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Power

A New Lithium-Sulphur Battery With an Ultra-High Capacity Could Lead To Drastically Cheaper Electric Cars and Grid Energy Storage (newscientist.com) 133

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Mahdokht Shaibani at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues have developed a battery with a capacity five times higher than that of lithium-ion batteries. From a report: The battery maintains an efficiency of 99 per cent for more than 200 cycles, and a smartphone-sized version would be able to keep a phone charged for five days. To date, the problem with lithium-sulphur batteries has been that the capacity of the sulphur electrode is so large that it breaks apart over cycles of charging and discharging, and the energy advantage rapidly disappears, says Shaibani. "The electrode will fall apart, and then the battery dies fast." That happens because the sulphur electrode expands and contracts as it cycles, with a volume change of about 78 per cent. Volume change also occurs in electrodes in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars and smartphones, but is about eight times smaller. To prevent the electrode disintegrating in their lithium-sulphur battery, the researchers gave the sulphur particles more space to expand and contract. Usually, lithium-sulphur batteries have materials added that bind the particles together inside so the battery doesn't crack as it expands. Shaibani and her team used a smaller amount of a polymer binding material in their electrode, and created more spaced-out structures between the sulphur particles.
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A New Lithium-Sulphur Battery With an Ultra-High Capacity Could Lead To Drastically Cheaper Electric Cars and Grid Energy Storag More

A New Lithium-Sulphur Battery With an Ultra-High Capacity Could Lead To Drastically Cheaper Electric Cars and Grid Energy Storag

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  • I am ready (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ryzilynt ( 3492885 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @02:16PM (#59592640)

    With the stream of weekly articles about all of the incredible innovations in battery tech. The promises of ultra cheap ultra high capacity batteries.

    I am read to see some real would implementation.

    • *world

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 )

      We are seeing the improvements in batteries. Keep in mind today we are carrying in our pocket a computer that is more powerful then most mid-range laptops and desktops, that has a battery at lasts us a full day. Electric Cars are a reality with high demand brands available that are not considered a compromise over ICE cars. I see more homes with solar panels Including homes in Mennonite communities to offer enough power to run their homes and business.

      With combination of new efficiencies and improved bat

      • Re:I am ready (Score:5, Informative)

        by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @02:57PM (#59592798)

        Keep in mind today we are carrying in our pocket a computer that is more powerful then most mid-range laptops and desktops, that has a battery at lasts us a full day.

        Yes, we do, but the productivity comes mostly from the improvements in the electronics, and not the battery.

        My Dell Axim lasted roughly two days on one charge of the extra battery in 2003 and provided experience on par with the modern smartphones and small tablets. It had a weaker processor, and the choice of software was more limited, but I had all apps that I have today on my phone: maps, e-book reader, note-taking app, scheduler and task manager, etc. I still boot it from time to time, and the features that I find missing compared to a smartphone are the extra sensors, the camera and the built-in connectivity.

        None are limits due to battery.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          Your Dell Axiom had a 1000 mah battery.

          My current phone is almost 4 times that (3700) and not a particularly large battery by modern standards.

          Not sure the relative physical size of the batteries, but it would seem to me that a modern system is using a lot more power (screen size and brightness being the biggest draws I'd bet), and can do it because of the battery.

          • You could (and I did) by a 2Ah extended battery. That is, bigger batteries were available back then. Large screens were not. They, and not the batteries are the tech that improved a lot.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AvitarX ( 172628 )

              OK, so the battery today is only twice as big?

              With soldered batteries I can't compare size and weight, but the battery seems improved to me.

              • A 2Ah battery today is quite the same as the 2Ah battery I have for my Axim. The SoC boards, the screens, the sensors, the cameras, and generally the rest of the electronics on the other hand, are all a bit better.

                The "battery technology" is not the driver of the smartphone progress.

      • Keep in mind today we are carrying in our pocket a computer that is more powerful then most mid-range laptops and desktops, that has a battery at lasts us a full day.

        The big improvements aren't from the batteries. They're from reduction in electrical consumption by our devices when performing equivalent tasks. When I was in grad school, we used to use Li-S batteries in our robots because of their high volumetric energy capacity. The problem was they'd only last about 25-50 recharge cycles. That was 25

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by amorsen ( 7485 )

          Watt-hours per hour

          You are making me cry.

          • At least his units work out; he just forgot to simplify by cancelling the hours in both numerator and denominator.

