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Samsung’s 20-year-life EV battery runs 600 miles on 9-minute charge
(interestingengineering.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm not sure if we are looking at the same chart. The chart goes up to 500 Wh/kg, the same as this new Samsung battery as per the original article. It's may well be the same battery that gives the chart that value, but notice the years prior it gets higher and higher up to that value.
It might be 10 years away from being the mainstream battery but the battery technology that was 10 years away 9 years ago is almost here.
I was meaning how EVs created a consumer market for huge batteries where prior to that the biggest battery in your house might have been a power tool. But you're right, there was a premium market for emerging battery tech and it increases along a scale like anything else.
I mean, lithium cells were used for fringe use cases 20 years ago, now they are seemingly everywhere. The difference with this tech is that they know it's currently expensive, so are aiming for use cases where the added cost is justifed. Give it 5 years and the tech will more than likely become easier to produce, lowering costs. That and sodium batteries are probably going to dramatically lower cost for grid storage, which should make it easier to have consistent power delivery.
I read your argument as being that since we aren't quantum leaping ahead with technology, it's a bit of a wash with the pushes for future battery standards. But my point is that this battery update, while not being a 10x in performance, is more likely a 2x and will be viable to scale with pricing decreases as time progresses. I'm in the trucking sector, and one of the things I have noticed about transitioning to electric heavy duties is that a lot of the issues aren't completely on battery density, but rather that there isn't an infrastructure that can charge the batteries at high voltage without beefing up the power grid around stations. If you could instead give a cheap enough battery backup to create a buffer that fills up during lower use hours, then a lot more of the solutions for that could charge ev trucks quickly would make more sense (it's actually what has made the Tesla Semi have such good numbers). It's stuff like this that actually might push the transition, which has to happen, not waiting for next quantum leap.
Michael Thackeray filed a patent under Argonne National Laboratory for the leading EV battery chemistry worldwide today, Lithium Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt Oxide (NMC), sometime around 2007-2008.
The first cars with that specific technology started coming out in the US market in 2013/2014 IIRC, with EVs coming out before then basing their battery chemistry on NCA (Tesla) or LMO (Nissan Leaf & Chevy Volt).
That's a 5-7 year timeframe from laboratory to mass production.
If you consider new technologies today like Samsung's battery in this article, and make the not so unrealistic leap that we're better at battery production today than in 2013/2014, it's very possible that we see this technology hit the market in 5 years or less.
Technology always improves. It's CAPEX that hinders it, and I'm willing to bet that there are financial interests out there to keep the main battery chemistry NMC and secure steady profits.