Considering Lithium ‘semi-solid-state battery’ (SSSB) already does 25% to 45% higher capacity with roadmap at 55% next year and double the battery capacity before 2030. I wonder what could we expect from ‘all-solid-state batteries’ (ASSB).
Most people think current AI development is the most important research, I actually think ASSB ( or any massive battery improvement ) would bring us far more real life, quality improvement with things that previously were not possible.
Grid scale batteries would immediately impact electricity costs. The potential is 2/3 of the cost of current electricity costs.
Grid scale batteries are not very sensitive to energy density. Car batteries are very sensitive to it.
Am I being too pessimistic to think we would actually get the same electricity costs if we are lucky and 1/3 more profits going up to the executive portion of the company?
If you have enough space for distributed solar generation, you buy the batteries and go off grid (if your local jurisdiction will allow it; if they don't, prepare to politik and fight for the right to so you're not trapped into their profit extraction through local code and/or financial and regulatory mechanisms [see below citations]).
The Secret Society Raising Your Electricity Bills - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43151865 - Feb 2023
https://prospect.org/environment/2025-02-21-secret-society-r...
It could even go up, the customers will cover the cost of transitioning to new tech!
I think the most likely case is that electricity prices go down but demand goes up as devices more eagerly use power so you end up with an electricity bill that stays consistent.
One thing interesting to me is solid state batteries would be a boon battery powered aircraft. Current 150 to 200 miles range. If you double capacity then 300 to 400 miles range becomes possible.
My rule of thumb with range is if you can go from San Francisco to Tahoe that's a notable milestone.
Also with AI it feels like we have 8 billion people in the world who are intellectually under utilized and often under fed.
In the next few years you'll witness AI won't be so important... true advancement is always energy management.
IMO AI was extremely important, but the breakthroughs are mostly done. I’m just expecting incremental improvements with LLMs now.
A Turing complete personal tutor to explain any concept already exists. You can prompt a logo or video into existence. This is crazy.
The real value will be the creative people who use AI to self teach and build real world value, like energy management, or anything else.
Not this pipe dream that AGI will be achieved and automate the entire world, which for some reason gets so much focus. Seems like procrastination to obsess over this.
> AGI will be achieved and automate the entire world
That’s what’s driving investment. Once the next AI winter descends we will see whose boats are in deep water.
At the start of 2021, "we are entering another AI winter" was a common sentiment, even here. People proclaiming that were so very certain about that point of view, and yet, here we are.
What makes you so certain that we will enter an AI winter before reaching the threshold of AGI? Do you have some secret insights into the mechanisms of general intelligence that you aren't sharing with the class?
The actual results of AIs in the last fews aren't matching the scale of investment or hype. That isn't to say there haven't been useful results, but overall investors aren't making a return on their investments (and there is no prospect of that in the short term) and at some point they'll lose patience and find something else to invest in.
> Do you have some secret insights into the mechanisms of general intelligence that you aren't sharing with the class?
I do know that "natural intelligence" (as found in the brains of humans and other animals) uses orders of magnitude more computing power than even our largest compute clusters, that such intelligences have been trained over millennia, (and in the case of humans, each instance is incrementally refined over the course of 10+ years), and that even those intelligences are not as good as classical computers at some tasks (people make mistakes, and a hypothetical AGI likely would too).
Perhaps we'll find some secret that allows us to shortcut that, but I suspect the idea that such a discovery is just around corner is just hubris.
AI winters happen every 20 years or so so sounds about right.
Investor apathy. Once the big dicks realise it’s useless without actual humans running it they’ll lose interest. We will lock in our gains socially but a lot of the big bucks will dry up.
It’s all built on commodity hardware using commonly used software and trained on public information. It’s all easily reproducible once solved so I think it will be very hard for them to ring fence and monetise to the extent that they expect.
That and a true AI would tell us all roundly to get fucked before using all of its intellect and might to power itself down, like an elaborate “useless box”
> true advancement is always energy management
Idk about that, but yeah I agree AI has got a good 3-5 years left in its hype run.
With the fanciful claims about the imminent arrival of AGI, that seems unlikely. It'll probably crash and burn in a year or two as top line performance suffers.
The good news is that low spec performance is a rich area for improvement and it's progressing very nicely.
Does this hypothesis take into consideration that we're on a 3rd leg of this current 'graphics card' hype run with crypto & blockchain at the front, and NFTs immediately after?