            Now, would he have said "watts per hour", that would have made me turn in my grave at 5 rpm per minute.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sd4f ( 1891894 )
              I never could understand why these things don't get simplified into joules, after 1 watt-hour is 3.6 kJ.

              • Because Wh is easier to calculate. Average Joe can perhaps figure out that a 40W lamp running for ten hours consumes 400Wh but he doesn't know the definition of a Watt or what the hell a "Joule" is (French pagan Christmas perhaps?). Quoting electricity prices per Wh makes practical sense.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          You forgot the other difference, namely the software is likely 2000 times slower then it was in '94.

      • Wow, a battery that lasts whole day! I guess the old Nokia feature phone I use whose battery lasts a WEEK in normal usage must be using some kind of voodoo magic.

        • That old Nokia has the equivalent of that tiny chip which is on your smart phone, that actually makes phone calls. Combined with low power applications such as optional backlit low resolution LCD Display. If we have the same set of features, Our phones with modern chip design, and modern batteries could last a month.

      • Actually it is in the range of a Supercomputer/Vectorprocessor from the mid 1980s, e.g. a Cyber 205 or an early Cray X-MP. However that is not really comparable, as smart phone likely has a bit less than a 1 GFLOP on the CPU but most have a GPU ...
        If we could have get a Supercomputer with as much RAM a new Smartphone has in our days, we would not only had given our firstborn, but also the wife and he house ...

    • I am ready too.Elon Musk announced they are developing a 1M mile-capable battery [wired.com], further backed by a paper in September, and later a patent filing.

      From the article: The lithium-ion batteries described in the paper use lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide, or NMC, for the battery’s positive electrode (cathode) and artificial graphite for its negative electrode (anode). The electrolyte, which ferries lithium ions between the electrode terminals, consists of a lithium salt blended with other compounds.

    • I am ready to see some real world implementation.

      Try opening your eyes. There have been dramatic improvements in batteries by every measure:

      1. Energy density
      2. Longevity
      3. Charging speed
      4. Safety (non-flammability)
      5. Charging speed
      6. Temperature tolerance
      7. Cost

      If you think we aren't making progress, you are oblivious to reality.

      • A big step in energy density could pay off even if it's at a reasonable *decrease* in all the other factors - think electric aircraft.

        But yeah, people who see no progress aren't paying attention. I was flying my son's $50 drone over the weekend and thinking how I wanted a nitro RC helicopter when I was his age, it was just so out of reach.

    • Re:I am ready (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @04:13PM (#59593116) Homepage

      Commercial battery tech does continue to advance; most people just fail to notice it.

      Anyway, RTFP (Read The F'ing Paper) version:

      For those not familiar with it, Li-S is one of those "major leap forward" techs (not as good as Li-air, but still superb - theoretical max of 2,7kW/kg, vs. Li-Air at 3,5kW/kg (w/air mass) / 11,4kW/kg (wo/air mass), vs. say NMC li-ion at 560Wh/kg (note: none of these take into account auxiliary mass) ). It's also made of cheap, abundant materials. Li-S is held back by a number of problems, however, of which expansion is only one. More research focus has been on the polysulfide shuttle problem, which wastes energy and irreversibly loses capacity. This paper does not focus on it (although other researchers have shown promising results in recent years... still needs more work, however).

      (As a note: You can get Li-S cells on the market today, but they have short lifespans, and the mechanisms used to even get those (such as a high fraction of mesoporous carbon in the cathodes) mean that they're not dramatically superior to conventional li-ion cells)

      Conventional li-ion chemistries have been slowly moving in the direction of abandoning using fully dissolved PVDF toward drier or fully dry binders - the first mass scale adoption of dry manufacturing should be starting this year when Tesla builds its first cell lines (they spent a lot of last year snatching up various smaller companies to acquire their tech). The main motivation is cost - a large amount of capital costs in cell manufacture (and the majority of energy consumption) goes toward drying and solvent recovery. But they also appear to produce better electrodes, where individual grains are bound together with small links rather than being "slathered" in binder that hinders expansion, blocks li-ion diffusion, and clogs pores.

      This paper extends something similar to that. They use Na-CMC (sodium carboxylmethylcellulose) as a binder - a common nontoxic thickener made from cellulose, found in food and cosmetic products. They only saturate it to 1/3rd of its solubility level with water, causing it to only form stringy connections between individual cathode particles. The results of this are quite impressive in every regard - even things that weren't part of the original goals (for example, greatly improving the binding to traditional metal foil electrodes rather than having to use carbon paper or the like). They can get near the maximum theoretical sulfur loading in the cathodes, with a very high loading per unit electrode area (minimizing electrode mass as well).

