126: Are Solid State Batteries Still the Future?

[Music] hey everybody on today's episode of still to be determined we're going to talk about being a day late a dollar short as usual i'm sean farrell i'm a writer of some sci-fi i'm a writer of some stuff for kids and i'm just all around curious about tech and with me of course is my brother matt who is the tech guy so lucky me when i have questions about tech i call my helpline which is also known as matt's personal line matt how you doing i'm pretty good how about you pretty good as you know of course matt we are going to be talking about your most recent video this is is this solid state battery breakthrough too late which is a interesting question about this in particular but it's an interesting question in the bigger picture the bigger picture being what happens to those tech developments that are interesting breakthroughs but are just a little bit behind the curve and so i i'm interested in that side of the discussion before we get into today's episode though i wanted to share a thought from a previous episode this one came from driller dev this is based on last week's conversation where we talked about other things including recycling of styrofoam recycling of plastics and a more organic version of plastic based on seaweed and driller dev had this to say regarding styrofoam darkling beetle larvae can devour it rather quickly thanks to some bacteria in their digestive system and apparently they decompose it so well that you can't find microplastics in them which could make them safe for livestock feed chickens for example imagine turning nugget packaging into real chicken so thank you for that driller dev that's very interesting and i was going to suggest matt maybe a video in the future looking into organic ways to deconstruct styrofoam so i like that i i had not heard that before that's awesome so yeah and kind of gross yeah it's but it's really it's i mean stuff like that i think is amazing when you have a thing that we make which we then stand around and say this does not exist in nature this does not naturally occur we don't ever have that well a storm swept through and there was a lightning strike and left behind all this styrofoam as we know that's how it's made like no this is like a thing where a bunch of guys were riding bicycles they all collided and the chemicals they happened to be carrying you got your peanut butter in my chocolate you got your chocolate and my peanut butter suddenly we have styrofoam and then nature shows up and it's just like oh yeah we can handle that i love those discoveries when it's just like oh yeah there's this beetle larvae and you know what that beetle larvae can do it can eat styrofoam does it enjoy it who's to say maybe who are we to judge what those poor little larvae actually want to be eating or are they just sitting there like well it's a living it's here [Laughter] so as the title would suggest we're talking about breakthroughs in solid state batteries and matt poses the question is it just a little bit behind the curve has the tech moved on to other things and left this development in a would you put it in an also ran category or how would you frame it i would i don't know if i'd say it's an also rand it's just one of those the benefits have to really significantly outweigh what you can do today for it to really kind of take off and it's like there's other technologies and things that are happening that are eating away at that solid-state advantage the point where it's like is it really that much better and it's so much more expensive and this is good enough and close enough to that that we could probably just do that right so it's i don't know if it's an ulcer ran but it is kind of a almost also ran right i guess that would be the way i put it it strikes me as like if you if you were gonna go along the route of like a satirical version of of this it would be like if in the early 1900s somebody had developed a slightly larger horse and it was saying and now this horse can pull even more on your wagon and meanwhile there's model t driving down the road and everybody's watching the model t drive down the road and looking at this horse and the horse is looking at them and everybody feels very awkward it feels a little bit like that including the horse including the horse that poor horse so in the vein of this conversation there were a lot of comments like this one from the 8-bit guy who wrote considering my first ev was a nissan leaf back in 2011 and it only went 85 miles on a charge and these days tesla's low end battery gets 267 miles per charge probably at a fraction of the cost of the early nissan batteries i'd say we have already arrived with the technology to achieve mass adoption and while that's no reason to stop research in advancement i think people need to stop waiting for the magic battery that may or may not happen and jump on the bandwagon now and i'm wondering do you see this new tech let's say it is able to start being mass produced it does you know the the numbers drop do you see production of this being in the same vein as say i go to a store looking at a cell phone and i see my apple phones and i see the android phones but then i see those from other producers which are maybe a little cheaper they cut a couple corners so they don't use the most recent tech that the main you know frontier phones use do you see this kind of technology being the tech that might fill that gap for a slightly more affordable version of the electric car or do you think it just doesn't meet the need it's too expensive it's too expensive right now and by the way the 8-bit guy great youtube channel if you i had a chance to meet him at flowcharts live really interesting guy um and great channel it's not that it's going to fill a cheaper need it's that it's it's high-end so it's like i could see some top-tier android phone coming to the market some two thousand dollar phone that hey we got a solid state battery in here that's where it's going to realistically start to show up in consumer electronics and then what we have today would trickle down to the cheap little phones you're talking about that's how it would work and to me that's where i kind of come back to the premise of my video which was but is it too late is that yeah does that make sense because it's like the the technologies that are available today are really really good and as he points out they're really good it's like we have cars with 300 miles of range on it which is more than enough for the vast majority of us and so it's we're kind of already there and the kind of what i was raising in the video is it's not just that we're already