The 'drill, baby drill' & 'let's bring nuclear back' crowd are going to hate this, but once again renewables+storage are doing what they can never do; bringing prices down to create the cheapest energy source ever.
BYD has already brought the price of mini-SUVs and sedan cars down to < $10,000 & 15,000. If this tech can be made to work for car batteries, they will be even cheaper.
The cost of renewables+batteries keeps falling every year, and this is another sign that the trend has years left to run. If the USA had the cheapest solar & batteries being used in China today, it could power 80% of its electricity grid from solar power alone, cost-competitively with natural gas.
This also illustrates another trend. The 21st-century center of gravity for energy science & technology is firmly in China. This was discovered in China, and it will be commercialized in China.
Chinese researchers claim to have developed a lab method to fully recharge old lithium batteries, potentially making them infinitely rechargeable—though commercial viability remains unproven.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
9 Comments
>[…] though he says the market is likely to be small because the lifespan of an EV battery can be as long as 15 years. It will also require battery packs that are designed in a way to allow for injections of the electrolyte, he notes.
Could potentially become useful in 20 years, good to know.
Not sure why you’re against nuclear. If we had implemented more nuclear instead of wishing for research to magically pop out a solution for batteries, we’d already have working plants instead of relying on decades old power plants
Humanitys refusal to take up nuclear power for the past 90 years in favour of coal, oil and natural gas is the actual reason that humanity has destroyed the environment. Literally if everything else was the same but we had replaced all power generation with nuclear we’d probably be under 1C of warming if not even lower compared to 1.5c now.
What’s wrong with bringing nuclear back? I think people want cheap energy. They don’t really care how we get there
Great (if true) for EVs and what not.
I still find it extremely unlikely lithium based solutions will be in anyway useful for large scale grid applications.
For EVs this is almost pointless, luckily: LFP batteries can last 2000+ cycles before reaching 80% original capacity with good batches being able to push 2500 before the threshold gets reached. Even on an extremely low end 250km range car its more than HALF A MILLION KILOMETERS before not even having a useless car but one that still have 200km of usable range: even if pushed hard with frequent fast charges and abused by driving it like Vin Diesel under cocaine all the time which could easily half the battery life span, at 25000km/years thats TEN YEARS before reaching that stage. On a decent 450km range car driven normally, at 25000km/years that’s **36 years** before reaching the point when your car… still has 360 km of range.
EV battery life span is not even a factor to consider anymore if LFP is the chemistry involved: the rest of the car will most likely have reach the point of unsustainable usage well before the cells will be considered for a regeneration process.
I‘m all for renewables and China is indeed kicking our ass in a lot of ways but I do think it’s slightly misleading to point out how much cheaper Chinese batteries and vehicles and tech are, without noting that a lot of the cost savings is due to China having labor rights and working conditions that in many cases are about a half-step above “slavery”.
Again, from a tech POV this is wonderful and I acknowledge the complexity of the question and understand that moral compromises are inevitable, but they didn’t just drive down their costs via innovation and technological wizardry, they drove down costs via the mistreatment of people, and we shouldn‘t be looking to encourage or emulate that part. We can now build reasonably safe nuclear plants, and we can mostly do that without our (or their) workers being poorly-treated.
If car batteries last 15 years before needing recharge. There will be a new generation or 2 out before it needs a recharge. So there needs to be a secondary use of old recharged batteries for this to really work in real life.
I guess this is why Bill Gates wants to block the sun. So that the Chinese won’t be able to recharge their batteries.
BYD has hit that target through government subsidy…
Seriously, the euopean version of the 10k car is 26k USD and the Truck they intend to manufacture in Mexico for the American market is going to start over 50k.