greater mechanical fragility, greater self-discharge, and comparatively terrible energy density.
I believe it would depend on the type of capacitor. A metal foil capacitor would have no problem, but an electrolytic might. The rate for capacitors is so much larger than batteries I doubt it's actually a problem.
I hope you see this, or if anyone can answer I'd appreciate it. Where does one go to research battery technology? What are the reputable journals? What is the discipline that is primarily motivated with researching battery technology?
To answer your last question, chemical or electrical engineering mainly, but chemistry, physics, and material engineering are all involved as well. There's no specific "battery tech" major, you can dive in with any partially related background.
Most battery announcements are bogus, but this one might be real. A123 Systems, the developer of lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, is involved. They put in $20 million as a Series A.[1] If you have a Crunchbase account, you can see more of the terms for this round.
Ah I remember going on cuil back then. Just read up on why they shut down and this is appalling: (from Wikipedia)
>... on the morning of September 17, 2010 "employees were told about Cuil's demise [...] and the servers were taken offline five hours later." Laid-off employees were told they would not be paid.
For those dismissing this as a yet another lab breakthrough without substance, the article is about this company getting quite substantial funding for what looks like a pretty nice series A funding round.
It looks like there are some serious investors involved that clearly believe that these guys know what they are doing. They presumably did their due diligence. That generally means this company used some seed funding to do proof of concepts and prototypes that are showing some promise.
In any case, 20M is nice but clearly nowhere near enough for mass producing stuff like this. So, what this means is this company just received funding to do more R&D from a nice consortium of investors that would clearly benefit from having a stake in a company like that if it had at all any chance of succeeding. Presumably there are still some hard problems left to work on otherwise, we'd be reading about some company investing billions to actually build the factories to mass produce this.
Since there are now several companies working on solid state batteries, the chances seem pretty good that one of them will eventually come up with viable products that can be produced at a quality, scale and cost that is interesting.
IMHO that will likely happen second half of the next decade or so. One application where this stuff might be applied early might be electric planes. That's a use case where improved energy density and safety is so valuable that even a very expensive solid state battery might still be interesting.
Funding and/or “serious investors” or even serious people on the board or as advisors means literally nothing. Theranos checked literally all of those boxes, and even got a visit from the Vice President and an award.
And they never even had a product that worked, and what devices they did have were fraudulent.
Having high profile people involved should never have been relevant to the quality of product coming from a company, but now that we are all aware of Theranos is should be absolutely clear to everyone that it is meaningless. It is likewise meaningless to make claims without backing it up with results from at least an independent third party if not making devices available to multiple technically competent reporters.
Two important qualitative differences from Theranos:
- Spinoff from battery research program at a University, not a bachelor degree dropout
- Investors are technical
So no, Theranos did not have any "serious" investors if using the definition of "serious" as those that are technically competent/know how to evaluate the technology. It's possible of course that it's all still a scam like Theranos, but more likely if this doesn't pan out it's going to be some limitation with the underlying tech, market adoption, competence running the company rather than outright fraud.
Theranos is one example. But there are many examples of where funding and corporate investment is a sign the company has something serious and industry changing. The point is that without statistics both of us are just dealing in effectively anecdotes.
And the idea that independent third parties need to be involved is simply not true. (1) They already have car manufacturers willing to validate the technology (and they are often quite conservative) and (2) this company isn't at the point yet where their technology is being commercially sold.
Also in the Theranos case there really was only one major customer i.e. Wallgreens who then failed to do proper due diligence. Here you have multiple car manufacturers involved who specialise in vetting new technology for mass production.
We're in a post-Theranos world. Companies are going to be getting a little extra scrutiny.
Also, as near as I can tell, Theranos got their later investment rounds by being willing to wildly lie. IIRC, they claimed something like $100e6 of revenues where the actual number was approx $100e3 [1]. That is probably going to (slowly) lead to criminal liability for some of the principals.
Here (as parent mentioned) you have battery companies investing in a battery company.
