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A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything

Lithium Ion Batteries Are the Curlicue Lightbulbs of Energy Storage

In general, the regler media is fascinated with the sturm and drang of nearly meaningless politics, and any other form of social friction they can drum up and lord over. They’re not very informative on a good day, and they’re more likely to lie than not if it suits whatever is residing in their cobwebbed heads and cankered hearts. So you have to poke around, and adduce how regler life is really going. And changing.

The idea of electrifying everything only caught on fairly recently, and without much forethought. Electric cars were supposed to get rid of gasoline powered cars. What was supposed to happen to the gasoline wasn’t specified. It’s a by-product of cracking crude oil. Whether we drive around burning hydrocarbons or not, that oil is going to be cracked and made into component substances we still need. Maybe we can go back to the solution the Cleveland refiners had for it back in the 19th century. They cracked oil to get petroleum jelly, and kerosene for lamps. They didn’t have any use for the gasoline, so they just dumped it on the ground. Cleveland had some interesting fires back in the day.

Eventually Rockefeller and some other fellers decided the gasoline might make good motor fuel. This led to the suburbs and the perfection of the car horn, so the jury’s still out on the whole scheme. But to get back to the topic at hand, electric cars were supposed to be the way forward out of tailpipeland problems.

As I’ve occasionally remarked, electric cars are not an electric car problem. Some of the first automobiles ever made were electric. It’s pretty easy to make an electric car. The problem has always been the battery. Gasoline has a whole lot of get up and go in it per gallon, and it’s nearly impossible to cram the same amount into a battery unless it’s really big and nasty. If you don’t believe me about the amount of energy in a gallon of gas, check your car’s gas tank with a match next time, and get back to me. I won’t wait up for you, though.

So electric car manufacturers and cellphone makers and other assorted manufacturers kind of solved the battery problem with lithium ion. They had a dry run with nickel cadmium, but lithium holds more juice, and takes up less space to do it. Your phone and your Tesla are loaded with the stuff.

Luckily for us, you can mine lithium using nobody but little children armed with those plastic pails and shovels you once took to the beach with you back in the day. So no downside there, amirite? But lithium is really nasty stuff, and once it catches on fire it burns like a Cleveland river. You can’t really drive that far on lithium-ion power, and it takes too long to recharge, and the battery wears out pretty quick. Oh, and they cost a lot. And you have to recycle it like it was plutonium’s little brother. Other than that, it’s great stuff.

Someone is bound to solve the battery problem someday. I always figured the solution wouldn’t be a battery per se. It would be a capacitor, a kind of solid state battery, if you will. Hey, if those little cylinders in the back of grandma’s TV set, or next to the speakers in my Fender Vibrolux, could store enough juice to give me quite a tingle, or maybe even kill me, they must be able to drag a car to the supermarket and back eventually, right?

I’ve always suspected that Li-On batteries were some not-too-bright-intermediate stage in battery production, sort of like those curlicue lightbulbs we were all required to buy just before they were basically banned from polite speech and the Home Despot aisles. Go ahead, look up CFL on Gargle, and you’ll get lots of info shoved at you about the Canadian Football League, but not much about Compact Fluorescent Lights. They were full of poison, and caught on fire more often than I require for table lamps, and wouldn’t even emit light when it was below freezing.

So what’s going to be the battery equivalent of LED lighting replacing CFLs, if we’re to continue this inapt simile? Could be sodium-ion batteries:

Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 

Natron says its batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, a level of immediate charge/discharge capability that makes the batteries a prime contender for the ups and downs of backup power storage. Also helping in that use case is an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.

So these new batteries weigh more than Lithium-Ion batteries per kilowatt-hour stored. But that 50,000 charge life cycle is as close to immortality as a battery can get, and the charge rate solves the main problem with existing batteries. These batteries will be used in stationary things first. Battery backups and power management stuff. But they’ll get better and probably replace the curlicue lithium ion batteries in cars pretty soon.

And once again, I’m sure we’re way ahead of the Chinese on this.

Or not:

3 Responses

  1. The problem of energy density happens in different places. I’ve got in discussions with dumbfounded guys who buy “tri-fuel” generators that are marginal for what they want to use it for, decide to run it on propane, and don’t understand why it stalled when the A/C started.
    The answer is energy density, as in the BTU content of the fuel. Bunker fuel has more than diesel has more than gasoline has more than kerosene has more than propane, and so on. The lighter the fuel, the less BTU’s, the less heat it will provide, and the engine provides less hp. You have to downrate the generated power, ’cause the manufacturers are gonna claim the biggest output number they can, and you’ll hafta work out the details.
    Speaking of large capacitors, in the mists of time I had a Kasino (made by Kustom, if that means anything to you) amp that had two power caps the size of beer cans, with wire screw lugs on top.
    Steered well clear of them, on the recomendation of my HS physics teacher, who had worked on radar stations in WWII, and had an unfortunate encounter with a capacitor the size of a briefcase.
    You see, I can learn.

  2. (Sung to the tune of “My Bonnie”):

    “My bonnie leaned over the gas tank,
    The height of its contents to see.
    I lighted a match to assist her,
    Oh bring back my bonnie to me.”

    My first lawnmower was bought back in ’92 when I bought our first house. It was a steel-bodied no-name with a 3-1/2 HP Briggs engine, and it lasted 25 years. It rusted out, and I had to re-drill the deck for all 4 wheels, and stick a new steel plate under the engine to keep it mounted on the deck, but it ran great. Never changed the oil, just kept adding fresh. When the engine finally dropped through the deck the second time it was still running, so I gave it to a guy who re-built lawnmowers.

    The replacement was a 40-volt Ryobi with two (2, count ’em, 2) lithium-ion batteries. I could mow my postage-stamp yard plus the widow-lady’s next door on one battery, which would last about 45 minutes if I wasn’t bagging. Recharging ’em takes about an hour-and-a-half. When we became political and economic refugees from the Soviet Socialist State of Minnesota and moved to NW Wyoming, I was a little worried since we had a 1/2-acre lot. No problem, I can still (usually, unless the grass is thick) mow the whole place on one battery. The mower doesn’t lose power as the batteries drain, it simply stops suddenly (some kind of electrical engineering magic).
    I’ve had the thing for 7 years now and the batteries still (knock wood) hold a good charge, so I’ve been happy with that level of battery technology for a lawnmower on a small yard.

    Capacitors can hold a lot of voltage and if big enough a lot of energy, but the problem is that they want to dump all in one big surge, which makes them difficult to use as a battery. Check out Phillip Jose Farmer’s “Riverworld” series to see his invention (purely fiction) of the “batacitor”, a combination of battery and capacitor that could store the lightning-like discharge from the ‘shrooms and pay it out slowly to power the riverboats. Nifty if somebody could ever get one to work.

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