• Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    The battery prototype demonstrated endurance, maintaining a stable structure and perfect reversibility over 6,000 cycles — equivalent to more than 16 years of daily operation — with zero loss in storage capacity.

    WTF!? If this battery is just half as good as they claim, it could be a game changer for storing power for solar and wind!

    • blackbeans@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      There’s always a catch, details matter.

      Some chemistries can only work if heated up to a certain temperature.
      Some cannot supply high currents. Some perform badly at lower temperatures. Some are expensive to produce. Some have a very low energy density per weight or volume. Some are hard to create consistently and require a lot of balancing. Some cannot be scaled up easily. Some are prone to aging regardless of cycles. Some even require manual maintenance.

      It’s hard to make a cell that does everything right. Cycle life is only one out of a huge list of parameters.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      If all of the claims from Chinese tech companies and research was half as good as they claim we would all learn Mandarin by now.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        That is exactly right, and simplified Chinese is actually extremely popular to learn here now. (Denmark)
        And no wonder, they have become leaders of several key (future) technologies.

        • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Counter point: I know exactly one person who learned Mandarin and several dozen who don‘t. Pretty much everyone learned english and (to a lesser degree) a third language that isn‘t Mandarin either. French, Spanish and Japanese are popular, though.

    • Jason2357@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Those are not the metrics that are important for storing wind and solar. Cost per MWh is the important one.

      It is great to see, and isn’t an unreasonable jump from lifepo4. They already do 4-6k charge cycles with something like 20% degradation. This is a bigger deal for electronics and vehicles as it would make battery replacements unnecessary.

      • Pelicanen@fedia.io
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        3 months ago

        But cycle life is a central parameter for the cost of a battery, the longer it lasts the more rarely you have to replace it. In the longer term, a battery that lasts twice as long can be practically half as expensive.

        • willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          Assuming the manufacturing costs (materials + utilities + other fees + labor + profit extraction) for the two types of batteries are equal, yes.

          • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            No? Even if the new battery is 3x more expensive to build, and has 50 % of the capacity of a Li-ion battery, it can still have an advantage in large scale storage if it lasts for 10x as many cycles without degrading. At the end of the day, it’s a combination of parameters that determine which is the best for a given application, and high resistance to degradation can outweigh other parameters in many scenarios.

    • satanmat@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      IF is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there.

      And yes IF it is as you said HALF that good, in either direction— the article mentioned ~80% under heavy loads. And that alone would be a game changer.

      Energy storage is the “oil” of the future.

      IF — we shall see. But I’m hopeful