The Age of Sustainability - Issue #9 All About Batteries

Getting to zero net carbon emissions is a nice goal. But we won’t get there if all we do is pontificate about the righteousness of the cause; there’s got to be some goal setting and making. We can’t talk about everything at once so let’s focus on battery technology because getting the society to rely on electric driving will hinge on several things. First there’s overall cost of the vehicle and a major component of the is cost of battery. Then there’s range which boils down to energy density of the battery. Also keep in mind recharge time. Naturally the higher capacity the battery, the less recharging comes in to the picture. Today’s issue of The Age of Sustainability is all about batteries.

I love this because in it Elon talks about removing barriers to building a $25k car. With batteries being so expensive to make right now, they seem to be the bottleneck.

One of the inventors of the Lithium battery was at Univ. Texas a few years ago working on a solid state battery. I don’t know if this effort is related but going solid state, i.e. no electrolyte, can be a game changer.

The battery market is really hot with lots of competing ideas. I don’t have an opinion on this article.

Good advice that boils down to buying what’s on the market, not what’s on the drawing board.

This is an academic paper with a pay wall. You most likely won’t read it but its existence shows how dug in the industry already is.