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saw a video on "3D current collector" potentially increasing EV range by 30% and was wondering if that was legit and if it can pair with a Sodium Ion Battery
Hi Matt, promising stuff. How is the world of mining minerals coming along and making it more eco friendly? Less intens on the use of pfas and other pollutants? Regards, Radboud
From the study referenced, "In this study, Mg and Sc are chosen as dopants in P2-Na0.67Ni0.33Mn0.67O2, and both have found to positively impact the cycling stability, but influence the high voltage regime in different ways." I was talking Magnesium and the dopants used. Here's the full study if you're interested: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202309842. Also, I include a citations link in the description of each video (here's this video's script/citations): undecidedmf.com/top-5-new-battery-technologies-to-follow-in-2024/
Except the batteries from northvolt and from the study he mentioned completely negate that advantage by using Nickel and Cobalt. How is that even an improvement over LFP, a chemistry that uses only Lithium and also gets better energy density? Maybe CATL batteires are better but I dont even know at this point.
Solid State Batteries are right around the corner for cars. Toyota has already designed a car that has a 900 mile range per charge. It charges fast in under 15 minutes and will NOT catch fire. Toyota plans to offer these cars in the next few years.
I'm just sad it's not commercializing into home use. I only need like 10kWh to power my house overnight. I could probably skate by with 6 if I needed. If I had a large enough sodium battery 🔋 I could probably recharge even on a cloudy day with the right roof array. Sigh
Sodium Ion honestly makes me extremely excited for stationary storage bases. Between Starlink, solar perovskites, and sodium ion home batteries I’m getting more and more excited to build a cabin in the mountains someday everyday.
One of the biggest drawbacks to large scale desalination (other than the power required) has always been what to do with the concentrated salt solution after the potable water has been made. It would need further purification, but those Sodium Battery plants might be a good candidate for using the salts.
There's lithium in seawater too - and pretty much the entire rest of the periodic system as well, at very low concentrations. Water isn't known as the "universal solvent" for nothing... :) We might not be able to fill all our lithium needs from desalination, but it could be a good start, and as you mention, we'd end up with crabloads of sodium as well... Just gotta find somewhere to get rid of all that chlorine, once we've extracted those salts. Ugh. :)
@@michiganengineer8621 I do often wonder if it would be feasible or not to just use marine drone vessels to send it out to sea and release it slowly across the course of many nautical miles, kind of streaming off the back like a salt truck. Because in theory wouldn’t the water cycle just ensure the salt content of the water is balanced? Water always eventually makes its way back to the ocean, it’s not like we feasibly truly can just delete it. So the salt would be a relatively high concentration for a short time but then go back to neutral after dissolving and being pushed around the currents, no?
I feel that it would be better to incentive finding industrial or otherwise productive uses for the waste, similar to how pigs are turned into thousands of products after they're butchered, or how sawdust and shavings from timber are repurposed. Just throwing it back into the ocean feels like sweeping dust under the rug.
For those wondering like me. The Picture for batsand at 5:00 is the heatexchanger/ controlunit. The mentioned 40m^3 are to be buried outside and connected to said exchanger
Wow! There are so many new battery "Breakthroughs" and yet we still use the same 30+ year old battery tech. I wonder, when the new amazing batteries enter the market and change the world. I have been waiting for at least 10 years now.
Cheaper batteries as long as the efficiency is good even if the energy density is not great is an interesting thing for prototyping, DIY, off-grid home applications!
Indeed. I worry about chasing higher energy density as it just makes failures a bigger problem due to more energy released. Having a bigger less energy dense battery makes more sense for stationary storage, as you have a better chance of isolating individual cells that fail from setting the whole battery on fire. Personally I just don't feel comfortable with current technologies for home storage, particularly in dense neighbourhoods where a single house fire could spread quickly. Switching to technologies that don't self ignite or release toxic gases is all very well, but it getting insanely hot will still start a fire or couse you major burns if its a phone in your pocket, or some of the more worrying things like rings that might be hard to remove fast enough.
I have always been keen on the idea of using old mines for pumped hydro. Both surface and underground operations...... If you are able to get an underground mine that is close to closing, they would be perfect for pumped hydro. Obviously the size of the openings underground, depth etc will effect the capacity.
@@broadsword6650 Just a guess, but it's probably because they need overhead access to the battery units to lift them in and out of place with a crane. Can't do that if there's a roof over them.
Thanks for the video. Please do not use salt interchangeably with sodium. There aren't the same. Sodium is an alkali metal while a salt is a product of a neutralization reaction between an acid and a base. The salt you are referring to (or common salt) is sodium chloride and it's one of numerous kinds of salts. The statement "salt is less energy dense than lithium" should be replaced with "sodium ion batteries are less energy dense than equivalent lithium ion batteries". The word "equivalent" is also of critical importance because both sodium and lithium batteries come in various chemistries, forms and nuances that can affect their energy densities.
The electric eel is a rechargable sodium-ion battery that is self replicating, safe for the environment, with zero fire incidents over it's long development. Amazon currently carries several versions but shockingly there's no competition despite it's high potential.
Enovix is already ramping production of a pure Si anode battery, they are at least a year ahead of Amprius and their batteries are much cheaper. Sila only makes a Si anode material that they sell to battery OEMs, they have no plans to make their own batteries from what I've heard them say.
