But at its core, an anode free battery has a lot of desirable properties which make this engineer feat notable. Perhaps the most important is that the materials are readily available in a number of countries which could source their own raw materials to produce batteries. They also do not fail exothermically[sp?] when cell integrity is breached, that makes them a better battery for cars than the current Lithium ones.

So the next bridge to cross (and one so many battery breakthroughs fall down on) is what is the cost to produce batteries at scale. If, as we read yesterday they can get them down to $1/kWh then you'll be seeing a whole lot of these.

In California, if you are tied to the grid as my system is, you are still at the mercy for how much the power company will credit you for power you generate vs charge you for power you consume. That has been a source of argument hear for the last 20 years. With sufficient local storage, you can completely disconnect from the grid and that removes this pricing power of the power company over your energy production. Something I hope to do within the next 5 years.

[1] This is sort of the MPG equivalent rating for solar panels, good for comparing panels to other panels but bad for guessing how much power they will produce for you.

So just under $2 CAD/kW installed and running - inverter, licensed electrician and permits, everything. (That's under $1.50 USD/kW)

The panels are now cheaper than when I bought them too :)

I've been considering it, and I figured $2 CAD/kW is the 10-year break even point for me, which would be amazing since you can get a 10 year interest free loan for it.

As well as the 10 year interest free loan check if your province has any rebates. The "Greener Homes" grant gave me $5k (So I only have $8k on the loan). It just made 1000 kWh in June, I'm super happy.

Not just by a little bit, but by a huge margin. They are predicting prices will come down and that especially new, costly batteries will have a hard time competing with the more established manufacturers dropping their prices.

We'll make more batteries in the next few years than we have ever made. Production is growing from slightly below 1 twh/per year to multiple terawatt hours per year. Bloomberg NEF puts demand for next year around 1.6 twh/y and is tracking 7.9 twh/y of investments related to new factories. Not all of those will get built but that's a lot of capacity and lithium demand. Yet prices are dropping, as you pointed out. That's because there's plenty of lithium and we don't have a shortage anymore.

Despite a lot of lithium being in places like Chile and Bolivia, Australia is actually the top producer of it. Chile is about to loose its number 2 position to China: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-worlds-largest-l...

All this is of course before you start considering battery chemistries that don't use lithium. Sodium ion is looking pretty good right now. No lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc. And used for some cheap cars and grid storage already. Especially for grid storage, lithium based batteries aren't necessarily the most obvious thing to use.

It would have been entirely within the guidelines of polite discussion (and the site) to point out that scarcity isn't the only deciding factor, but the OP never made any assertions to that effect.

Sayeth Wikipedia, "Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged."

Ok. I'm still not entirely clear on it but it makes some kinda sense.

It's sort of like "serverless" ;)

I mean, with the server-less analogy, it is sort of like the fact that you don't manage the creation and destruction of the VM, someone (something) is though.

You essentially only handle business logic, not the "serving" part of the server, but IMO it's not a buzzword. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because I want control and fear lock-in, but there's real meaning behind it, no?

Why should I be excited that "it creates its metal anode the first time it is charged"?

I mean this question in ELI5-fashion not in a disparaging one.

Chromium is 5 times more abundant than Lithium in earth crust (0.01% vs 0.002%). Better, but not that much ?

"Regular" sodium-ion batteries with prussian blue has, it seems, the great advantage of not using any scarce elements. It would be nice to have a comparison between this solid state chemistry and the regular one.

The Gibbs free energy of formation for chromium oxides and chromite is much more negative than for lithium-bearing minerals so Cr compounds are thermodynamically favored to precipitate out of melts and solutions, forming minerals with high concentrations that then get pushed up by other processes. Li+, with its lone valence electron, just doesn't form strong bonds or highly stable mineral phases in comparison. On top of that the diffusion coefficients for Cr species in magmas and rocks are generally orders of magnitude lower than for Li. Cr gets locked into crystal structures early and stays put, while Li keeps migrating and diffusing in the form of water soluble minerals. There's also a whole biogeochemical cycle for Cr involving microbes that can concentrate it in sediments.