Which was in turn in a post-Enron world. The one sure way to make sure that crap can keep happening is to pretend that something has really changed, so it can’t happen again. It can, stay vigilant.
Counterexamples do not imply the inverse of the original claim is true, just that the original claim may not be a universal truth. (And of course, the OP never claimed it was, your claim of "literally nothing" is more akin to making a universal claim.)
The only serious investor in Theranos was Tim Draper, who gave Holmes about $200k in initial seed funding, and largely because she was a friend of the family who Draper has known since she was a kid. Holmes went around to every major Silocon valley VC firm and every life sciences VC firm, but they did their due diligence and after consulting with experts every one of them said "I think I'll pass on this one."
Following that initial seed funding from DFJ, all of Theranos' early stage funding came from fly-by-night wannabe venture capitalists. A123 systems definitely does not fall into that category.
Yeah, they think it's a 1 in 50 chance of working. Or whatever metric they have that results in $20M being invested. Pretty small beans for a technology that would change the world. To me that says it's just interesting enough that they don't want to see it die.
Series A funding usually means a certain level of viability and risk. Presumably with battery prototypes it is pretty easy to assess if the thing exists at all in some kind of prototype form or not and whether it works at all. When I say due diligence, I'm assuming that stuff was checked and triple checked by investors.
Also, Theranos owed a large part of their funding to the fact that the CEO was cute & female. Stuff like that is super sexist of course but that doesn't make it any less true. Investors were a bit less critical than they might have been and the company certainly got a lot more press and exposure due to this than would otherwise have been the case. Not all investors are idiots.
In any case, I checked, there's very little chance of that happening with the CEO of Solid Power. Looks like a pretty solid linkedin profile for somebody running a company like this.
Sure but you're being a big disingenuous by just saying smart investors.
We have a number of car manufacturers involved here and they don't mess around when it comes to validating new technologies. Especially given how important batteries are to the future survival of the companies.
So it's not okay for him to make assumptions about the LinkedIn profile but it's okay for you to make baseless, presumptuous comparisons to Theranos? You can't have it both ways.
After Theranos and Magic Leap I've really downgraded the degree to which "huge investments from big incumbents" can be considered a reliable signal for quality.
Magic Leap didn't get investments from that many big incumbents. It's mostly just investment groups and Google being the only technology player.
And as I've said before. You can't make broad generalisations based on two data points. Huge investments from reputable companies are still a pretty good indicator of company success.
I encourage everyone to read the article before dismissing this news as yet another snake-oil press-releases - there is plenty of background there and it appears that that both BMW and Hyundai are investing, among others, giving some credence to the story.
BMW and Hyundai investing doesn't mean nothing. But it also doesn't mean a lot. There are a ton of battery startups that have highly speculative investment from respectable companies. They invest because the prize is so big. If they really have done what they claim then it is worth many many billions.
Produce 100 test batteries and send them out to labs round the world with a note saying "look what we made!".
Then when those labs post their results (and they will because testing claims like this on a battery is a simple and cheap process), then I'll consider investing.
If it's per unit space, it's effectively a bomb. Doesn't mean it has to be unsafe. We drive around with big tanks of gasoline. But stored energy is stored energy.
> If it's per unit space, it's effectively a bomb.
No, not particularly- the energy stored in an li ion cell is only a small amount of its potential energy. The cathode (eg cobalt oxide) and the organic electrolyte act as an oxidizer and fuel, >10x more energetic than the energy stored in the lithium.
Solid state batteries carry far less energy than a normal battery.
If solid state cells had 3x more energy per volume, they'd have slightly less energy to release than a normal li ion cell, and those aren't bombs. Flamethrowers at worst.
A bomb requires way more than just energy, it needs to have a mechanism to release quickly. Li ion has a mechanism like that, but solid state batteries don't.
Ordinary matter contains about 90,000 terajoules of energy per kg. But that hardly makes everything a bomb. There needs to be a way to explosively release the energy for it to be a bomb, and for some types of energy storage there isn't such a mechanism.
Whatever non-ordinary matter would be, E=mc² should apply as well.
