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A Staggering 19x Energy Jump in Capacitors May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries
(www.popularmechanics.com)
this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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Technology
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There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.
The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen's perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).
FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical ("battery") and electrostatic ("capacitor") energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can't mix.
My university login no longer works so I can't get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:
"holds promise" and "has the potential" are not miscible with "May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries".
I've been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.
While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.
Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.
I mean, I wouldn't mind a car with "only" 200km range, but that can charge up to full in just 5 minutes. I use my car just for work 99% of the time anyway, the times I need to go somewhere further away I can easily stop midway to charge, get a coffee in the meantime and then be on my way.
Unfortunately what's shipping today seems it would offer maybe half that.
For the batteries that were announced this past week, a larger-than-refrigerator-sized cabinet held a capacity of around 15kWh.
Around half the energy density by mass of Lithium batteries, and in the order of a sixth of the density by volume.
Now if only we could come up with a system where your car could be charged while stopped at traffic lights, we might be onto a winner (:
Considering however that the price of sodium is around 1-2% that of lithium, I expect we will see significant R&D and those numbers quickly start to improve.