I'm very optimistic because these solve so many battery issues at the same time, heat, rapid charge, sourcing.

Other industrial lithium intermediates are also toxic, as is the concentrated brine it’s often extracted from. Since it’s concentration is so low, most lithium extraction is pretty nasty.

I think if the price of chromium spiked enough, you'd just see more things move on to different materials. More aluminum, titanium, brass, bronze, etc. There are a lot of things made of stainless that don't necessarily have to be, simply because it's cheap and good enough.

But that's still only 7.2 million tons/year.

I feel like the where are we going to get the lithium and but what about the environmental costs arguments to be kind of weak when you look at actual production numbers and compare the costs with other resources we consume.

So this is experimental and a product version won't be available for a year or (likely) longer. And as products naturally niche into longevity, weight, capacity, and other categories, those metrics will become relevant at that point. Until then, it's just experimental results with metrics relevant to previous experimental results.

The plot shows ~400 Whr/kg and ~800 Whr/L densities. For grid storage that is fine.

The paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01569-9 is unfortunately behind a paywall.

We will see. Battery technologies live or die on whether the nasty, complicated surface reactions are truly reversible over discharge cycles at the sizes needed to be practical...

I mean if it was otherwise suitable for grid storage it's not a downside obviously, but at those energy densities it can be inferior in terms of cost and/or cycle life and still be commercially viable in other significant markets.

Not to mention this is research, it doesn't have to directly result in a commercially viable product.

  Lithium extraction is also environmentally damaging, whether from the … brine extraction that pumps massive amounts of water to the surface to dry.

At some point universities should really rethink how they do PR around research - at the least try and tamp down on headlines that read like something out of some grifter startup instead of a research lab

can you use existing factories and manufacturing techniques or do you need to invent or build those. we've started hearing about solid state batteries about 15 years ago and we still dont have any at a big enough scale. if solid state batteries do takeoff it will probably takeoff first in electric aviation and supercars which can hide the cost due to a more expensive products and the need for higher density

Most of the research on this has only started in the last 10 years or so and it does take time to work out the kinks.

Even within the common Lithium-ion batteries, there have been constant improvements but it’s easy to miss the changes over time.

“Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose” https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

Yes, partly it was to simulate demand, but they can only afford to do so because of their costs going down.

Tesla has not been spending on a lot of new models recently , but they have been spending heavily on making them cheaper and better.

Rivian, ford GM and every other non Chinese car manufacturer has been loosing money per car expect Tesla for a reason

Graphene anodes are pretty bog standard at this point in LiPo batteries.

Magnesium doping has also found its way into high density NMC batteries.

Sodium-ion batteries are currently being manufactured by CATL and in the ramping up phase.

You aren't seeing them because the chemistry of these batteries is usually only called "lithium ion" or "Sodium Ion" the various other chemicals are thrown into a soup of special sauce to raise battery density, cycle life, charge speed, etc.

If they're still rolling out new manufacturing lines, they are clearly still kicking and have investors who believe they have a viable product.

Did they have to move on from one technology? I mean I've never heard of them before but if you say so, that's not really that surprising with how fast with battery technology is evolving.

And this is tough. There are only so many market niches, and if some competing technologies turn out to be better your product has no place.

This is the tragedy of engineering: most technologies, even technologies that "work", end up failing, because in any niche there can be only one winner. I'm sure if you've worked on new technologies you've experienced this, perhaps on every technology you've ever worked on.

The incessant press releases suck but PR people gonna PR.

And as the other poster suggests, quite a bit of R&D does make it into existing devices in one form or another. All of these technologies are worth exploring, but the notion that replacing present lithium battery tech is super urgent is not actually correct.

TBH, there are a lot of "news" with conditional: might, could etc. The sad thing is that they generate (spam) discussions on HN.

But hey, after all, maybe that's their purpose.

Disclaimer: I really hope these batteries make it.