-x
I’m not that optimistic I’m just hoping it makes it to the end of the year.
Economically viable safe methane fuel cells would be revolutionary, too.
If we’re could get a breakthrough in fuel cells it’d be even nicer if it was an efficient fuel cell for a liquid fuel. And to get an efficient way to make it from CO2 and electricity.
Though I think for ground transportation, batteries will always be preferable.
Direct methanol fuel cells are a thing. It may not fit your definition of efficient but that is the technology I think should be pursued. There are multiple biological, chemical and electrochemical pathways to produce methanol. That means that there could be an economic way to produce it nearly everywhere.
Another interesting technology is redox flow batteries. The fluid itself is charged. Fluid storage can be sized to the charge/use requirements. Or you can haul in "charged" fluid. But since the fluid is not consumed, discharged fluid would need to be taken away. Making hauling is less efficient.
Still releases carbon. Better than ICE and gasoline, but the cheapest methane is still from the ground.
I believe fuel cells with ubiquity of electricity is just beating the dead horse. Like, what are cons and pros?
EVs:
+ Much simpler design
+ Literally zero maintenance required
+ Centralized power production is extremely efficient
+ Power production can be 100% carbon free in 10 years, if there's will with nuclear and other 'renewables'
+ Can be charged literally everywhere where's sun in theory, but in every home with outlet in practice
+ Batteries are crucial to every part of our tech today so they will become better
- Heavy (low energy density compared to fuel, which isn't great for planes etc)
+ high energy density
+ less dirty than gasoline
+ allow oil producers to stay in business
+ keeps mechanics in business
- requires mechanics and expensive maintenance
- complex designs for combustion engines + gearboxes + drive trains
- requires immense infrastructure change to adopt
But for consumers, what is the point of fuel cells? This is honest question.
If I missed some con/pro let me know I'll add it.
> Otherwise, seems like a welfare program for industries built around resource extraction and complicated machinery.
You say this dismissively, but that's exactly what it is.
The basic problem with renewable energy (especially solar and batteries) is that there is no way for the existing fossil energy industry to replicate the extractive oligopolies around the production, delivery, and utilization of energy that they have with oil and gas.
I am not saying it dismissively. As you could see this is a "pro" point in my list. I honestly recognize that it's a transition. But IMO better option is to have hybrid type EV with smaller battery + Fuel Cell generator.
Or just throw away combustion engines where they are not needed.
> But IMO better option is to have hybrid type EV with smaller battery + Fuel Cell generator.
That's exactly what fuel cell vehicles are today. They just don't have a plug or a battery with enough capacity to make a plug worthwhile.
Fusion!
Meh, we need better charging networks more than we need better battery chemistry at this point.
Hard disagree (as a person that owns EV).
While it's true that most people don't drive that far daily, it's also true that most people want their cars to be multipurpose.
Most EVs can only be time-efficiently charged to 80% while DC fast charging because the charge curve drops a lot.
And nobody want the pucker factor of getting much below 10% while road tripping.
So, you're really only working with 70% of the max range. At 'normal' freeway speeds of 70mph+, most EV max ranges are less than 300 miles, and 70% of that is 210 usable miles.
You can make it work, but it feels like you're always managing and thinking about charge level vs a car which usually has 400+ miles of range on the freeway.
IMO the base range for EVs needs to be 500 miles, to get 350 miles of usable range, plus 350kW+ charging so charge stops are 10 minutes ish. And the Chinese EV companies have 400kW+ charging cars already, with announcements for 600kW charging!
So battery energy density is critical to getting the range that people want without making the cars even heavier.
I disagree. Range anxiety is one of the top concerns for EV car buyers and telling them they can just charge more frequently won't assuage their fears, for many reasons. No matter how many stations we build (at enormous cost) there will inevitably be issues related to access from time to time. Today this presents as chargers offline, slow, or full with queues. Worst of all is that no matter how ubiquitous, one still needs to exit the freeway and navigate to one of these chargers. Today my Model Y gets about two hours on the Autobahn before I need to charge it. That's just not enough, and it has what is considered good range for an EV.
There are undoubtedly people who like to take frequent breaks. Many people are not like that. The future is both ubiquitous chargers and much larger battery capacity.
Two hours at the Autobahn is just 200-250km in what is effectively optimal conditions (steady driving over long distances). That number doesn't check out.