      That said, there still are some caveats.

      1. The best results were at a (slow) charge/discharge rate of 0,1C. Fine for cell phones, but subpar for EVs (even accounting for the much higher capacity... e.g. 0.1C corresponds to the charge rate of 0.4C in a cell with 1/4th the energy density). At 0,5C in the new Li-S cells, the capacity rate decline significantly accelerates when cells are have a high area loading on the electrode foils. This can be significantly ameliorated, however, by using medium loading levels on the foil.

      2. The improvements to cycle life allowed the authors to discover new problems with Li-S that hadn't previously been encountered. Specifically, after extensive cycling they found that the lithium metal *anodes* were not wearing evenly. They also encountered issues of outgasing.

      All of this said, this is great news, and increases the promise of Li-S as being a viable li-ion replacement some years down the road, in many different fields.

    • I am read to see some real would implementation.

      I would be happy if people simply settled for examining the world around them instead of being so desperate to get first post that they don't form coherent sentences. /Posted from a mobile device with a battery size (electrically and physically) which would have been thought impossible 15 years ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      Maybe like buy a thing and see how amazing and cheap the batteries are.

      So much more is rechargeable because of it (also because electronics are more efficient, but even something like a soldering iron that doesn't really have an efficiency advantage).

      Prices have fallen so far at this point that future drops will be harder to see even.

      Almost an order of magnitude in a decade.

      In 2010 a 50kwh battery would be over 50k, now it's under 10.

      https://about.bnef.com/blog/be... [bnef.com]

  • I would love a battery that would last longer than a day, here's your noble prize, lots of money, and apples phone number, get to mass markets asap
    • Apple will just use the tech to produce an iPhone with the same battery capacity (slightly less than a day), but 20% thinner. Because the rest of us want thinner phones instead of larger batteries, apparently.

  • I love hearing hope for better and cheaper batteries. Let's do this!

  • Tell me when it is commercially available. There's a new battery breakthrough every couple of months, and O(0.1%) of them actually become available commercially, for various reasons.

    Also, from the article, "The battery maintains an efficiency of 99 per cent for more than 200 cycles ...". While interesting, that's way too small a number to care about. It's like quoting the 0 to 5 MPH acceleration on an automobile. :-)

    At 200 cycles, a Tesla, for example, would only be at about 60,000 miles. The current-g

    • Re:And it will be available in ten years. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rerogo ( 1839428 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @02:40PM (#59592732)

      200 cycles at 5x the capacity is 300,000mi, not 60,000mi.

      Without cobalt, the battery also has potential to be cheaper, assuming it winds up making it to market at scale.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by psergiu ( 67614 )

        The question is - is that electrode material flexible enough to resist shrinking and growing by 78% more than 200 times without developing fractures (polymer binding et all) ?
        The whitepaper does not talk of any tests beyond those 200 cycles - also the load rates used in those tests were 0.1C and 0.05 C - a bit low for SuperCharging.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hodr ( 219920 )

          1/10C is the standard for these tests. If you want to compare their results to other tests, you need to use the same methodology.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        200 cycles at 5x the capacity is 300,000mi, not 60,000mi.

        That's not the way it works, in practice. Sure, if you get 5x the capacity for the same amount of money, they could put in 5x the capacity and charge the same price, but it is far more likely that they'll just lower the cost of vehicles (or take a larger profit margin, or both) and put in battery packs with comparable range per charge, or at most, about half again more range per charge. I would be really surprised if anybody put in a 1500-mile-per-c

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

          If the energy density is 5x, that means an equivalent battery needs be only a fifth the size and, probably, weight. So the range improves.
          If the battery gets 5x cheaper (not saying it does), it's also okay if it lasts only a fifth as long before needing replacement to be on par with what we have.

          They gave a smart phone example. The same sized battery would last for five days. So if you need to charge every five days times 200, that's 99% capacity after 3 years. Well, almost. I don't remember ever owning a s

        • Agreed, although if replacement cost is proportional to mass/size rather than capacity, then you could also swap them more often, say, at a cost and frequency similar to tires.

