The fact that GM apparently is road testing them now is encouraging.

And perhaps they followed SOP for startups. Advertise your successes until you obtain funding and then shut up and develop in secret so that you don’t give your competition any help.

That seems to have happened with Ambri. Sadoway did a lot of public stuff, got backers, and went pretty much silent.

One never knows whether things are going well or failure is underway until a product appears. Or doesn’t.

Eos was quite for a long time and then announced their ConEd deal.

Now, that’s a bit of a mixed bag for us – we only use them in EVs for a portion of that flat-ish part (which is why they make such great grid storage when re-purposed). But it does tell us that there’s reasonable hope that if it’s at 91% after 300 charges, it will hold above 80% for a few thousand. I’m interested to see how these work out – Hope things sort them selves out by 2015… cuz that’s about the time I’ll be in the market again.

Thanks for the info – exciting field to follow.

The big hope was that we would get down to $200/kWh in the next few years. That would make EVs as cheap as ICEVs. These folks are saying $125 now.

I’m not clear on their cycle life. They say after 300 cycles the batteries are at 91% capacity. Unless there’s a cliff following 300 then everything is great.

Should be able to make a 200 mile range EV for about the same price as a LEAF and economy of scale would pull it down into the low $20k range. Assume subsidies go away then.

Right now it makes much more sense to make a smart grid with demand response – AC units that have thermal storage, fridges that communicate with the grid to shift their load by a fraction of an hour or so, and water heaters that shift load by multiple hours to use demand when it’s available.

Pair that with good connections between grids (three amigos is a good start), smart renewable development (use the tech that best fits the demand curve to produce the most valuable power, not necessarily the cheapest power) and then implement “time of use pricing” and “value of solar” generation pricing to incentivise people to tweak their living habits to take advantage of the natural fluxes. Throw in some smart EV chargers that can interface with the grid and I think we’re there – no extra conventional storage necessary – it’s all built in to the technology we use every day at no extra cost. (well, cost of transition, but no running cost. And many of these components will be replaced over the years anyway, so minimal long term cost – factor in efficiency levels and it’s likely a significant savings for most)

Battery tech advancing and becoming more economical will shift how much of the above mentioned technologies get implemented and to what extent – that’s the information I’m trying to glean from this conversation… but I don’t know that we have enough information to make accurate predictions at this point – but you’re more informed on this particular point than I. Care to share?

But $125/kWh… WHAT?!?! I thought the goal that they (was it the Obama administration or who set that goal?) was $300/kWh… or am I mis-remembering something?

I must be mis-remembering…

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/eos-puts-its-zinc-air-grid-batteries-to-test-with-coned

Good video on the liquid metal battery. After the talk Sadoway set up the company Ambri to manufacture the batteries.

There’s some good stuff on their web site.

Worst case for grid storage, if nothing else appears, is that we build a lot of pump-up. That’s both doable and affordable.

Take a look at the graph on this page.

http://enviasystems.com/innovation/#es2

Are they blowing smoke? Possibly. But if the GM stuff is right then things sound very promising.

(I think I spelled their name wrong earlier. No ‘r’.)

Gotta do some research on Envira. 400 Wh/kg is great – just need to see the price. Could shake things up a bit.

Thanks again!

(I do realize that if even 1 of these emerging battery technologies succeed it would alleviate much of this concern, and there are many alternative storage solutions, but I outline the worst case – aka no tech breakthrough – and then plan for the probable case.)

Don’t think I’ve heard of Aquion before – Have to look into that one. I’ll also give a little more time to researching Ambri’s then too.

As always, thanks for the informative reply.

There are multiple battery technologies. Zinc-air is coming on strong. That would be cheaper than lithium-ion. Zinc-air might scale down to EV weight.

Aquion’s batteries are going on the New York/ConEd grid in early 2014. The use a sodium sulfate based salt water electrolyte.

For grid storage the most interesting (to me) is Ambri’s liquid metal battery. It’s working in prototype and they are working to bring the best ‘mix’ of materials to market. Even with the materials they’ve moved on past it would probably give us “dirt cheap” storage.

Then there are non-battery grid storage solutions being developed. I think we’re fine. Just need a bit more time to sort things out and figure the most affordable.

We’ve got lithium in the US. We use to extract/process it but China undercut the world market and our plant(s) closed down. Someone is working on extracting lithium from geothermal waste water at the Salton Sea plants. That brine apparently has a high lithium concentration.

Other plants are opening around the world. I think both Canada and Australia are getting ready to process lithium.

Engineering costs, I would imagine would go down quickly. Same with manufacturing, a bunch of battery factories have already been built.