On Tuesday I talked to an Amprius VP who is in charge of building their new factory in Brighton near Denver International Airport. Once their factory - which is huge - is fully operational they'll be producing at considerable scale and their target market - drones and surveillance satellites - are hungry for their products.
@@mv80401 When will they be in full production, what customers have they lined up, what is the energy density and cost per Watt hour, how many cycles can it do before degradation starts are some of the questions I'd love to ask him.
Some time ago I read about this thing called Pumped Heat, which stores energy as heat but by the compression of a gas to create that heat and an expansion side to create a cold side. So here it isnt really storing energy as heat, but more accurately as a temperature difference. Its a closed system too
This is huge ! Removing lithium from the equation is a game changer in long term storage. Obviously were years away from out of the box residential systems. In 5 to 10 years things could really be different. Its very exciting to me. Ty Matt as always ! Looking forward to the follow ups on this one
I'm looking forward to thermal batteries for home/business use. Low BTU models have existed for thousands of years but denser storage sounds wonderful.
Yeah that monster place was a Kmart distribution center. Then a Costco center. It is now empty. I was in there during Kmart days for electrical work on the crazy conveyor system. If that conveyor is still there, Amprius is gonna have a ton to do to clear it out before tooling up and moving in.
Planned for 2025. ASAP is what is needed to get to GWH production over the Calf facility. Cells are mostly used for various aircraft due to their high energy density (and cost).
@@hallkbrdz Yes. I have been in contact with a VP at Amprius and he indicated the designs for the interior layout/construction were almost complete. That was about a month ago. What was funny was during the planning and zoning stage with the city, residents were complaining that they would end up with lithium in their water. Mostly because of its close location to one of the cities water treatment facility (across the street). Which, is of course, complete nonsense.
Matt the most challenging metals in battery are copper and aluminium and steel for the casing. For NMC Nickel is important for LFP Iron is the replacement. The lithium is 10% by weight of these other metals. This is the same for Sodium as a replacement for lithium.
@@francois7355 China 'copied' the LFP technology from a Canadian patented process. This patent prevented development in the US and Asia because they have laws.
@@johndinsdale1707 interesting to know that, thanks for the info. I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, I saw a VOX video where they spoke about the import bans from China, I understand there is politics involved. But letting the average consumer suffer by hindering their access to better technology... Excuse my poor English, it's not my first language.
Re Sand for thermal storage. We are rapidly running out of building sand, used in concrete and mortar; actually, really rapidly. The good news is, that thermal can use any old sand, like desert sand, which is of no use in construction, and is abundant.
Great video! For some reason the use of the word "salt" instead of Sodium bothered me =D There is no reason to consider Sodium more or less of a salt than Lithium from a chemical perspective.
Excellent overview piece. The only issue I have is in the silicon battery (silicon anode) segment it focuses on three albeit fine companies (Amprius, OneD, Sila) but overlooks the leader in supplying silicon anode material - Group14 Technologies. Group14 is about to commission the first "EV scale" silicon anode plant in the world with its JV with SK in Korea (2,000 MT/yr. or 10 GWh) and has two more of the same scale under constructoin in Moses Lake, WA that will come on line in the next 6 months. No one else is even close to that reality in manufacturing scale-up.
@UndecidedMF12 I sent you an email with more detail than it makes sense to list here. If it did not get through, please let me know here and I'll resend.
ESS Inc, in Wilsonville Oregon makes iron flow batteries and is in production now. They have I believe several dozen 500 kWh units in place with utilities and commercial users now...
I use PCMs with compute to heat my house. Much higher energy density because it incorporates phase change than Rondo's Bricks (My wife works for Rondo) and the PCMs can be 'tuned' with nano metal particles to hit the right temperature band. Finally, some thermal discussion @undecidedMF. 'bout time. 🤨
There was a recent article on how MIT has come up with a way to make concrete a battery. That will be pretty cool to have every house have a battery built in to it.
Everything in battery adoption comes down to high quality and high volume manufacturing. Quality to convince buyers and volume to reach economies of scale
I like the idea of largeish batteries for my 1970s Finnish home. I still have the 3 sqm steel oil storage using one room in my garage. I'm using heatpumps only now so it's just sitting there...
Living off grid I would be very much interested in sand batteries. Both for heating the house, hot water and electricity. So I have my eyes out for Batsand in Latvia.
at 08:04 you mention the dimension of the smaller unit of batsand as 40m3. Their website indicates Size L x W x D 140 cm x 72 cm x 55 cm (0.55m3), Weight 142 Kgs.
The best thing about thermal batterys is that you dont need a battery at all, only a charging system as you can use the dirt sand and rock underneath structuures (like your house) as the thermal medium. Not nearly as efficient without isolation but it will hold enormus amounts of energy. And im sure on new structures insulation can be build in and the batterys themselves can be used as structural elements.
Not all solid state batteries are the same. Quantumscape's SSB has lithium metal anode and Solid Power's SSB has silicon anode. According to Solid Power's presentation, they are in an early R&D stage of developing their own lithium metal anode SSB which could be years away. Perhaps this is why Solid Power's market cap is only 1/10th of Quantumscape's. It would be good to see a video that compares different technologies of SSB's.