That number is an upper bound, I don't believe any process is known to convert matter into a useable form of energy with reasonable efficiency and yield. Neither fusion nor fission count as they only "convert"/release a tiny fraction.
Some processes are highly efficient in that conversion, accretion disks around black holes can convert 10-40% of rest-energy (mass) into "pure" energy. Annihilation is 100% efficient.
My point is that energy density doesn't make a bomb, it's also necessary to have a mechanism for the spontaneous and rapid release of that energy. Ordinary matter has a very high energy density (the highest), but as you point out it takes special processes to release that energy.
Similarly, I can have a soda can filled with Lithium-Deuteride (a fusion fuel) and that can have a very high energy content (terajoules per kilogram) but it's not a bomb unless it's connected to a system that can actually release the fusion energy in that fuel all at once. It's not something that could even remotely happen spontaneously without those other components that make it a bomb.
Another example would be Potassium. Naturally occurring Potassium contains about 400 megajoules of radioactive energy per kilogram, which is about 100x as much as TNT. Even in the form of, say, a Potassium salt that would avoid the issue of the chemical energy of Potassium metal, that material would still have enormous energy density. And there's nothing you need to do for the energy release to happen, it'll happen automatically. But it's still not a bomb because it will take over a billion years for just half of that energy to be released, and there's no known way to substantially speed up that release of energy (without inputting even more energy) to make a bomb.
The title seems misleading. There doesn't appear to be any new technology here, just a funding round announcement.
In a press release, the company listed a bunch of advantages that they claim their technology has over current batteries
The aversion to link to source documents really hurts the credibility of publications like this. It forces me to try to find the "press release" on my own. Ok, here it goes.
I went to the Solid Power press release page and found nothing about a breakthrough - indeed nothing since last June, and then nothing of technical note:
I found this comment in the article refreshing: Solid-state batteries are thought to be a lot safer than common li-ion cells and could have more potential for higher energy density, but they also have limitations like temperature ranges and electrode current density. Not to mention we have yet to see a company capable of producing them at large-scale and at an attractive price point competitive with li-ion.
So far all of the solid state batteries that I've read papers on suffer from an inability to charge quickly because they cannot dissipate heat fast enough. The whole swap the battery packs thing is a work around for this where you get a car and 'n' battery packs. Charge the packs slowly (limitation of battery) but swap packs quickly (mechanical issues, not a problem). To my way of thinking such a solution is fine for a commuter car but exacerbates the range issues. Maybe that is ok in this space but so far until Tesla's "300 mile range" cars hit the market EVs were pretty niche.
The galaxy brain take on Tesla is that it is just marketing wrapped around the progress that was already happening in batteries. They really actually are cheaper and have much increased energy density relative to 10 and 20 years ago.
Does lithium-ion itself count? The first practical chemistry was developed in 1979, the first commercial battery was shipped in 1991 and they went pretty mainstream between 2000 and 2005.
That's a long time if you are talking about announcements made today but there's been lots of announcements in between and there is considerably more investment now than 30 years ago.
If we're looking at breakthroughs since 30 years ago, lithium ion definitely counts. But it's pretty much the only example, and there are very severe flaws with lithium ion leaving the space ripe for improvement. Everything since has pretty much been optimization.
There is a great video from GreatScott on youtube[0] about LCB (Lithium Ceramic Batteries) where he got hands on some of them and tests them for charging, usage and physical resilience (they work even if you cut off large parts of the battery).
In cars having lower weight & volume makes a big difference (your house has more space, and doesn't have to be lugged around). The safety aspect is a big part also - no risk of exploding cars (and already no risk of batteries being pierced when in a house).
Even if completely true, that technology will probably come too late for cars. With the current production (and sales) of Tesla, other carmakers have had to react one or two years ago (and it looks like they did).
Expect an increase in the production and sale of EV by a factor of ten in the next five years, barring a global economic crash. That scale should easily drive down the cost of conventional LiIon cells below the cost of gasoline engines (you will probably be paying around 100$/kw/h or even less).