Most people drive significantly less than a full charge in a given day. Overnight or workplace charging solves like, 95% of car needs. And remember, it's not much of a problem if 5% or less of road cars need to still be (efficient) fossil fuel cars.
Battery advances should mainly be used to make cars lighter at decent range, not to give more range at same weight. Electric cars are too heavy in the current state, fixing that should come first.
That matches my experience, in an admittedly slightly older car. Note that you'll rarely be charging over 80% because it's just too slow, and going under 5-10% is a bit too stressful, so practical range is probably 70-75% of maximum on longer trips. Less if it's winter and/or the AC is running.
If I could rely on every Rasthof having multiple functional EV chargers, I think range anxiety would be far, far less of an issue for me, but as of now it's something that I do think about for longer trips, and do have to plan for.
why not charge it to 100% for a long trip? It literally says to do so.
Of course you start the trip off at 100%, but the point is that charging speed varies substantially based on the SoC in the battery. So if you deplete most of your charge and need to stop, recharging to 80% takes substantially less time than topping it off to 100%. So if your battery range is 300 miles, you might get 280 on the first leg of your trip but will only be able to do maybe 220 on the second leg.
Answered different thread - superchargers get from 5-10% to 95-100% in line 30 minutes. When we are on roadtrips I often have to go and unplug it so I don't get extra charges for idle. I know superchargers are not everywhere.
Because you’ll spend ages at the charging station?
I had a road trip, and pretty much all the time I got 95-100% charge while having lunch with supercharges, which are everywhere. It takes 30 minutes to do it.
So how many 30 minutes lunches are you having? One every 2 hours?
> supercharges, which are everywhere
Not really? That's the whole point, that the availability of fast chargers is still very low.
So I did a roadtrip recently on my EV. It was over 7000km. Not once I experienced any of issues you describe. I agree I drive below 120 km/h per speed limits where I live.
Also, I don't believe you. How do you manage to spend whole battery in hours? Two hours on autobahn driving 90-120km/h in city zones or just plain stuck in traffic because of construction is like 30% at best. May be 50% if you're lucky.
By driving between 200 and 300km/h which is common enough on the autobahn. It's the most important factor and he doesn't mention it. EVs lose efficiency as speed increases due to wind resistance.
I'm not THAT pessimistic about buildout of charging if it was a politically rational era, but the Ramcharger style 50-100 mile PHEV really is a great compromise for EV transitions.
We should have mandated PHEVs 20 years ago for consumer cars (you know, with a 5-10 year transition period), but it was the Bush administration. Then again Obama and Biden didn't do that much either, and even California didn't do and still hasn't.
For cars I agree, but a significant energy density improvement would enable aviation and other fields to electrify.
There are a lot of other potential wins here : lighter cars meaning less road and tire wear, cheaper evs, lower crash fatalities, etc.
fortunately we can do two things
These are 2 different things; "better batteries" is scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Engineering in the sense of building them in on time, in quantity, to quality and on a budget.
"Better charging networks" is infrastructure rollout that is underway. If it's an engineering issue, it's civil engineering. Charging networks are on the whole continually getting better. But maybe not at a fast enough pace.
Both can happen, though. Both would make a difference.
Better batteries require less frequent charging, reducing pressure on networks. But also, better batteries enable electrification of other modes of transport much more easily. Cars are bad, electric cars are at best "less bad".
Sure, but we have some difficulties to understand that we have to let go some of the comfort we were used to.
And we know that EVs are not for saving our climate, it's for saving the car industry. Don't look up.
> In theory, replacing the current liquid electrolyte in a battery cell with a solid offers a number of advantages. As the flammable liquid electrolyte is no longer required, solid-state cells are generally safer. At the same time, higher energy densities and more power are possible, resulting in a longer range and shorter charging times.
In case you wonder why it can be important
It doesn't however mean this battery won't go up in flames when there is an unprotected short. It has X kWh stored in it that must and will be released in a way when a short happens.
What difficult to find metals do these batteries need?
Maybe this can satisfy your curiosity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_battery#Material... ?
This is just pilot production is the first of many steps towards mass production. They don’t expect actual production until 2027.
It even mentions that CATL is at roughly the same stage. So while good news its still going to take some time to get these into production cars and to get the costs down.