Sandy Munro's podcast featured the SAKUU printed dry battery that saves up to 25 percent manufacturing cost and material with improved performance and safety on the best lithium battery cells. I missed that in your report.
if you look at the periodic table you will notice that Sodium is in the same column (2) as Lithium. It has similar properties, it also blows up in water, but it is much more abundant, and its properties are better understood. Also, the news this week were the magical golf balls on the floor of the ocean that generate electricity and make oxygen.
One thing that has to be considered when moving energy from solar or wind to a thermal source is the requirement for water. To convert heat to electricity requires a steam driven turbine. A 240MW combined cycle power plant in my area uses 1.25 million gallons of water per day to generate power. It affects where this type of storage should go: only where water is plentiful.
Do you happen to know what kind of batteries the engineers at the Parallel company are using for their autonomous rail cars? Have you done an episode on autonomous rail cars yet?
What about storing energy as compressed gas? There was a concept a few years ago where a company was offering compressed gas powered forklifts. You get an air compressor that would fill up bottles and then you put that bottle onto the truck in the same way you do for LPG powered trucks.
You missed another thermal energy storage method, and that is to cover a swimming pool that have been so readily abundant and use that water as the medium. It's been tested in Arizona and Florida.
Sodium Ion seems like the most achievable but I remember reading a science journal that mentioned an Aluminum batter tech that seems like no one is taking about.
Iron Air seems more energy dense still... glad too see all the science getting done too. Those carbon dioxide compressed air batteries looked good too.
Lithium is not rare, it is in fact very plentiful but because of its reactability and solubility is not found in nuggets like gold and similar metals. It is ten times more abundant than tin.
Yeah, and the big mines like Greenbushes in australia are in the middle of nowhere. It was scarce, prices went high, so people went out and found more - that's how it works. Prices are now back to 2021 levels
@@BaneWilliams - perhaps a different reference frame, Lithium is more abundant than Nitrogen yet we extract 140 million tonnes of Nitrogen a year but only 35 thousand tonnes of Lithium.
@@pooroldpedro Yes many mines are shuttered not because they run out of material but because another mine has undercut them and they can no longer mine economicaly.
@@GruffSillyGoat Nitrogen is extracted directly from air, and its still much easier to extract it compared to CO2 for example because it conviniently makes up almost 80% of it. Mining relies on deposits that often have orders of magnitude higher concentrations of needed resources compared to the crust average. Carbon for example is maybe at 250 ppm, only 5-10x more abundant than Lithium, and yet we can mine it at 99% purity in absolutely massive quantities because some biological process neatly concentrated it into coal deposits hundreds of millions of years ago. But then why do we see global lithium resources at only ~90MT instead of like 10GT? Perhaps theres more to geology than just abundances?
Great video as always Matt. There is so much going on in the battery world it must be hard to keep track of it. Samsung just announced this week their SSB for mass production in 2027 with several big car OEMs on board to use them.
Great info. Good level of detail while still understandable by the average educated person. I have worked in some of the traditional power industry fields and as an amateur tinkerer I’ve played with several power generation technologies like concentrated Solar power and Hydrogen. The biggest problem with hydrogen I have found is that extracting hydrogen takes about as much power as it produces. Sorry for the long intro. Are there any studies on using hydrogen as a power storage medium instead of a power source? There is very little power loss. When collecting Hydrogen using electrolysis. And then feeding it back through a fuel cell on demand.
I read about nuclear waste being used as very-long-life batteries. I believe I remember the article saying they couldn't be made bigger than AA batteries at present. The promise seems almost too good to be true, but then I'm noticing that science, imagination and the rate of knowledge growth has added the "almost" to "too good to be true" so I hope.
those batteries have amazing engergy density, but what they lack is power density. so if you need a little bit of energy for a long time they are perfect. if you need a lot of energy fast, they are useless. so i excpect them to be staples in some areas, but be fairly limited in aplication.
Concentrating Solar Plants store their energy as heat, it's incredibly efficient because none of the source sunlight is wasted, it all gets used to heat the salt medium. And Moltex Energy's Safe Salt Reactor does exactly the same thing, melts a vat of salt with the heat from the fission. This means that even though it's a Small Modular Reactor, it's low GWt output is used to heat a salt vat when power demands are low and when demands get too high, above what the reactor can produce, the output is boosted by combining the heat in the salt vat with the maximum output of the reactor
one type of battery im interested in is hemp batteries. you take hemp and bake it at 350F for like 24 hours iirc. its basically a regular li-ion battery afaik otherwise. but by baking hemp like that you create carbon sheets that can then be used for the membrane in batteries. and its already being mass produced in wisconsin.
Not to pull the rug out, but I wouldn’t trust him for any of these technical topics. He happily promoted that scam solid-state battery a few weeks ago, and still hasn’t done anything to attract it even though it’s been proven to use a standard lithium battery.
This is a great video. I used to listen to Dr Bill Wittenberg on KGO (a SF based talk radio show). I’m pretty sure he mentioned having built some kind of an underground heat storage on his property. Not sure if it was heated with wood or some other means. Probably used the heat to heat his home hydronically. (At least that would be my preference.) Anyway this video reminded me of his comment. It shouldn’t be too hard to build but determining the size needed would require some engineering.
