Hey! Sorry for the weird heading. I live in a country where EV’s are everywhere and I keep hearing debates about the need and possibility for range increase. Today I overheard a discussion between two people about batteries in the near future.
Person A argued that the range increase and battery improvememts in EVs have been so great the last 10 years and this is indicative of it being a technology that will just keep on improving – and we just have to have some patience before the batteries and range will improve even more.
Person B argued that while thats true, a lot of the range improvememts now aday are due to more aerodynamic cars and that seeing as a battery is a chemical process, we are closer and closer to hitting the limit of batteries without any significant scientific breakthrough.
Im fairly uneducated in this field and find it hard to evaluate whos right. Person Bs arguements seemed more trustworthy, but it doesnt mean that hes right.
So my questions are: Who’s “right” and why? Will batteries in EVs keep improving significantly or have we already seen the biggest improvememts?
Thanks a lot in advance!
In: Chemistry
With solar, wind and EV industries you have unprecedented levels of investment in battery and other energy storage technologies now. More than have ever existed in the world before.
Electric cars were viable – and the first cars were in fact mostly electric – but lost because they just didn’t have the battery technology at the time. Only heavy, relatively low capacity lead-acid was available to them. Hence EVs lost their opportunity to their oil-based rivals.
Now we have lithium technologies, EVs are not only viable but mainstream. You can literally go and buy one today and drive it for almost everything you do, from a bunch of manufacturers. Not only has electric come back, it now has the technology for almost everybody to utilise it. All that’s happening at the moment is subtle improvements and mass production and as that happens – and will be boosted by a ban on ICE cars somewhere between 2030 and 2035 depending on where you live – the amount of people with one will mean (somewhat enforced) market saturation in under a decade.
And the batteries are improving, and even shared between a multitude of other technologies, including grid-level applications and now have almost every car manufacturer will be willing to invest billions in a better battery. At least until they exceed everyone’s ordinary demands.
And batteries are evolving all the time, but it’s small and subtle, and only some improvements are commercialisable, but with the materials and technology we have nowadays there’s still room for improvement.
And the best thing – if we were to discover a radical new “petroleum” product that’s somehow more energy dense, we’d probably have to redesign every car on the planet before it could take advantage of it. Much like the E5-E10 transition happening across Europe. Only more modern cars are able to use it.
But if we find a new battery technology – we can pretty much retrofit it to almost any car in some fashion. So although “major” chemistry changes (Lead-acid, Ni-Cd, NiMh, Li-ion, Li-Poly, LiFePO4, etc.) are few and far between you can actually already find lead-acid being replaced with LiFePO4, NiMh replacement batteries that are Li-Po, and so on. And “Li-ion” batteries have come a LONG way since the first time I ever encountered one.
So, as an ICE car owner, and someone who has been increasingly moving to an all-electric life for years now, including living in all-electric houses, fitting solar panels, etc., I’m actually planning that batteries and EVs and solar will continue to improve and even if they don’t – the current tech is MORE than good enough to be viable even with no improvements over the next 30 years. I’ve been championing electricity over oil for decades, because it’s the one most versatile energy delivery technology that we have, and only storage was letting it down historically.
I’m planning a utility-independent retirement. I’ve bought a house again (deliberately all-electric as a major factor in my purchase) and over the next 20 years I intend to be generating the majority of what I use, and my next car will almost certainly have to be an EV (I won’t have any choice, to be honest).
And as my small solar setup, in the UK, with LiFePO4 batteries will tell you – yes, they are expensive, but boy are they a great technology and easily capable of running my entire household, and a vehicle.
By retirement I intend to have no household electricity bills. No “fuel” bills for my vehicle. And all of that is based on what I have out in my shed TODAY. Not even what will come in another 20 years (and 20 years ago, nobody had LiFePO4 batteries – they were barely being patented in their modern forms by then).
And the beauty of electricity – it doesn’t matter. If fuel cells or whatever new technology takes over, and everyone’s car is already electric-based… there will be a fuel cell made in the shape of the most common batteries. You’ll be able to just swap and go, and it’ll have better capacity than your car was originally designed to have, even if it’s not as great as a “brand new” fuel cell car.
Sorry, but oil was a stupid profit-making, world-destroying distraction. Electricity is the future of just about everything you want to do, and having any vehicle that runs from a self-contained electrical storage technology is going to describe that you’ll have for the foreseeable future, no matter what form that storage actually takes.
Hell, even hybrids – they are electrical cars that generate electricity from burning oil. That’s how they work. The electrical part doesn’t care, and the source fuel is whatever’s easy to obtain today. Even if another tech came along, I can see people with hybrid cars removing the ICE from their car and replacing it but leaving all the electric drive mostly the same.
It’s taken over 100 years but we’ve finally cycled back to common sense with a powerful, versatile, ubiquitous, multipurpose, transferable, convertible energy technology – and the best storage for that at the moment is batteries which are more than sufficient to own enough of to run your entire house.
My house uses 7KWh of electricity a day (confirmed by lots of monitoring over several years). I can literally store that much in less than 7 LiFePO4 batteries that I could literally pick up and carry myself right now (alright, someone may have to help stack them into my arms, but you could do it!). That’s never been viable before.
I can actually see people having far more use from batteries in their home than in their vehicles, because household energy use is actually often less than the vehicular use. And the more batteries, usage and investment we have in them… the more those batteries with improve and someone will be desperate to find the “next” major chemistry to beat even these batteries. Even if it takes 20 years, nobody will care, because LiFePO4 could run your house, and car, today. And we’re nowhere near done with those technologies, or even several prior chemistries, yet and still actively use them in many industries and use-cases to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars of products.
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