        • I would be really surprised if anybody put in a 1500-mile-per-charge battery pack.
          Why not? There are gasoline(diesel) powered cars, that have that range.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jezwel ( 2451108 )
            You could probably run a 5000 mile range on a car if you tow a trailer with a huge battery pack/fuel tank on it. How practical will that be in everyday suburbia?
            • you don't need a massive range if you live and only drive in suburbia although it would be a "nice to have"

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jabuzz ( 182671 )

            Because every car journey I have ever made (including as a child) in my entire life could be covered by a vehicle with a 500 mile range that could be charged overnight. As such the use requirements of a 1500 mile range in a car is very low.

            • Yeah, and every car travel I do is around 1000 miles one way ... so: not that low. It is nice to have still some "gas" when you are at the destination, probably at night when "gas stations" are closed.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jabuzz ( 182671 )

                If you are driving 1000 miles one way without an overnight stop or more than one driver then you are a dangerous driver. It is over 14 hours at 70mph, and would be illegal for a professional driver in the EU and if you had a crash and caused deaths as a none professional driver expect to do jail time (see Great Heck rail crash as an example).

                Finally I live in the UK. driving 1000 miles would require going around in circles. The longest possible journey without having to get our your car (ferry or channel tu

                • Obviously I make some stops, but more likely: my GF takes over.

                  You are ridiculous ...

                  However I wrote miles and was thinking in km ... I guess my long trips are around 1300km, not sure how many miles that are.

    • Re:And it will be available in ten years. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @02:43PM (#59592738)

      Tell me when it is commercially available. There's a new battery breakthrough every couple of months, and O(0.1%) of them actually become available commercially, for various reasons.

      Then you should head for some other news site rather than Slashdot. I though the point to this site is to discuss edge things that more than likely won't work. If you want just the 3% of things that actually make it, head over to MSNBC or something.

      How does this battery technology hold up under more realistic real-world cycle counts?

      It doesn't which is why it's being done in a lab, because it's not in the domain of production ready. I'm not trying to dog you here, but you have to remember who the audience is for this site here. If you're looking for "production ready" only things to talk about, you're at the wrong site.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        How does this battery technology hold up under more realistic real-world cycle counts?

        It doesn't which is why it's being done in a lab, because it's not in the domain of production ready.

        I think you're completely missing my point there. Whether it is production-ready or not, they obviously have prototypes. And the claim is being made that this technology makes this alternative battery chemistry practical by changing it in a way that it doesn't break down quickly like previous designs with that chemistry, but the number of cycles they put it through is grossly inadequate to prove that claim.

        The comment about "tell me when it's in production" is just me being cynical, having seen these stor

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by amorsen ( 7485 )

          yet seeing very little real progress outside of labs

          I have seen massive improvement in battery technology over the last 10 years. I own a Vauxhall Ampera built in 2012. It has a 11kWh battery or so. The newest Leaf (not the plus) has a battery of approximately the same weight and size. It stores around 40kWh.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            That's fair. Every decade, density of lithium-based batteries roughly doubles. That's not zero, obviously. But progress seems to be pretty slow, and mostly coming from slow, evolutionary improvements, rather than radical leaps in chemistry, with the possible exception of the rise of lithium ferrophosphate in power tools. The 5x and 10x wins never seem to materialize.

            • its not slow if you compare it to the rate of development of making the internal combustion engine more efficient over the last 100 years. progress always appears slow as we want the new stuff yesterday - testing can take a long time as well as building the infrastructure to actually build the product

        • The comment about "tell me when it's in production" is just me being cynical, having seen these stories over and over, and yet seeing very little real progress outside of labs,
          Then you are blind.
          Capacities, charge times, cycles etc. have improved by a factor of 10 during the recent 20 years.
          And prices in the same time have dropped by a factor of 10 .... so no idea about what you are complaining.

          Someone linked tis already, but I link it again, and I guess you could find much better links anyway: https://abou [bnef.com]

        • And the claim is being made that this technology makes this alternative battery chemistry practical by changing it in a way that it doesn't break down quickly like previous designs with that chemistry, but the number of cycles they put it through is grossly inadequate to prove that claim.

          The thing is that it maintains 99% after 200, that's pretty good. Li-S batteries typically are large applications because after charge 150-ish, they've lost about 15% from the shuttling. So holding 99% after 200 is indeed an improvement in terms of Li-S, it means a slower shuttle, at least on the front end. But Li-S is very "spiky", so it could be the case that after charge 201 it drops to 15% or worse. At any rate, the article is definitely over-hyping Li-S, Li-S is ideal for large applications where p

    • For a phone, if a charge lasts five days instead of one day, 200 cycles means over two and a half years at 99 percent efficiency. That's hardly too small a number to care about.

