I’ll believe it when I can buy a car or a laptop with a solid state battery.
I’d be happy to buy a big, bulky, heavy, early version of any of these batteries for my house, as long as it’s affordable, high capacity, and has a good cycle life.
It doesn’t even have to fit in a car, it can be the size of a shed. Hell, I’ll build a shed for it.
Yet this magical product has yet to materialize!
Unfortunately the cycle life of lead-acid is TRASH to the point where in any country except for Canada, LiFePO4 or even Li-Ion are more cost effective due to their far better depth of discharge, cycle life and absolute lifespan.
Even a “deep cycle” cell can only withstand tens of actual deep cycles. To get the rated 200 cycles, you can only discharge to 80%, which makes your 10kWh bank effectively a 2kWh bank. Suddenly it doesn’t look cheap anymore, especially when you’re lucky to get 2 years out of it micro-cycling. Lead acid is only good for rare emergency deep discharges i.e. UPS usage and it’s even questionable there now due to time degradation putting a short limit on its lifespan.
Here in Canada we can’t get lithium in any form other than overpriced packs, so I do have a dying lead-acid bank that I’m hoping to limp out until we get better chemistries. It’s basically a big capacitor at this point. I compensate by dumping surplus solar power into my boiler or air conditioner depending on the season, and shedding all but essential loads during outages.
Some people might scoff at the 2027/28 timeline, but I doubt this is vaporware. Toyota is the world’s biggest car maker, so their claims have some credibility.
Toyota’s breakthrough is with mass-producing these types of batteries, they still face challenges in real world use - “Problems include the extreme sensitivity of the batteries to moisture and oxygen, as well as the mechanical pressure needed to hold them together to prevent the formation of dendrites, the metal filaments that can cause short circuits.”
It’s not vaporware, it’s anti-EV FUD.
Don’t buy one of those EVs, we’re going to have much better EVs really soon now and you’ll be stuck with something inferior. Same with their talk about hydrogen: EVs are just a fad, hydrogen is the future! … and it’ll be viable real soon now, so stick with gasoline until then!
Toyota is constantly in the news about battery advancements or hydrogen because it’s defensive FUD to protect their fossil fuel vehicle sales.
Yeah this type of news makes people think current EVs are not enough and need to stick with gas. The realistic approach would be to be relying on consistent charging network that people can plug into for long periods of time and there needs to be more than two chargers per location. Yet right now people don’t realize the necessary infrastructure upgrades to make our live more green and viable.
They’re also funding a liquid anhydrous ammonia powered car, as if hydrogen wasn’t a terrible enough idea, let’s power a car with an incredibly toxic chemical that has to be stored cryogenically or under pressure. What could go wrong?
Let’s power a car with a battery that burns so hot and so persistently, that piercing said battery caused firefighters not to bother with extinguishing the car at all.
Let’s power a car with a fuel refined from oil extracted at the cost to the environment. Burning it will also cause excessive emissions. Also it will be extremely volatile so the infrastructure to move the fuel and refuel the vehicle will need to be monitored at every point, and it requires fuel to be cooled down to very low temps when it’s hot outside.
Let’s power a car with natural gas. It’s an incredibly toxic chemical that needs to be stored under pressure. It also makes it so you can’t park in underground parking since it malfunctioning can lead to people suffocating, or an entire building exploding.
You can always make something sound bad.
The size of the company making the claim has no correlation to the veracity of the claim.
BP, Exxon, Shell spent decades claiming global warming wasn’t real.
Philip Morris & British American Tobacco spent decades telling us smoking didnt cause cancer.
All of whom are or were as large as Toyota.
Look at their track record and judge their words against their actions.
Toyota has spent considerable sums over many years campaigning against Electric Vehicles.
https://electrek.co/2021/09/22/toyota-facing-boycotts-over-fight-slow-electric-vehicle-progress/
So should you believe a company that says it’s about to table the next huge EV breakthrough when it fouht tooth and nail to slow that transition ?
Your choice, but I won’t until I see something more substantial than press releases
Also look at thier pathetic EV offerings at the moment: they’re obviously still in the “build compliance EVs until the hydrogen ones are ready” mindset: https://youtu.be/yOeDJ7s_LCc
They’d be better off if they just took an off the shelf battery pack and put it in the muria instead of a hydrogen fuel cell…
Assuming efficiency of ~4 miles per kWh (on the high end of current EV efficiency), that’s a 200kWh battery. charging that in 10 minutes would require 1.2MW’s of power, enough to power about 50-100 homes simultaneously. Now imagine a handful of vehicles charging simultaneously, consuming as much power as a small city.
Spread it over enough people and it’s the same energy. For one person it’s a much shorter charge. Over a population with random charging times it’s the same consumption off the grid. The problem then becomes a distribution issue, not a production issue.
Likely these kind of chargers will be expensive and at supercharge stations. Homes will use lower over longer.periods as it’s rare you want to pop home for 10 minutes needing a full charge.
This is a big step forward, no matter how you look at it.
It might be also useful for excess storage when we have wind and solar energy that the grid doesnt need. Being able to do so rapidly will mean a smaller array of batteries required for grod storage.
It’s a big step forward IF it enters production.
As thevenin links elsewhere in the thread they’ve been promising this is “any day now” since 2010
I’m not sure people are going to be interested in paying for megawatt-capable chargers, anyway. There’s a couple of sites near me that have old 50 kW chargers and new 250 kW chargers, and have higher prices on the 250s. I expect that sort of thing to continue - providers are going to want to cover their costs and higher powered chargers are more expensive to buy and operate.
Assuming efficiency of ~4 miles per kWh (on the high end of current EV efficiency)
Why should we assume this?
I’m getting close to 8m/kwh on the high-end. Realistically, I’m ranging between 3.6 to 5 m/kwh. But when I drove for Uber, I did 200 miles using only 34.1 kwh, I drove slow, and it was mostly city driving. So I could only need 137 kwh for 800 miles. Still prohibitively unrealistic to charge in 10 minutes. It’s about 1.4 MWatts to charge from empty for 10 minutes.
the charge power needed for the 200KWH is not 1.2 MWatts for 10 minutes, it’s 2MWatts. Mostly because you can only charge fast at lower percentage.
That would be impractical even for fleet vehicles.
Unless they’re also going to announce the development of nuclear fusion in order to provide the necessary cheap energy, then I don’t think this is going anywhere.
If the discharge rate can be equally speedy, it just means any “gas pump” will include the same battery tech, load itself slowly, then unload into the car quickly. Neat way to solve the “renewables are intermittent” problem.
That’s a cool idea! But then what happens when I get to the “pump” right after someone else has used it
I wouldn’t want and keep burning gas till then though. With new manufacturing processes like this, delays are common, and it’ll likely be pricey at first. I’m excited, but don’t use this as an excuse to keep burning gas.
