We’ve been seeing claims like this for years and every time it’s been total bullshit. 99.9% chance it is this time as well, but enjoy the thought experiment.
yep.
SHould be a blanket ban on miraculous battery technology stories until they are actually in production and proven.
Cause lets face it, if one of these miracle batteries using cheap, common materials with amazing capacity and longevity was real, it wouldnt take long for companies to jump on them.
Call me pessimistic but I’m guessing this is only time we’ll be hearing about it
NIckel Iron is fantastic without any revolutionary improvements. Batteries made 100 years ago still work today. They are large and heavy so are only of use for home power.
The big “down side” which is the reason it isn’t commercially developed at large scale is that they last forever. No investors are going to give billions to a business that can’t generate revenue forever with a product that needs replacing every 3 years.
The government would for the military.
Meanwhile my UPS taks 8 hours to charge and lasts 8 minutes.
UPS batteries are something i don’t understand either. Why have they not changed with all the new tech we have now? Is it just still made of the best chemicals for their use and to then be recycled or something?
UPS batteries need to be fully charged all the time. Lead acid batteries like to be fully charged. Lithium batteries need to be stored around 50% charge to have a long lifetime.
Lead batteries are also cheap.
And mine take ~30 minutes to charge. This person may want to replace their batteries.
It’s brand new, I’m reading directly from the instructions, if it only takes 30min to change they should say that and it’s not by design. It’s a CP1500PFCLCD
Charge time depends on the UPS. The cheap consumer grade ones usually have a float charger that takes forever.
There are newer LFP portable batteries with <10ms UPS switch times that charge quickly and will keep the power on longer. They also have much longer battery life’s (3000+ cycles) , and LFP cells don’t degrade the same when kept at 100% like other types, although you should still cycle them a few times a year.
Bluetti makes some, the elite series has their latest UPS features. The non elite are slower and noisier.
Its all fairly new and have been improving year over year. For example, earlier models may not have switched back on if power was out for a long time and it fully drained the battery. Now some models can turn back on.
Edit: more details.
The technology uses nickel and iron clusters smaller than 5 nanometers, meaning 10,000 to 20,000 clusters could fit within the width of a human hair.
By using these dimensions, the researchers increased the electrode surface area, allowing almost every atom to participate in the chemical reaction. This efficiency enables the battery to reach a full charge in seconds rather than the seven hours required by historical versions of the technology.
5nm nano fabrication will cost a fortune. this week’s cure-all battery.
Nano chemistry is entirely different from nano fabrication. I haven’t read the paper but most materials like this are made by mixing chemicals in a beaker and/or heating them in a furnace.
Just make one large enough to power my house for 2 weeks and let me use solar completely detached from the grid. I’ll put it on the side of my house.
maybe in a shed off the side of your house? i would not want that fire attached to my structure in a failure.
It’s not lithium. This battery wouldn’t be a fire hazard.
if it’s charged it’s a fire hazard. i’ve seen nickel cadmiums go up in weird ways. we’re talking about your largest investment, prudence is warranted.
My house is charged. It’s a fire hazard.
It is waaaaaaay more likely that they’ll be an issue with an EV or ice car in your garage to catch fire than a storage battery like this. This or sodium batteries can’t have a runaway thermal “event”. The chemical reactions aren’t there for it.
That’s doable right now pretty much, in that the cost of existing batteries is in proportion to the other stuff you’ll need.
The sodium batteries rolling out to market right now should be good for it. Just waiting for them to get out and into use for a few years to make sure their isn’t any immediate unforseen bugs. I just want a 30 year battery and not a 10 year, and time itself degrades lithium based batteries quite a lot. They can make one that will last over 500,000 ev miles, but don’t count on it doing it and lasting 20+ years.
Team expects, may be useful, could be used, prototype, are currently investigating and so on. Cool piece of technolgy, but no even mention when they’d expect that to be commercially available, if it’s even possible to manufacture in commercial scale. Like many other new battery chemistries and technologies, it shows promise and makes a good headline, but at this point that’s pretty much it.
To be fair, commercial long-life nickel-iron batteries are already being sold for grid storage. The main reason they aren’t used more widely is they cost more up front.
That’s ok, because they still cost less than alternatives over the full life span of the battery.
The risk is that the higher purchase cost required will likely be wasted as new battery tech surpasses it long before its life is over.
So for now, it’s all about weighing opportunity cost, tech lock-in, and early obsolescence
Eh, give em the clout they need to develop it further.
Well tbf this was a university lab which isn’t focused on commercial production but just trying to prove their experiments
this is one of the bigger changes in battery tech i’ve read in a while. i’m curious about their beef aerogel tho. i have no personal problem using it (beef is going to be used, regardless, so ethically we should not waste the beef we’re producing) but i would love to see this battery tech become vegan. in part so i can calm the little part of my conscious, and in part so we don’t have to have an ethical debate about batteries.
Per the article they are working on that, which is good since cattle farming is not exactly eco friendly.
The researchers are currently investigating the use of other metals with this nanocluster fabrication technique. They are also testing natural polymers as more abundant replacements for bovine proteins to facilitate potential manufacturing.
If it lasts 30 years, it will not fly with the industry and the concept of planned obsolescence.
Ooh, they’ll figure a way to make it clock out on the last monthly payment. One little chip will do, or just a few lines of code in the right place.
Someone will find a way to make it a subscription service that stops working when a certain MW is exceeded
We are heading for a subscription LIFE.
Did you ever see the movie THX 1138 (1971)?
The police stop chasing him when his “value to society” runs out.
Then a new player will become dominant in the industry.
the device achieves an excellent specific energy (47 W h kg−1) and superior specific power (18 kW kg−1)
I’m not familiar with this stuff. How does that compare to popular lithium batteries?
Looks like it’s more like NiMH than LiPo, but higher power than NiMH (which I guess lines up with their claims of charging super fast).
Poorly. According to a random Wikipedia query, commodity lithium ion is ~270 Wh per kilogram. So this is around 20% of that, according to the above.
“Excellent” may be in comparison to other byzantine specialty battery chemistries, but lithium ion remains resolutely enthroned.
Nickel iron is typically used for off grid solar energy storage. Weight doesn’t matter at all since the battery won’t be moved. The most important thing is lifetime. Traditional nickel iron batteries last for decades and can be refurbished.
Home storage generally uses LFP which is around 170 WH/kg. 270 is NMC which is used in stuff like mobile phones where the trade offs are different.
It might be cool for storing solar energy for your home, though. We don’t need to always carry the battery in every use case
Most li-ions land around 120-160 W-h /kg. So much poorer, but much cheaper on density
The specific power (power density) is kind of crazy though. I think most li-ions top out around 10kW/kg, any more and they will overheat and boil their electrolyte which usually leads to fire.
I looked around and found that lithium ion batteries will range from 100-270 Wh/kg and up to 10 kW/kg.
So these particular batteries are sort of an improvement, less energy by weight but better power if I understand correctly. Definitely not an expert.
Just like with all of these headlines, it will not charge in seconds outside the lab without cryogenic cooling systems. Pack density is already largely limited by cooling systems, so everyone looking for faster charging and higher range should really be focused on superconducting tech more than cell chemistry
Every battery charges in seconds
I hope, but 90% of these never pan out.
It takes decades for innovative products, or seemingly useless ideas, to be commercially viable. That’s why the best response, when asked what is the purpose of doing research on seemingly useless topics, is to say “I don’t know, but I know it’s going to be taxed someday.”