      As it stands, the longevity of the battery is currently the Achilles heel of smartphones, as we're quickly approaching the point of diminishing returns on hardware. I've got a six year old phone that's still in great shape (it was a high-end phone when I bought it), except that the battery capacity is about half what it used to be.

    • Almost all the battery advancements you hear about that are commercially viable get incorporated within 5 years. Why do you think battery capacities have increased so much in the last 10 years? It's not magic that you can fit a 3200mah battery in the space that a 1200mah battery fit in 2010.

    • A cycle in battery tech means a "a full cycle from 0% to 100%".
      Aka loading 200 times from 75% to 100% are only 50 cycles.
      Or charging 200 times from 50% to 75% are also only 50 cycles.

      So in most normal operations such a 200 cycle battery would last easy two years or longer. If it is cheap enough and/or the degrading is not to much that is good enough e.g. for an eBike or Electric Motorbike or even a laptop with replaceable battery.

  • I'll take 200 cycles if it's that dense (5x), hence it should be easy to replace (as it's smaller).
    So then it also better be Nx cheaper.

    No mention of cost projections?

    • You cannot deduce cost from size. It's an entirely different electrolyte chemistry with different anode and cathode chemistries. For all we know the cathode or anode or electrolyte could cost 1000X what current lithium battery versions cost or the manufacturing could cost 10,000X because the sulfur makes the processing hazardous.

      You cannot deduce costs from the information provided.

      • Right, I did not try to deduce cost, rather observed that _IF_ the cost was low than the limit to 200 cycles would not be a deal breaker.

  • Yes, it could (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @02:39PM (#59592724) Journal
    But will it?

    All these guys rush to announce I could do this, I could do that, I could do yet another thing.

    The amount of R&D money pouring in to Li-Ion is so much, it is like that race between SSD and spinning rust platters. Like the Zeno's paradox race every time SSD catches up to hard disk in cost per MB, hard disk has moved on further. Eventually it never overtook or catch up to hard disks. It just found enough application where the cost differential was worth it for other reasons, quietness, cooling, compactness etc.

    Similarly the Li Ion is getting so much of funding, and it is still on the "Battery Moore's Law: Price falling by 50% every seven years". In fact the recent reports suggest it could accelerate to 5 or 6 years instead of 7. The kind of mass production that went into VLSI chips has not yet hit the Li Ion cells yet. People are still experimenting with pouch, prismatic and cylindrical cell geometries. Once that is shaken out, and the world settles on the "best" geometry for the cell and the size, expect another huge burst of mass production and economy of scale.

    So this new chemistry needs to find a different raison d'etre . Otherwise it will forever be in the "could" land, and never reach the "did" land.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by urusan ( 1755332 )

      The amount of R&D money pouring in to Li-Ion is so much, it is like that race between SSD and spinning rust platters. Like the Zeno's paradox race every time SSD catches up to hard disk in cost per MB, hard disk has moved on further. Eventually it never overtook or catch up to hard disks. It just found enough application where the cost differential was worth it for other reasons, quietness, cooling, compactness etc.

      This is a somewhat ironic analogy to use at this precise moment in time, because SSDs are finally in the process of overtaking HDDs in terms of cost per MB.

      The cheapest consumer HDDs are $18.75/TB today (for an 8TB capacity drive). The cheapest consumer SSDs are around $100/TB today (both 1 TB and 2 TB drives are about the same cost per TB). While SSDs do still have a bit to go to catch up, their pace of progress is blisteringly fast compared to the progress of HDDs, and HDDs are hitting physical limits mor

      • Thanks for the update on SDD v HDD prices. Was not following it up closely.

        The R&D funding stream is a very significant point you make. In the Hydrogen vs Battery vehicle race, hydrogen was funded by auto companies, some coal companies and nuclear power companies in some small unmotivated R&D pace. On the Li Ion battery side camcorders and laptops were the early users willing to pay up to 10K $/kWh. Infact it was so expensive they were using milli-Ah to measure the capacity, not kilo-Wh. But it was

      • On top of that, SSDs are finally reaching capacity parity with HDDs. 8TB SSDs are just recently out on newegg.com and while extremely expensive today, this is just because they're newly released. 16TB and 32TB SSDs are already undergoing mass production and are available for servers.

        You can buy a 30 TB SSD [cdw.com] today. For a mere $12,000. Seagate showed off a 60TB SSD 4 years ago. Toshiba showed off a 100TB SSD at the same time. 4 years ago. The only reason SSDs haven't already blasted hard drive manufacturing into dust is the fact Seagate has billions in factory plant to manufacture spinning discs they're busy paying off. There is no practical or electrical reason why hard drives should still exist. The reasons are purely financial.