I am looking k forward to the salt batteries. Would be amazing to heat my own home with that tech. Easy, safe and almost lasting forever. In my eyes ideal for warming homes
Pointing out the water heater in every home is a thermal energy storage battery blew my mind. I wonder how difficult it would be to concentrate solar into a off the shelf water heater and use it's heat to warm a building through the night? Further if the concentration of the solar was a roof top system it'd cool during the day by diverting energy that otherwise would have gone down into the building.
It's already been around, for decades (centries actually but not in modern form). It's pretty universal as well, in country's with a lot of sunlight for example you'll often see a silver metal canisters on the roofs to heat water than then supports heating and washing needs. In more northern climes your find glass tube or matt panel systems doing similar. Modern versions also use heat pumps to increase the rate of energy extraction from the panels into water based thermal stores. Cooling is a little more difficult as you have to have a temperature difference to convect the heat away from the roof, often though the outside temperature is higher than the inside temperature so this tends not to work. Although, there are systems that use white panels with a special radiative paint that cools buildings by radiating infrared light off into space.
@@GruffSillyGoat Yea it's also similar to the concept of a boiler room making hot water to distribute to buildings, but that tends to be powered by fossil fuels. But it shows that we have already thought about hot water distribution into radiators to heat buildings. I've just never thought about catching sunlight to skip the nasty fossil fuels for this. I mean, I've also seen people just line up a bunch of black hoses on their roof then connect that to a shower, for a simple solar heated shower..
You can rank thermal storage materials by dividing their specific heat by their specific cost, ie kJ/kg / $/kg giving kJ/$. Personally, I think phase change materials are the way to go, because melting a material requires lots of energy.
Not new tech but LFP/Lifepo4 batteries are starting to hit stride. Their cost is down to the point where they're price competitive with lead acid batteries on $/wh. They're rapidly being implemented in RVs, house/solar backup battery banks, EVs. Good for tons of cycles, won't blow up or burn like some other lithium batteries, and getting cheaper by the minute.
Do The TES Batteries Required High Grade Construction Sand For It To Be Economical? If So Our Supply Is Rapidly Running Out, This Is Primarily Due To Construction However And We Could Just Switch To Different Building Materials
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saw a video on "3D current collector" potentially increasing EV range by 30% and was wondering if that was legit and if it can pair with a Sodium Ion Battery
"an eye on"
Hi Matt, promising stuff. How is the world of mining minerals coming along and making it more eco friendly? Less intens on the use of pfas and other pollutants? Regards, Radboud
2:50 - Manganese, not magnesium.(?)
From the study referenced, "In this study, Mg and Sc are chosen as dopants in P2-Na0.67Ni0.33Mn0.67O2, and both have found to positively impact the cycling stability, but influence the high voltage regime in different ways." I was talking Magnesium and the dopants used. Here's the full study if you're interested: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202309842. Also, I include a citations link in the description of each video (here's this video's script/citations): undecidedmf.com/top-5-new-battery-technologies-to-follow-in-2024/
0:33 "So, what kinds of batteries am I keeping an ion". hahaha, I see what you did there. 😜
@@ChrispyNut Nerds 🙄
@@ChrispyNut ikr 🤣
@@kh9242that's rude
I heard that too.
Came to say this lol
Sodium Ion tech is still the one that I'm the most excited about. Safe batteries that are easy to make with abundant materials? Hell yeah.
Perfect for grid storage. Loooong lifespan is crucial here
I'd love cheap battery storage for my house.
Except the batteries from northvolt and from the study he mentioned completely negate that advantage by using Nickel and Cobalt. How is that even an improvement over LFP, a chemistry that uses only Lithium and also gets better energy density? Maybe CATL batteires are better but I dont even know at this point.
Solid State Batteries are right around the corner for cars. Toyota has already designed a car that has a 900 mile range per charge. It charges fast in under 15 minutes and will NOT catch fire. Toyota plans to offer these cars in the next few years.
I'm just sad it's not commercializing into home use.
I only need like 10kWh to power my house overnight. I could probably skate by with 6 if I needed.
If I had a large enough sodium battery 🔋 I could probably recharge even on a cloudy day with the right roof array.
Sigh
Sodium Ion honestly makes me extremely excited for stationary storage bases. Between Starlink, solar perovskites, and sodium ion home batteries I’m getting more and more excited to build a cabin in the mountains someday everyday.
One of the biggest drawbacks to large scale desalination (other than the power required) has always been what to do with the concentrated salt solution after the potable water has been made. It would need further purification, but those Sodium Battery plants might be a good candidate for using the salts.
There's lithium in seawater too - and pretty much the entire rest of the periodic system as well, at very low concentrations. Water isn't known as the "universal solvent" for nothing... :) We might not be able to fill all our lithium needs from desalination, but it could be a good start, and as you mention, we'd end up with crabloads of sodium as well...
Just gotta find somewhere to get rid of all that chlorine, once we've extracted those salts. Ugh. :)
@@lennyvalentin6485 Swimming pools
@@michiganengineer8621 I do often wonder if it would be feasible or not to just use marine drone vessels to send it out to sea and release it slowly across the course of many nautical miles, kind of streaming off the back like a salt truck. Because in theory wouldn’t the water cycle just ensure the salt content of the water is balanced? Water always eventually makes its way back to the ocean, it’s not like we feasibly truly can just delete it. So the salt would be a relatively high concentration for a short time but then go back to neutral after dissolving and being pushed around the currents, no?