kind of here it's that there's other technologies coming that are going to make that a 500 mile car or it will be a battery that will take up a third of less space and weight as the battery today and give you the same exact range and that's the sales pitch of solid state is that it'll take up half the space your car and gave you same amount of range it's like but it's also crazy expensive right and here we have companies that are finding alternatives to kind of chip away at those benefits so it really does come down to there's not gonna be a magical magical scenario where solid state's gonna certainly be the cheaper option it's not gonna happen it's it's just not it's just the advancements that are happening in other technologies are driving those costs down as so solid state comes down everything else is coming down too so it's will solid state ever just suddenly leap frog and become cheaper i don't see that happening i just i just don't see that happening so it's going to take a long time for it to trickle down could it conceivably happen as a result of something along the lines of the materials required for manufacturing does solid state have an advantage there that it might be like a more plentiful uh component that that would actually undermine that if somebody somewhere is just like we're now mining this material or producing this material really efficiently so the price of the materials goes down and then does the solid state go down with it do you see that because no it's a lot of the same materials going into solid states it's just different chemistries and different ways you do it so it's it's not that that would be the advantage the advantage is is that you would need less materials to get the same exact result so if you want a car that goes 300 miles in theoretical land with the best solid state battery you need half as many of those materials to achieve that goal right so that's where it becomes quote cheaper but the problem is is that there's other technologies that are maybe use a third less materials but they're already far cheaper than solid estate is or can be even in that scenario so it's it's just one of those it's um it's an uphill battle i think solid state has where if you'd asked people or myself like five years ago what do you think it's like oh solid state's gonna be the future today i'm kind of like i don't know about that anymore because there's so many options hitting the market that are chipping away at the benefits of solid state so for cost wise there are other ways you can go and get the same exact benefits and that's the biggest problem i see for solid state i think that there's a comment here from breakfast burrito i like one of those a wonderful way to intro this comment but burrito points out something that might be an advantage in solid state's camp that i'd like to hear your thoughts on burrito writes i've worked on solid-state batteries for an automative oem the amount of work that went into testing and providing solid-state batteries for mass production has been immense the fact that we have major oems publicly announcing strategies for adoption within two years shows how far along they are it can't really be compared to new developments just coming out of labs as they are at least a decade away from being implemented in evs so the timing issue is a part of this too is simply enough of the snowball rolling downhill that it still hits the market in a way that is measurable and maybe it doesn't sustain itself as the primary choice five ten years from now maybe one of those new techs does replace it but maybe we do still see them on the market because oh they're gonna hit the market it's yeah it's been rolling downhill for so long i mean there's there's car companies that are putting all of their eggs in the solid state basket so there are definitely going to be solid state batteries that will be in evs they're going to be coming to consumer electric electronics so when i say it's too late it's not that there won't be any there are definitely they're going to definitely be part of the the mix but if you had asked people five years ago it looked like oh solid state will just kind of be permeate most things and where i'm at now it's like no it's not it's gonna have its use cases but it's not gonna be this holy grail of battery technology that's going to just kind of be 80 of the market or something crazy it's going to be smaller than that he's right but the problem is if you look at the companies that are coming out in the next two to three years the amount of batteries they're going to be producing is like this like it's the amount of batteries that tesla produces in a month is going to dwarf what they'll produce in a year so fast forward five years they'll be producing a lot more in five years they'll be producing a lot more in 10 years from now so it's going to be there's going to be a ramp up period for them and that's where i'm making the argument of there's other paths that are already being followed today it's not just stuff in the lab i would point to tesla today they have their 4680 cell they have new chemistries they're put into place they're starting to put silicon into their batteries they have their structural battery packs they're putting to the cars there's all these things do that they're doing not just from a chemistry level but from an engineering perspective of how they're constructing the cars that is driving the cost of their battery packs down through the floor so it's like in three years their cost of their battery packs is going to be really small compared to what it is today and they're continuing to drive that cost down what's the sales pitch for solid state oh yeah they're gonna be on the market in two to three years but they're still going to be crazy more expensive than what tesla's doing today is that's the kind of the point he's making of the stuff that's in the lab is lagging behind solid state yes but there's already stuff on the market today that's ahead of where solid state's going to be in two to three years it's like everybody's kind of chasing and kind of running in unison and it's not like one of these things is standing still right they're all advancing together it's the same thing for um this is a bad analogy but betamax versus vhs right betamax beta became the de facto standard for like for uh tv stations right but for home use betamax versus vhs betamax was the better technology better sound better quality better everything but it was more expensive vhs was good enough and it just dominated the consumer space because it was cheaper it was good enough people didn't care the differences most people couldn't tell