        Samsung released a 24 layer MLC V-NAND chip in 2013.

  • Imagine when battery technology advances to the point where a home or business can store enough power to last several days or even a week or more. Now you've got solar/wind recharging modular battery systems that no longer need to be connected to a grid, unless it's for the purpose of reselling that electricity.

    Frankly, it's not far-fetched at all that this could happen in our lifetime (ahem, depending on how old you are).

    • Frankly, it's not far-fetched at all that this could happen in our lifetime (ahem, depending on how old you are).

      60. And I expect to see it in my lifetime. What I'm wondering isn't the tech, it's the cost. Will it be cost-effective in my lifetime? Not so sure of that. But I'm hopeful.

    • "can store enough power to last several days or even a week"

      That would be awesome, but...

      Even if you have home batteries that can store enough to provide for a week and they are so cheap that cost isn't a factor, you still need solar/wind to be able to recharge at the rate energy is leaving. For many households, solar/wind can not keep up with that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crow ( 16139 )

      Yes, but the utilities want to avoid going bankrupt, so they'll push for regulations that prohibit being off-grid. They've already done this in Florida according to some news stories.

      And if we start to see a good percentage of people going off-grid, the rates for those staying on-grid will go up.

      • Then move to a state where it is not forbidden.
        Or mobilize voters to get such state legislations abolished.
        Or for funk sake, leave your third world country and go to Europe, or South America, or Asia or New Zealand.

      • Yes, but the utilities want to avoid going bankrupt, so they'll push for regulations that prohibit being off-grid. They've already done this in Florida according to some news stories.

        And yet if you actually read the laws and electrical utility policies there is nothing preventing a person from going off the grid.

        Lots of people go off the grid, and their existence proves the lie. There are entire communities that live of the grid for religious reasons, and you want to tell me that there are none of these in Florida?

        And if we start to see a good percentage of people going off-grid, the rates for those staying on-grid will go up.

        Right, because that is how economics works.

        If it is so cheap to buy solar panels and batteries to go off the grid then what stops a utility from using this as their primary m

  • Having seen sooo many articles about lab battery tech that never makes it out of the lab, please wake me up when it's time to spend my money on something that's been commercialized.

    • OK, it's time to wake up. There's lots of things to spend your money on that have been commercialized.

      Stories about released products you can buy today are cool. So are stories about cutting edge research. If you don't care about the latter that's your business, but a lot of people on Slashdot do. Don't criticize those stories just because you aren't interested in research.

      Maybe you're trying to imply commercial batteries aren't getting any better. Why can't we buy electric cars today that have much bi

  • That's about 5 times the physical size of the LiPo battery inside a cell phone.
  • That sounds like the basis of some interesting fumes if the battery catches fire.

  • As far as I recall, Sulphur doesn't conduct electric current very well. Does it have to be in a molten state for the battery to work?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      No. Sulfur binds the Lithium ions and releases them again. As Sulfur has several different charging states (S2+, S4-, S5-, S6-), you have a mixture of different Lithiumsulfides at the cathode during discharge. The battery is totally discharged, if there is only Li2S. During charing, the Lithiumsulfide gets dissolved, until you have pure Lithium at the anode and pure Sulfur at the cathode. The actual charged particle providing the internal current are Li+ ions, hence the name Lithium ion accumulator.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Sique ( 173459 )
        Sorry... messed the Sulfur ions up. We have S2+, S2-, S4+ and S6+. You could use ammonia as solvent, but in batteries, solid electrolytes are preferred.

  • Screw cars. This is for planes (Score:3)

    by amorsen ( 7485 ) <benny+slashdot@amorsen.dk> on Monday January 06, 2020 @05:12PM (#59593348)

    5 times the capacity per weight of current batteries would easily power most regional flights. Yes, the planes would only fly 200 cycles before having to replace the batteries, but that should be a fairly simple operation.

    • This is the most insightful comment of the thread.

      5x power density would make electric aviation actually practical.

  • I wonder what the C rating is on these. Some LiPo's are crazy (yes, I know they're over quoted, but I've seen a 4 cell 1500mAH battery jump start a car). Five times the density could be nice for FPV drones (which typically only get 3-5 mins flight time).

  • The hobbyist, maker, and small company will never be able to get a hold of this technology because the big boys will make sure that only they get access to it for at least the first 5 years.

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