I feel that it would be better to incentive finding industrial or otherwise productive uses for the waste, similar to how pigs are turned into thousands of products after they're butchered, or how sawdust and shavings from timber are repurposed. Just throwing it back into the ocean feels like sweeping dust under the rug.
@@cameronf3343 In theory it should
For those wondering like me. The Picture for batsand at 5:00 is the heatexchanger/ controlunit. The mentioned 40m^3 are to be buried outside and connected to said exchanger
Like in a pyramid for example?
Wow! There are so many new battery "Breakthroughs" and yet we still use the same 30+ year old battery tech. I wonder, when the new amazing batteries enter the market and change the world. I have been waiting for at least 10 years now.
If MAtt is "reporting" on something, you can be alsmost sure it is at least one of the following things: shill talk, vaporware or outright scam.
Because current big players do everything to maintain status quo - any breakthrough means end of monopoly.
Cheaper batteries as long as the efficiency is good even if the energy density is not great is an interesting thing for prototyping, DIY, off-grid home applications!
Indeed. I worry about chasing higher energy density as it just makes failures a bigger problem due to more energy released. Having a bigger less energy dense battery makes more sense for stationary storage, as you have a better chance of isolating individual cells that fail from setting the whole battery on fire. Personally I just don't feel comfortable with current technologies for home storage, particularly in dense neighbourhoods where a single house fire could spread quickly.
Switching to technologies that don't self ignite or release toxic gases is all very well, but it getting insanely hot will still start a fire or couse you major burns if its a phone in your pocket, or some of the more worrying things like rings that might be hard to remove fast enough.
Yea! A paper, where I am a co-author, appears in the YT video!!!
At what point in video?
@@joep5170At 2:05
@@joep5170 2:06
I always liked gravitational storage.
Whether 2 lakes at different levels or a crane lifting and lowering huge concrete blocks :)
Pumped-Storage - it's been a thing for literally decades, half a century in fact.
I have always been keen on the idea of using old mines for pumped hydro. Both surface and underground operations...... If you are able to get an underground mine that is close to closing, they would be perfect for pumped hydro. Obviously the size of the openings underground, depth etc will effect the capacity.
'what batteries are you keeping an ion" killed me - bravo
0:32 “Keeping an ion” 😂
You beat me to it. Such a try hard. 😝
👍
@@ChrispyNut As revenge you could resort to a salt and battery.
@@feraudyh But then you could be brought up on charges.
@@farmergiles1065 I'm positive he'd put up some resistance to that, resulting in a negative outcome.
Though I'd remain relatively neutral.
I came looking for this comment! Glad I wasn't the only one!
Those drone shots of battery farms at the start of the video make me wonder why they aren't roofed in solar panels.
I know right. Most of the big factories and distribution centers in my area have panels on them. It almost seems like a no brainer.
Maybe the roof couldn't take it or there were some problems with regulations
@@broadsword6650 Just a guess, but it's probably because they need overhead access to the battery units to lift them in and out of place with a crane. Can't do that if there's a roof over them.
@@richardmillhousenixon The batteries appear to be in metal containers, though - so either they could be slid out, or the panels could be moveable.
@@broadsword6650 They just pull the entire container out.
Thanks for the video. Please do not use salt interchangeably with sodium. There aren't the same. Sodium is an alkali metal while a salt is a product of a neutralization reaction between an acid and a base. The salt you are referring to (or common salt) is sodium chloride and it's one of numerous kinds of salts. The statement "salt is less energy dense than lithium" should be replaced with "sodium ion batteries are less energy dense than equivalent lithium ion batteries". The word "equivalent" is also of critical importance because both sodium and lithium batteries come in various chemistries, forms and nuances that can affect their energy densities.
Well said, I was confused.
Very useful for home power backup system is sodium ion battery
The electric eel is a rechargable sodium-ion battery that is self replicating, safe for the environment, with zero fire incidents over it's long development.
Amazon currently carries several versions but shockingly there's no competition despite it's high potential.
Its green but has a high consumption rate, and is temperamental.
Enovix is already ramping production of a pure Si anode battery, they are at least a year ahead of Amprius and their batteries are much cheaper. Sila only makes a Si anode material that they sell to battery OEMs, they have no plans to make their own batteries from what I've heard them say.
Yeah, he’s done a bunch of battery videos yet has never mentioned Enovix, wonder why?
On Tuesday I talked to an Amprius VP who is in charge of building their new factory in Brighton near Denver International Airport. Once their factory - which is huge - is fully operational they'll be producing at considerable scale and their target market - drones and surveillance satellites - are hungry for their products.
@@mv80401 When will they be in full production, what customers have they lined up, what is the energy density and cost per Watt hour, how many cycles can it do before degradation starts are some of the questions I'd love to ask him.
5:44 The way Americans say "squirrel" as one syllable will never not be funny to me
Sqwerrrrrrrl
@@AGeekTragedy As compared to "squiddle," amirite??😁
Not all of us do! For this American it's skwur-uhl
@@evanstein3011stop it, you’re embarrassing me. -Another American
My foster daughter calls them "Disney Rats"
Excellent report and research, well done.
