I think the new chemistries are more likely for uses like aircraft and drones, maybe some military stuff, where superior energy density is willing to pay and the addressable market is small enough for a new entrant to manage. New technologies generally never succeed by directly replacing an incumbent, they almost always start with some market not well addressed.
Yes, exactly that! Primarily it'll be high performance edge case uses that will first be willing to pay the premium for any of the novel chemistries with premium performance, such as cells with silicon anodes and solid state cells. The biggest market for batteries by far is automotive at the moment, but ESS is going to grow rapidly if governments expect to hit renewable energy targets, this is where sodium ion batteries
could potentially play a big role if they can bring down the cost enough, and that's what I've been trying to evaluate, but at the moment, every sodium ion cell I've evaluated performed worse than LFP in almost
every metric,
including price. The one thing they are a little better at is complete discharge, that's where all lithium batteries suffer dramatically but it's not a common occurrence to begin with with proper BMS so I don't see it making a big difference. Cold temperature performance is a little better too, but there are tweaks that can be done to LFP and NCM cells to improve in that regards at a higher price point as well.
The obsession with fast chargers is driven by two things:
- folks who think EVs are exactly like ICE, and so are trying to build "gas stations". Apart from a small scattering on long distance routes, this is a mistake.
- inequitable access to lower rate pervasive charging. For example, apartment dwellers or neighborhoods with no electricity available at parking spots. This is also a problem at workplaces, where they waste their money building a few fast chargers that are a nightmare to schedule instead of widely providing a few kW per outlet at ordinary parking spaces.
I don't see the continued obsession with fast charging as really building the future. It solves only a small part of the problem. Wide access to power connections, bidirectional for virtual power stations, and at places where vehicles are parked during parts of the day with the cheapest electricity, those should come ahead of 600kW charging for infrastructure build.
Agreed. Unfortunately for me, I do a lot of long distance driving, my expectation is to do a quick fill up and get back on the road as quickly as possible. That and I do haul heavy loads occasionally and drive quite a few miles offroad to my house in the middle of nowhere, so unfortunately, I don't see any EVs in my future. But for the vast majority of the people out there who only drive to commute and drive long distance trips once or twice a year, faster charging is completely unnecessary. And you're completely on point regarding few fast chargers vs having more slow chargers, standard level 2 chargers are cheap, a single level 3 charger costs as much as 20-30 level 2 chargers for the charging equipment only, the focus should be on making those ubiquitous. Unfortunately here in the US, we're quite constrained on the rest of deployment costs, i.e. installation and complying with all the safety codes; the way I see them deploying these chargers in China and other Asian countries wouldn't pass code here, but I don't necessarily see their deployments as unsafe by any means. Some of that is also dealing with the substantially higher instances of vandalism here in the US but that's a
whole different rabbit hole!
On a side note though, the super high power chargers will be absolutely necessary for the trucking industry if we're to see wide-spread adoption with commercial vehicles. For your average passenger vehicle, as I mentioned above, lithium batteries are already for most part, cheap enough, durable enough and reliable enough for the vast majority of people out there and with the exception of the longer recharge times, their performance is on par if not better than most ICE cars. But for long distance trucking, battery energy density does need to improve 3-5 times to make them competitive, and I only bring it up because, well, the trucking industy's share of air pollution is
substantially higher proportionally compared to the number of vehicles they make up on the road. If we're to be serious about reducing carbon emissions for transportation in the US, trucks definitely have to be addressed, whether it's by using batteries, or, this is where H² fuel cells could actually be a better use case!
I agree, but I think unfortunately we're in the chicken and egg scenario there. It's only going to be when the market switches over mainly to EVs that we'll see people really complaining enough to get shared parking spaces (work, apartments, townhomes) largely switched over to these "everywhere but slower" charger configurations. I know several people in apartment and townhome scenarios, and if they want an EV and not use fast chargers, they will need to deal with HOAs or other organizations that tend to make your life difficult/expensive if you challenge anything status quo. Hopefully we're not too far away from this scenario.
Oh boy, the red tape to deal with to get enough chargers for HOAs or apartments/townhomes/condos is just suffocating to say the least! Well, I guess it's not only with chargers, even with solar panels or deploying more efficient water heaters, we just have too many dang regulations to deal with!
Bi-directional is a bit of a different challenge -- they really need to figure out how to warranty (and market) batteries for those scenarios given current cycle and usage limitations. (.. Car owners used to miles and years, but not 'cycles'). I'm sure they'll overcome this but I think that's one reason this has been slow to develop.
On a side note, Tesla built the Cybertruck battery pack to support 400V or 800V via relays rather than transformers. It's basically 2 x 400V packs that can operate in parallel or series, depending on the need. Which I thought was a cool solution for enabling higher power rates without higher losses or expense.
I've tested quite a few different cells, the simple and easy way to address the bi-directional charge cycles wouldn't be all too difficult to implement and it can be handled purely by software. NCM/NCMA chemistries are routinely capable of at least 1000 full charge/discharge cycles, LFP chemistries, I see them hitting 3000-5000 cycles these days. These are full DoD cycles, which is obviously really harsh on the batteries, so if you don't discharge the battery too deep or charge it too high, you can get a lot more life out of them. Typically battery life cycles are calculated from cycling 100% DoD, from their full charge voltage rating (i.e. around 4.2-4.3v for NCM/NCMA/LCO/etc. or 3.6-3.65v for LFP) to their full discharge rating (around 3.0v for NCM/NCMA/LCO/etc. to 2.5v for LFP). If you charge up to only 90% instead of the full 100%, you can easily get another 20-30% cycle life out of the cells, and if you cycle between 80% charge to 20% charge, for most chemistries, you can often triple the cycles (if not more!). So sacrificing 40% of the capacity to get 3 times the charge cycles, you'd still end up with more usable power, say, for a 100kWh pack with 1000 cycles, instead of 100,000kWh cycled, 60kWh x 3000 cycles for 180,000kWh cycled. For technical people, it wouldn't be hard to understand the difference and as long as the bi-directional system can be configured to set discharge and charge points, it wouldn't be too difficult to have an EV provide a good amount of power for home use while not degrading the battery too rapidly. Going from 1000 cycles to 3000 cycles would mean nearly 10 years of service as a backup/renewable power source for your home if the home is configured with solar or wind or some other renewable energy source, in addition to its use as the battery for the car, that seems like a pretty decent deal. But even for bi-directional, the bigger issue I see at the moment is cost with the current implementations offered, for example Ford with their Charge Station Pro and Home Integration System charges over $4000 for their hardware alone, not including installation or any additional costs if a breakout panel is needed. With LFP chemistry, 2000-3000 cycles seems to be the bare minimum these days, I've run across cells already capable of 4000-6000 cycles or more. And LTO is easily 20000+ cycles though the energy density and cost is not attractive by any means!
As for the 400v/800v, GM Ultium based cars had the capability of switching between voltages earlier than Tesla, actually Tesla was rather
hesitant to even consider 800v!
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