In such a scenario there is not much room to develop and scale a brand new technology. It could be interesting for planes though.
Cost isn't the only factor. There's a limit to how much battery you can physically cram into the car. If a new technology can give you 2-3X more range for the same volume of battery, cars made with that will have a competitive advantage. It might be more expensive at first but you do the same thing Tesla did: start with expensive cars and work your way into higher volume.
> that technology will probably come too late for cars
Why ?
Have I missed something where electric cars are done as a industry and the technologies we have today will be the status quo for future iterations.
Because the way I look at it the era of electric cars is just beginning and great that Tesla has helped to validate the market/technology but they aren't what we will all will/want to be driving.
Is there really that much free economy to get from scale? LiIon cells are hardly a niche good as it is. The whole gold rush around batteries right now seems specifically trying to get out in front of that demand.
I’m not familiar enough with the technology to read through the explanation: that article doesn’t mention Cobalt, Lithium, Nickel or rarer Earth metal. My understanding of the future of batteries is that, unless we find alternatives to those (or large sources outside of Tibet), we might get into geopolitical troubles.
> they close a $20 million series A round of financing
> ...
> Solid Power said that it 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.”
Is $20M enough for "multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility" ?
Check out "NOVA: Search for the Super Battery" on Netflix
www.netflix.com/title/80991272?source=android It's a great intro into the challenges of current batteries and it shows Ionic materials' battery which is very similar tech to the one described in this article.
This specific business model is proven to be worth-the-wait until proven innocent vs. early investing for a hope of windfall that highly likely will never materialize.
There is an excess of VC that reduces quality of due diligence.
I'm eagerly looking forward to when I can replace gas tanks with batteries of comparable energy density, and put 400+HP electric motors in unsafe light old driver's cars.
That will be a long long time coming. Gasoline is about 46 MJ/KG or 34 MJ/L. The best lithium-metal batteries are about 2 MJ/KG or 5 MJ/L. The best lithium-ion batteries, about half that. Gasoline is extremely energy dense. For a comparison, TNT is only 5 MJ/KG and 7 MJ/L.
Fortunately, gasoline cars are so inefficient that you only need about 1/3 of the comparable energy in an electric car to move the vehicle. Still a ways to go, but we don't need to get to all the way gasoline energy density for the equivalent range.
In short. No. Two big issues with current state of the art solid-state batteries are i) the amount of current that the batteries can handle is typically low at least because the conductivity of the solid-state elecrolyte is much less than a typical liquid electrolyte; and ii) cycle life is low at least because small defects in the electrolyte/electrode (cathode and/or anode) interface(s) are not self-healing. In a liquid electrolyte, the liquid can accommodate more changes at the interface because it is liquid.
According to [1], the specific energy is ~300 Wh/kg- the best li ion cells are ~275 Wh/kg, but only barely. When the OP article refers to 2-3x capacity improvements (2x on the website), it refers to energy density, or Wh per liter. That's not really considered an important metric except for phones. Unfortunately, the battery has to be over 150 Celcius for the solid electrolyte to work, so don't expect better phone batteries any time soon.
The way this would work is that cars would have a small conventional battery of ~15-30 kWh that could supply acceleration power and preheat the solid state battery. The larger battery would just back it up on long trips. How attractive this is depends 100% on how much power they can crank in the battery, since it isn't that much bigger than a normal battery.
Lots of people think solid state batteries will eventually replace liquid electrolytes, but it's effectively anyone's guess. We've had a lot of trouble finding high-power solid electrolytes for a looong time. The main benefits are safety related right now.
The basic reason is that conventional cathodes are highly oxidizing, so when a liquid electrolyte gets too hot it steals that oxygen and breaks down, causing a runaway reaction. Solid electrolytes and metallic cathodes don't have extra potential energy, so when there's damage to the cell like a short or overtemperature it simply burns itself out. The solid electrolyte is also far more stable and isn't very subject to breakdown from overtemperature or overvoltage.
[1]: https://qz.com/1383884/a-startup-promising-an-all-solid-stat...