Some time ago I read about this thing called Pumped Heat, which stores energy as heat but by the compression of a gas to create that heat and an expansion side to create a cold side. So here it isnt really storing energy as heat, but more accurately as a temperature difference. Its a closed system too
that's just the refrigeration cycle used by heatpumps\fridges\air conditioners.
This is huge ! Removing lithium from the equation is a game changer in long term storage. Obviously were years away from out of the box residential systems. In 5 to 10 years things could really be different. Its very exciting to me. Ty Matt as always ! Looking forward to the follow ups on this one
Great overview - as a mining executive, that also holds various lithium projects, this development is critical to watch and understand
Heh, you're keeping an ion batteries for us. Much appreciated.
I'm looking forward to thermal batteries for home/business use. Low BTU models have existed for thousands of years but denser storage sounds wonderful.
The Amprius facility in Colorado is not in production yet. They haven't even moved in at this time. I drive by it daily.
I was wondering about this. He must have been confused on that point.
Yeah that monster place was a Kmart distribution center. Then a Costco center. It is now empty. I was in there during Kmart days for electrical work on the crazy conveyor system.
If that conveyor is still there, Amprius is gonna have a ton to do to clear it out before tooling up and moving in.
Planned for 2025. ASAP is what is needed to get to GWH production over the Calf facility. Cells are mostly used for various aircraft due to their high energy density (and cost).
@@hallkbrdz Yes. I have been in contact with a VP at Amprius and he indicated the designs for the interior layout/construction were almost complete. That was about a month ago.
What was funny was during the planning and zoning stage with the city, residents were complaining that they would end up with lithium in their water. Mostly because of its close location to one of the cities water treatment facility (across the street).
Which, is of course, complete nonsense.
Matt the most challenging metals in battery are copper and aluminium and steel for the casing. For NMC Nickel is important for LFP Iron is the replacement. The lithium is 10% by weight of these other metals. This is the same for Sodium as a replacement for lithium.
LFP is all we have in my country, Lithium is old news and worse for the environment. I'm perplexed why the US doesn't have LFP batteries.
@@francois7355 China 'copied' the LFP technology from a Canadian patented process. This patent prevented development in the US and Asia because they have laws.
@@johndinsdale1707 interesting to know that, thanks for the info.
I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, I saw a VOX video where they spoke about the import bans from China, I understand there is politics involved. But letting the average consumer suffer by hindering their access to better technology...
Excuse my poor English, it's not my first language.
Thanx. Besides the Sodium battery, I'm waiting to the iron-air battery by Form Energy.
I love your optimism. The industry needs optimism to succeed. Keep it up!
Re Sand for thermal storage. We are rapidly running out of building sand, used in concrete and mortar; actually, really rapidly. The good news is, that thermal can use any old sand, like desert sand, which is of no use in construction, and is abundant.
Quite well researched! Thank you. Just subscribed!
EOS Energy Enterprises' zinc based batteries look good for long duration storage solutions, worth keeping an eye on
Old , simple ways are sometimes still viable. Water cisterns in basement for storing rainwater. Pumping through PEX in floors, as heat or cooling.
6:01 Why is a low specific heat good? Wouldn't you want a high specific heat so it can absorb more heat per given unit of mass/volume?
Great video! For some reason the use of the word "salt" instead of Sodium bothered me =D There is no reason to consider Sodium more or less of a salt than Lithium from a chemical perspective.
I can't wait to upgrade my electric moped to Mr. Fusion!! Thanks Matt!
Thank so much
I keep an ion Energiestro who makes VOSS to store energy in flywheels. Looks promising for individual house storage.
Excellent overview piece. The only issue I have is in the silicon battery (silicon anode) segment it focuses on three albeit fine companies (Amprius, OneD, Sila) but overlooks the leader in supplying silicon anode material - Group14 Technologies. Group14 is about to commission the first "EV scale" silicon anode plant in the world with its JV with SK in Korea (2,000 MT/yr. or 10 GWh) and has two more of the same scale under constructoin in Moses Lake, WA that will come on line in the next 6 months. No one else is even close to that reality in manufacturing scale-up.
@UndecidedMF12 I sent you an email with more detail than it makes sense to list here. If it did not get through, please let me know here and I'll resend.
ESS Inc, in Wilsonville Oregon makes iron flow batteries and is in production now. They have I believe several dozen 500 kWh units in place with utilities and commercial users now...
I use PCMs with compute to heat my house. Much higher energy density because it incorporates phase change than Rondo's Bricks (My wife works for Rondo) and the PCMs can be 'tuned' with nano metal particles to hit the right temperature band. Finally, some thermal discussion @undecidedMF. 'bout time.
🤨
What I like about the BatSand is that I can have a matching power source for my BatLight.
There was a recent article on how MIT has come up with a way to make concrete a battery. That will be pretty cool to have every house have a battery built in to it.
Definitely a lot to be excited about and hopefully more of these come to market soon
I'm keeping my eyes on Amprius Tech, Natron Energy, and SES AI.
Everything in battery adoption comes down to high quality and high volume manufacturing. Quality to convince buyers and volume to reach economies of scale
I like the idea of largeish batteries for my 1970s Finnish home. I still have the 3 sqm steel oil storage using one room in my garage. I'm using heatpumps only now so it's just sitting there...
Living off grid I would be very much interested in sand batteries. Both for heating the house, hot water and electricity.