that's kind of where i'm looking at it as like okay so i'll say it may be technically better and it may be coming on the market in a few years in a small scale but it's not going to be dramatically better than these other technologies that are already here other engineering things you can do to try to drive costs down it's it's going to have i think a a longer time to try to gain traction than people originally expected i think we're kind of i think there's kind of an uh people need to open their eyes and realize oh it's not going to be the the the big holy grail that we're all hoping for it's it's it's it's going to be a just another option on the on the market but it's not going to be the dominant player in the way people were expecting there was also this comment from aaron thomas which i think touches on what you've just been saying and it raises an interesting question from me aaron writes the battery breakthrough news has me jaded i'll believe it once it's on the market so solid state is still amazing since it's starting to hit the market and i'm wondering how much of this is driven and you mentioned vhs betamax how much of this is driven simply by public perception solid state as an idea has been something that has been pushed for longer do you think that it simply has more of the public's understanding from a marketing perspective for them to slap a label on something that says now with solid state battery and the public kind of understands what that means that oh yeah this is the thing we've been waiting for do you think there's an advantage there i don't part of the reason for that is i would say if you asked 90 people on the street they're going to be like i don't know i don't care aren't they all the same it's like i think that's the vast majority for people that like me and people that watch my videos we're like this two three percent of the market so it's like we actually understand and we know and we're like ooh solid state it's like that's a very small percentage so there's i would put good money on the fact that consumer interest is not going to drive this at all none nobody gives a crap all they care about is how far can a car go how much does that home battery last like it's like that's all how much is gonna cost me that's the only thing people will care about right so slapping graphene or solid state or anything on the label nobody's gonna give crap it's it's it's all comes down to what does it give me like what how long does it last how much does it cost how far can i drive right that's the only thing that's going to matter and finally i wanted to share this last comment from adam little it's a it's a divergence from the main part of this conversation but i thought it was an interesting question adam writes one factor i'd like to learn more about for all of these upcoming technologies is recyclability if a solid state battery can have its component material separated relatively easily at the end of its life that relatively low charge cycle number becomes less of an issue but if they end up being even more difficult and costly to recycle at the end of more conventional batteries then that adds to the rejection of them as a technology any thoughts about that is there any indicator here that solid state batteries will have an advantage at the end of their life to say like oh yeah here's a thing that we can actually reclaim fairly easily compared to these other techs or do the other techs have more of an advantage i would say with all the technologies available today and what solid states bring in the table there's not going to be a liquid difference with bad recycling in a significant way at all so there's not an advantage there where i think there's going to become an advantage in time is that there are battery technologies coming that are going to be based on like you know different you know sodium you know i mean like some sulfur right things that are things that are more abundant and easier to get that's where i think there's gonna be batteries that could become compostable almost that that's where the events will come in a decade or two but as far today the one thing i would bring up about battery recycling is we can actually recycle today virtually the entire battery like the batteries of a tesla the batteries of pretty much anything there's companies like lifecycle and american manganese i've actually had the opportunity to tour some of these recycling plants they can recapture like an incredible amount of the materials you're talking about like 90 plus percent 95 in some cases 98 of the battery materials to make new batteries so it's like this is already happening today so i don't think there's gonna be an advantage to solid state's recyclability over what we have already all of that leads me to the final conclusion which was there were several commenters around this that i thought captured the issue pretty well for me which was at the end of the day if this work towards solid state has largely been research almost for research's sake as opposed to having a product that goes on the market a good number of commenters were still saying that's still worth the time and money that goes into it and the question being does that research end up in the ip of a company that puts it in a cabinet and just locks it away or does it become something that somebody in the future builds on and then we make a tremendous leap forward that's unexpected now but in 50 60 years something happens where solid state suddenly becomes a thing that people didn't expect it to be so i think that that is a very interesting place to land on and yeah as usual i want to thank everybody who posted comments on matt's videos as you can tell from this video in particular they really do drive the conversation and i'm always impressed going into the comments and seeing the myriad of discussions and most of them are conducted very very politely even differing opinions i'm very impressed by the the viewers uh ability to say like i think you're wrong and here's why but i'm not going to make it a personal attack so that's debate the ideas about the ideas not the people so listeners i'm curious where do you land on this do you see this as a technology that you're like i can't wait for this to come out i think it's going to be a powerhouse in the industry or do you think this is something like i'm glad people researched this i'm glad there were these breakthroughs but i don't think it's necessarily going to be the driving force in tech moving forward let us know in the comments and of course 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2022-07-17 02:03

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