Labor input should be small – fork lift drivers and sales/clerical staff mostly. Manufacturing should be highly automated. (Obviously techies to keep the machines running.)

Energy costs might be a factor. Some batteries have to be “baked” for a while. But I also read something about quicker/less energy use by microwaving them. Don’t know if that’s for real.

Then – we might be using less lithium. I saw this a couple of days ago –

“On Wednesday this week at the annual conference of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, GM’s head of global R&D let his guard down slightly in saying prototype electric cars now being evaluated on U.S. test tracks have triple the energy density of a Chevrolet Volt, and close to double that of a Tesla Model S.A Volt has about 140 watt-hours per kilogram energy density in its LG Chem lithium-ion T-shaped battery pack. Tesla’s “skateboard” chassis now uses Panasonic cells that reportedly deliver as much as 240 Wh/kg, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said to expect more.

And so has GM in so many words.

“Today there are prototypes out there with 400 Watt-hours per kilogram,” said Dr. J. Gary Smyth, executive director of Global Research and Development, General Motors Company.

Smyth added the mystery batteries will cost much less than batteries in today’s electric cars and they’ll have a “big impact” on the auto industry and “it completely changes the equation” on cost, range, and vehicle packaging.

http://www.hybridcars.com/gm-rd-boss-hints-at-tesla-surpassing-batteries/

It’s very likely that the 400 Wh/kg batteries are Envira batteries. It says so in the article plus they match the claims of Envira on their web site and GM bought into Envira several months back.

If that’s the case then we’d need about a LEAF’s amount of lithium for a 200 mile range EV.

Now, I don’t know how much to trust that article. I haven’t seen any other sites pick it up. But I have been following Envira for at least a couple of years and they seem to be straight shooters.

So that says, worst case scenario (omitting the possibility of a cost spike cause by a temporary demand spike) the long term cost of the Leaf’s lithium battery pack should not rise over $140 ever… even if every country refused to export lithium to the US.

Now, granted there are all sorts of other costs… but are any of those material costs? Or just manufacturing and engineering costs?

Are there any other materials that have the potential to derail our EV conversion? (and grid storage conversion?)

(Such as Cobalt?) I’d look it up, but it’s relatively hard to find reliable, up-to-date information when you’re unfamiliar with a topic… especially when people intentionally put out FUD.

Apparently when the topic of lithium batteries for EVs first got going someone mistook lithium “reserves”, the amount of extra processed lithium available as the amount that could be processed if there was demand.

And they, or someone else, used the small quantity price of lithium rather than the bulk cost to calculate that there are hundreds of dollars worth of lithium in a LEAF battery pack.

Here’s something I wrote up a while back….

The 100 mile Nissan Leaf uses 4kg of lithium in its batteries. Let’s say magic happens and between 2015 and 2035 we put 1.2 billion 200 mile range EVs on the world’s roads, each using 8kg of lithium in their batteries. (And that’s if range increase comes only from more batteries rather than the more likely improved anodes and cathodes.)

That would mean that in that 20 year period we would need to produce 480,000 metric tons of lithium per year.

And after that we could just recycle what we’ve already extracted.

At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth’s crust, lithium is the 25th most abundant element. Nickel and lead have about the same abundance. There are approximately 39 million tonnes of accessible lithium in the Earth’s crust. An 81 year supply.

Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Portugal and Zimbabwe have roughly 13,000,000 metric tons of lithium that can be extracted. That’s a 27 year supply.

Bolivia has 5.4 million of the 13 million tons. Over 11 years.

There are approximately 230,000,000,000 tons of lithium in seawater. A 479,167 year supply.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial

Cost

Prices for high-purity, battery-grade lithium hydroxide range from $6,000 to $7,000 per tonne

http://lithiuminvestingnews.com/5886/lithium-prices-2012-carbonate-hydroxide-chloride/

That’s $6 to $7 per kg (1,000 kg in tonne) or $24 to $35 for the lithium in a Leaf.

The cost of extracting lithium from seawater is 5x or less than from lithium salts. If we had to use lithium extracted from seawater it would increase lithium costs to $120 to $140 (or less) for the entire battery pack.

Research how much the cost of cobalt contributes to the cost of some lithium battery chemistries if you really want something to worry about!

Ironically cobalt is one of the materials they are using in this new battery so that may have a significant impact on cost though presumably the price per KWh is still going to be very good.

if not there are a lot of cars which can do more than 100 miles. like the tesla, nissan , ford and others

It might be fun to figure out if a Tesla S or Volt might work out for you.

EVs don’t work for all. Yet. They don’t work for me. A trip to the grocery store is about 120 miles RT. I’m a low annual mileage driver (<6,000) miles per year. And I really have to have 4wd.