It's the Batteries, Stupid!

[Electroman]

But in the case Envia, somehow reading through their claims in their public disclosures, their website touting 400 wh/Kg, active participation of their CIO in the Internet forums, and even the pictures of the two executives who were most active - all screamed 'scam' to me at that time.

 

[JRP3]

I think it was more the case of thinking they could design away the life cycle issues. They did hit the 400Wh/kg mark in independent testing but they never could solve the cycling degradation problem.

 

[Zzzz...]

But in the case Envia, somehow reading through their claims in their public disclosures, their website touting 400 wh/Kg, active participation of their CIO in the Internet forums, and even the pictures of the two executives who were most active - all screamed 'scam' to me at that time.

Envia did produced 426Wh/kg cell. And that cell capacity was independently verified. Problem is that devil was in details. Capacity faded away too quickly with each charge/discharge circle.

So they did not scam anyone. But investors had to ask many questions right away, like what is calendar degradation, what coulombic efficiency of the cell, what temperature envelope(some cells work best at 70[SUP]o[/SUP] Celsius and barely work at room temperature, some other way around, degrade too fast at 50[SUP]o[/SUP]C), what self discharge rate etc and so on. Many questions with negative answer to single one of them killing prospects of substantial market penetration for a given breakthrough chemistry.

Envia did tried to solve fast capacity degradation problem, but failed. Bad for them, but I do not think that it qualify as a scam.

Excellent write up of Envia history, very much worth reading: The mysterious story of the battery startup that promised GM a 200-mile electric car Quartz

 

[castigador55]

5x Major Breakthrough in Lithium-Ion Battery Capacity and Performance

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/01/prweb11514478.htm

""EnerG2’s silicon-carbon solution provides a 5X improvement in battery cycle life while maintaining a dramatic improvement in energy density compared to high capacity silicon anodes.. The technology is compatible with future improvements in silicon materials and is designed to leverage increased material stability at a consistently low cost.""

 

[brianman]

will help electric vehicles travel anywhere from 200-300 miles on a single charge

And this one for JRP:

Chevrolet Volt has an all-electric range of 38 miles per charge

/shakehead

Me to EnerG2:

Psst, Tesla.

Hm, maybe I should stop by and show the car to them...

Corporate Headquarters
100 NE Northlake Way
Seattle, WA 98105

 

[JRP3]

Comparison to inferior products with no actual numbers showing gravimetric or volumetric energy density, and no cycle life numbers.

 

[JRP3]

Interesting paper on graphene wrappers for silicon nanoparticles, providing increased cycling for Li Si cells. http://isen.northwestern.edu/doc/pd...angJ_June2012_JofPhysicalChemistryLetters.pdf

 

[Cosmacelf]

Silicon anodes appear to be the holy grail for lithium ion batteries. There are many people working on various solutions to the expansion/contraction problem that silicon has. It'll be interesting to see if Tesla's next generation battery uses silicon.

 

[hiroshiy]

Has "Battenice" been discussed in this thread?

世界を変ãˆã‚‹é›»æ± ï¼Ÿæ–°é–‹ç™ºã®é‡å­é›»æ± ãŒç•°æ¬¡å…ƒã™ãŽã‚‹ã€‚ - NAVER ã¾ã¨ã‚

Sorry the site is in Japanese but you can translate:

Google Translate

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Interesting paper on graphene wrappers for silicon nanoparticles, providing increased cycling for Li Si cells. http://isen.northwestern.edu/doc/pd...angJ_June2012_JofPhysicalChemistryLetters.pdf

Nothing to see here.

 

[clea]

They say they had the model they used to describe how electrical currents respond to electrical potentials in lithium ion battery cells wrong and believe they have found a better model. Hopefully this better understanding of the electron flow will translate into better batteries for us in the not too distant future.
Mystery of Lithium Ion Batteries Solved

 

[Lokolo]

Although a long way off, and pricey

BBC News - Battery offers 30 second phone charging

Not knowing anything about battery technology I am not sure how viable this is for cars. But fast charging batteries could be very useful for the EV industry.

 

[JRP3]

Charging times are not as much of an issue as people try to make it. Energy density and cost are, and to those points:

In the demonstration, a battery pack the size of a cigarette packet was attached to a smartphone.

Which means the energy density is about 4 times worse, and:

Dr Myersdorf said that the batteries are likely to be 30 to 40% more expensive to manufacture compared to traditional ones and the final product will be twice as expensive than those on the market today.

So it's really a double fail.

 

[JRP3]

Plant based flow batteries for cheap grid storage: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/01/renewable-energy-breakthrough/

 

[AndreN]

Algae-based batteries. This one has pretty much all the checkmarks for unbelievable things we've heard from other battery tech announcements. Charges in 11 seconds, 200x the capacity (or did they mean power?) of lithium ion, ...
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/30/this-algae-battery-could-power-a-tesla-with-200x-the-charge/

 

[JRP3]

That entire article is garbage in my opinion.

Here is how a current battery charges, using lots of rare earth minerals that may be going extinct or, worse, cause cancer:

Zero rare earth minerals in a lithium ion battery, lithium is not a rare earth, nor is it "going extinct", and they don't cause cancer. Also, they didn't demonstrate anything, I could probably run a current through a wet piece of seaweed and light up a bulb.

 

[trils0n]

Well, at least the Algae battery only needs $1500 dollars to finish the prototype, and $5000 to make it to mass production by summer. What a joke of an article.

 

[Johan]

Just listened to the Q2 call. Elon and J.B. answered questions on cell size and chemistry in the Gigafactory. They basically confirmed that both chemistry and size will differ in the Gigafactory. So they will move away to a battery slightly large in size than the 18650 and of course with updated internals. So Tesla will likely be the global definer of LiIon standard cell sizes.

 

[JRP3]

I was a bit surprised that they didn't choose an even larger format. I mean if you are going to make a new standard, and since Elon has already said the optimal number of cells is probably half as many as they currently use, why not bump up the size a bit more? Obviously they've looked at it more closely and have their reasons.

 

[techmaven]

I was a bit surprised that they didn't choose an even larger format. I mean if you are going to make a new standard, and since Elon has already said the optimal number of cells is probably half as many as they currently use, why not bump up the size a bit more? Obviously they've looked at it more closely and have their reasons.

Yeah, there are issues of yield, cooling, and fire suppression. They have mentioned yield several times when it comes to comparing against existing prismatic form factors and yield directly affects cost.