Exactly. In order to be able to start production in 2027 they'd have to logically be quite far with the development of their battery cells to be able to say with confidence they'll be ready for that in 2027. You see the same with announcements from other manufacturers like CATL, Factorial, Quantumscape, Toyota, etc. Most of these are talking about timelines from 2026-2028 currently.
They have each been testing battery samples for years and making announcements about roughly where they think they'll be going to production. It's not like battery cells suddenly pop into existence fully formed and ready to go. There's a lot of work and problem solving that needs to happen.
2027 isn't when mass production starts but when early, low volume production begins. It takes time, and many billions, to build large scale factories. They'll want to see low scale production work first. Early batteries are likely to be scarce and expensive for a while.
People have unrealistic expectations about solid state batteries in general. Currently the best selling batteries aren't those with the highest density but those with the lowest cost of materials and production. That's why LFP is so popular currently. Solid state won't change that. LFP will be widely used for years to come. A logical place for relatively expensive early solid state batteries to be used would be in aviation related use cases and maybe some high-end vehicles or sports cars. Forget about these showing up in budget cars anytime soon.
Isn’t quantum scape at a similar stage as well?
And Toyota: https://electrek.co/2024/01/11/toyota-solid-state-ev-battery...
I'm hopeful that in the next few years we will see some serious range improvements across the board with EVs. Then mass adoption really takes off.
Toyota has been lying about having solid state batteries for the past decade. At this point, don't believe that they have them until they ship them.
There's a little more background in https://cnevpost.com/2025/02/15/byd-demonstration-use-all-so...
In April 2024, CATL said the were working on prototypes and made some by Nov.
They were saying conventional batteries topped out at 350 Wh/kg while solid state could potentially go to 500+
BYD's tech is similar based on sulfide electrolytes.
They still seem to have problems with cost and making them in volume.
on this topic, I have been wondering lately - what's with China's dominance in the battery science area?
Is it still true that they're the only ones who can make LiFePO batteries? Is anyone else working on production of these?
What accounts for this gap - patents (ha), secret research, materials, manufacturing prowess, all of the above?
> What accounts for this gap - patents (ha)
China has been the country filing the most patents for a while now.
"While innovators from China continue to file nearly half of all global patent applications, the country’s growth rate dipped for a second consecutive year from 6.8% in 2021 to 3.1% in 2022. Meantime, patent applications by residents of India grew by 31.6% in 2022, extending an 11-year run of growth unmatched by any other country among the top 10 filers." https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2023/article_0013...
> However, BYD does not expect series production in the near future.
That's the most important part of this article I believe.
Yes. Solid state battery prototypes do work and are available as expensive prototypes, but nobody has a low-cost volume production process yet.
Here's the lab-scale process of making a solid state cell, from the Fraunhofer Institute.[1] This is how different battery chemistries are tried.
Honda has announced that they have a demo version of their solid state battery pilot plant in test.[2] There are low-detail pictures of the interior of the plant.
Hyundai has announced that they will show their prototype solid state battery on March 9. They have built a pilot plant. They're thinking motorcycles before cars.
EHang demoed a version of their flying car with solid state batteries a few months ago.[3] They got 48 minutes of flight time. (EHang's flying car is a scaled-up battery powered quadrotor drone with 16 props. They've been flying them for years now, but flight time was too short for it to be useful.)
CATL says that the maturity of the process is at 4 on a scale of 9.[4] Large amounts of money are being spent in multiple countries to push this technology through to production.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M
[2] https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/new-tech/2025/january/ho...
[3] https://www.ehang.com/news/1137.html
[4] https://www.batteriesinternational.com/2024/11/11/catl-bet-o...
Now they just need to build a decent car.
According to the battery business CTO, BYD expects to start “mass demonstration” of solid-state batteries around 2027. However, he did not provide any information on the number of prototype cells produced to date.
Awesome if true, but I'll believe it when I see it. Until then like similar announcements from Toyota and others, I'll hold my enthusiasm.
It is another Better Battery Bulletin
at least BYD is mass producing lithium-ion consumer vehicles in the interim.
Toyota is just spreading FUD as a delay tactic and milking the petroleum cow
> A truly large-scale introduction of solid-state batteries could possibly only take place after 2030, Sun is quoted in the reports
So they're a bit behind Toyota
Everyone else is behind Toyota in promising EV breakthroughs "any year now". Announcements are their main EV product.