New 'doped' solid-state batteries can charge to 80 per cent in just nine minutes
New 'doped' solid-state batteries can charge to 80 per cent in just nine minutes
I recently read through this and was just curious what others thought the pitfalls or unforseen issues might be with quickly or steadily transitioning to such in a fairly environmentally friendly manner.
Hate the title name, but I think I have to use the article title as the title.
Doping is a common term in electronics, it's just that the article is on Top Gear so they didn't explain it well.
Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.
A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they're all in use, and that's not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.
It's about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.
Not to say it's impossible, but infrastructure doesn't come cheap, and so it'll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car's battery.
We could be using Hydrogen and fixed MW scale fuel cells at existing refueling locations to fill the gap while transmission and distribution infra catches up, also maintains existing supply chains whilst job roles shift.
What stops us from recycling batteries from vehicles coming off the road and setting them up as not only battery backups for houses on the grid, but also setting up local storages to off-load all the new cars being charged onto the batteries, and just using a constant charge to those throughout the day/night whenever cheapest. Would that not cut all load issues down as we build and as most people would know, our grid on the U.S. actually has less load now because we kept integrating more and more energy efficient items recently (lightbulbs, dishwashers, refrigerators, tvs, dryers, etc.). It isn't on the same scale many would want, but we stalled on upgrading the grid since before Obamas plan coming in, that was in the debates I remember in 2008. 20 years and hardly any upgrades isn't the consumers faults, we paid for upgrades over and over and the electric companies are it up and said, well if you want it you need to pay more from everything I have seen.
As far as I can tell (not as an expert), the pitfalls and unforeseen issues are probably pretty much what they'd be for every new battery chemistry: how safe is it? Does it have really bad self-discharge? Is the supply consistent? How does it do at low charging levels? How long/how many cycles does such a cell last? Does it require an unsustainable amount of exotic minerals?
As well as what they are for any new technology: what is the replacement cost? Can they be installed in existing technology via drop-in or with a simple retrofit, or do you have to replace the entire unit? How long before they come to market? Can they maintain supply to match demand?
Probably a lot of those questions are business-related rather than technology-related (i.e. "will the companies developing this stuff put enough into R&D to solve these problems before releasing them?" not "do the laws of the universe allow this?"). I am not an expert, but before I put all my chips on solid-state batteries (something I'm pretty confident will be the norm eventually), I would want those answered.
I'd be afraid of wearing out a battery super fast. Outside of super long trips that require recharging to arrive, I'd much rather leave a car plugged in overnight rather than need to pay to replace batteries. Also, like @stoy@lemmy.zip said, it's a lot of power at once that could get dangerous if something goes wrong or overload grids if lots of people start fast charging their cars.
Though of course I'm sure it's a great achievement and hopefully the research is useful.