So I have my eyes out for Batsand in Latvia.
at 08:04 you mention the dimension of the smaller unit of batsand as 40m3. Their website indicates Size L x W x D 140 cm x 72 cm x 55 cm (0.55m3), Weight 142 Kgs.
The best thing about thermal batterys is that you dont need a battery at all, only a charging system as you can use the dirt sand and rock underneath structuures (like your house) as the thermal medium. Not nearly as efficient without isolation but it will hold enormus amounts of energy. And im sure on new structures insulation can be build in and the batterys themselves can be used as structural elements.
Not all solid state batteries are the same. Quantumscape's SSB has lithium metal anode and Solid Power's SSB has silicon anode. According to Solid Power's presentation, they are in an early R&D stage of developing their own lithium metal anode SSB which could be years away. Perhaps this is why Solid Power's market cap is only 1/10th of Quantumscape's. It would be good to see a video that compares different technologies of SSB's.
Sandy Munro's podcast featured the SAKUU printed dry battery that saves up to 25 percent manufacturing cost and material with improved performance and safety on the best lithium battery cells. I missed that in your report.
if you look at the periodic table you will notice that Sodium is in the same column (2) as Lithium.
It has similar properties, it also blows up in water, but it is much more abundant, and its properties are better understood.
Also, the news this week were the magical golf balls on the floor of the ocean that generate electricity and make oxygen.
Steffes ETS has been making off peak brick heaters starting in the 1960's and I use them to heat my place. There bricks are better than sand.
Thank you and have a great week.
love the new intro!
Thanks for sharing this Matt. Cheers.
Silicon sounds like it will be 1st to market on a large scale. I'm really interested in the solid state and Sodium Ion myself.
One thing that has to be considered when moving energy from solar or wind to a thermal source is the requirement for water. To convert heat to electricity requires a steam driven turbine. A 240MW combined cycle power plant in my area uses 1.25 million gallons of water per day to generate power. It affects where this type of storage should go: only where water is plentiful.
Do you happen to know what kind of batteries the engineers at the Parallel company are using for their autonomous rail cars? Have you done an episode on autonomous rail cars yet?
so many breakthroughs so much hype
What about storing energy as compressed gas? There was a concept a few years ago where a company was offering compressed gas powered forklifts. You get an air compressor that would fill up bottles and then you put that bottle onto the truck in the same way you do for LPG powered trucks.
It takes 100 times more power to compress than what you get out... not a good thing
You missed another thermal energy storage method, and that is to cover a swimming pool that have been so readily abundant and use that water as the medium. It's been tested in Arizona and Florida.
Sodium Ion seems like the most achievable but I remember reading a science journal that mentioned an Aluminum batter tech that seems like no one is taking about.
Iron Air seems more energy dense still... glad too see all the science getting done too. Those carbon dioxide compressed air batteries looked good too.
Thanks for doing the research. Some interesting stuff in there.
I would love an update on Aluminum Sulfur batteries. They seemed to have huge potential in a not so long a time frame.
They're still in the lab and wont be out for at least 5 more years from what I last was hearing about them
Clever closing: “what batteries are you keeping an ion?” lol 🤓
Love your videos !
Lithium is not rare, it is in fact very plentiful but because of its reactability and solubility is not found in nuggets like gold and similar metals. It is ten times more abundant than tin.
Tin is considered a scarce metal, so saying it's 10 times more abundant than it isn't a good frame of reference.
Yeah, and the big mines like Greenbushes in australia are in the middle of nowhere. It was scarce, prices went high, so people went out and found more - that's how it works. Prices are now back to 2021 levels
@@BaneWilliams - perhaps a different reference frame, Lithium is more abundant than Nitrogen yet we extract 140 million tonnes of Nitrogen a year but only 35 thousand tonnes of Lithium.
@@pooroldpedro Yes many mines are shuttered not because they run out of material but because another mine has undercut them and they can no longer mine economicaly.
@@GruffSillyGoat Nitrogen is extracted directly from air, and its still much easier to extract it compared to CO2 for example because it conviniently makes up almost 80% of it. Mining relies on deposits that often have orders of magnitude higher concentrations of needed resources compared to the crust average. Carbon for example is maybe at 250 ppm, only 5-10x more abundant than Lithium, and yet we can mine it at 99% purity in absolutely massive quantities because some biological process neatly concentrated it into coal deposits hundreds of millions of years ago. But then why do we see global lithium resources at only ~90MT instead of like 10GT? Perhaps theres more to geology than just abundances?
Using waist heat from industry to heat buildings is a great way to save energy.
Very slightly seasoned, WAS what I was thinking when you mentioned doping. ;-)
Awesome pun
Salt batteries can also use a waste product of water desalination, so win/ win.
Great video as always Matt. There is so much going on in the battery world it must be hard to keep track of it. Samsung just announced this week their SSB for mass production in 2027 with several big car OEMs on board to use them.
Your videos are great! You explain all you topics so well. Thank you for your content.
I'd like to hear more about sodium sulphur tech. I understand that they have one of the highest energy densities.
Really want to see a comparison between Amprius & Graphene Manufacturing Group & a couple other top contenders for future batteries. Thanks!
Great info. Good level of detail while still understandable by the average educated person.
I have worked in some of the traditional power industry fields and as an amateur tinkerer I’ve played with several power generation technologies like concentrated Solar power and Hydrogen. The biggest problem with hydrogen I have found is that extracting hydrogen takes about as much power as it produces.
Sorry for the long intro. Are there any studies on using hydrogen as a power storage medium instead of a power source? There is very little power loss. When collecting Hydrogen using electrolysis. And then feeding it back through a fuel cell on demand.
at :58, you meant "conducive", not "conductive."
I read about nuclear waste being used as very-long-life batteries. I believe I remember the article saying they couldn't be made bigger than AA batteries at present. The promise seems almost too good to be true, but then I'm noticing that science, imagination and the rate of knowledge growth has added the "almost" to "too good to be true" so I hope.
those batteries have amazing engergy density, but what they lack is power density. so if you need a little bit of energy for a long time they are perfect. if you need a lot of energy fast, they are useless. so i excpect them to be staples in some areas, but be fairly limited in aplication.
I like the new intro!
Concentrating Solar Plants store their energy as heat, it's incredibly efficient because none of the source sunlight is wasted, it all gets used to heat the salt medium.
And Moltex Energy's Safe Salt Reactor does exactly the same thing, melts a vat of salt with the heat from the fission.
This means that even though it's a Small Modular Reactor, it's low GWt output is used to heat a salt vat when power demands are low and when demands get too high, above what the reactor can produce, the output is boosted by combining the heat in the salt vat with the maximum output of the reactor
Another great video as usual 👏
New intro song slaps, old one was good, but this one is a nice change.
one type of battery im interested in is hemp batteries. you take hemp and bake it at 350F for like 24 hours iirc. its basically a regular li-ion battery afaik otherwise. but by baking hemp like that you create carbon sheets that can then be used for the membrane in batteries. and its already being mass produced in wisconsin.
Thanks!
Thanks so much.
Not to pull the rug out, but I wouldn’t trust him for any of these technical topics. He happily promoted that scam solid-state battery a few weeks ago, and still hasn’t done anything to attract it even though it’s been proven to use a standard lithium battery.
@@Neberheim see my other comment to you about this. I’m working on a follow-up investigation.
Buying the best under $300 on the market for now. Bluetooth voltage, temp, data monitor is a plus with low voltage cutoff.
0:30 "Keeping an I-On". Nice pun.
This is a great video.
I used to listen to Dr Bill Wittenberg on KGO (a SF based talk radio show). I’m pretty sure he mentioned having built some kind of an underground heat storage on his property. Not sure if it was heated with wood or some other means. Probably used the heat to heat his home hydronically. (At least that would be my preference.) Anyway this video reminded me of his comment. It shouldn’t be too hard to build but determining the size needed would require some engineering.
All of them.
I think each of them have advantages and disadvantages.
The Thermal batteries could also recycle excess heat from industrial processes.
Eye on ION
Did you ask "What kind of batteries are you keeping an ion?" lol nice.
I am looking k forward to the salt batteries. Would be amazing to heat my own home with that tech. Easy, safe and almost lasting forever. In my eyes ideal for warming homes
I can't wait to see the label on SiB, "Please don't lick this battery".
Pointing out the water heater in every home is a thermal energy storage battery blew my mind. I wonder how difficult it would be to concentrate solar into a off the shelf water heater and use it's heat to warm a building through the night? Further if the concentration of the solar was a roof top system it'd cool during the day by diverting energy that otherwise would have gone down into the building.
It's already been around, for decades (centries actually but not in modern form). It's pretty universal as well, in country's with a lot of sunlight for example you'll often see a silver metal canisters on the roofs to heat water than then supports heating and washing needs. In more northern climes your find glass tube or matt panel systems doing similar. Modern versions also use heat pumps to increase the rate of energy extraction from the panels into water based thermal stores.
Cooling is a little more difficult as you have to have a temperature difference to convect the heat away from the roof, often though the outside temperature is higher than the inside temperature so this tends not to work. Although, there are systems that use white panels with a special radiative paint that cools buildings by radiating infrared light off into space.
@@GruffSillyGoat Yea it's also similar to the concept of a boiler room making hot water to distribute to buildings, but that tends to be powered by fossil fuels. But it shows that we have already thought about hot water distribution into radiators to heat buildings. I've just never thought about catching sunlight to skip the nasty fossil fuels for this. I mean, I've also seen people just line up a bunch of black hoses on their roof then connect that to a shower, for a simple solar heated shower..
You can rank thermal storage materials by dividing their specific heat by their specific cost, ie kJ/kg / $/kg giving kJ/$.
Personally, I think phase change materials are the way to go, because melting a material requires lots of energy.
Not new tech but LFP/Lifepo4 batteries are starting to hit stride. Their cost is down to the point where they're price competitive with lead acid batteries on $/wh. They're rapidly being implemented in RVs, house/solar backup battery banks, EVs. Good for tons of cycles, won't blow up or burn like some other lithium batteries, and getting cheaper by the minute.
If you store heat in sand, can we have a sand pit under ground in our yard, store the heat from summer and extract it in the winter via a heatpump?
Square footage is fine, but go up or down and then you can stack multiple.
Do The TES Batteries Required High Grade Construction Sand For It To Be Economical? If So Our Supply Is Rapidly Running Out, This Is Primarily Due To Construction However And We Could Just Switch To Different Building Materials