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Matt and Sean talk about Aluminum as another battery option, and your comments.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, What This Aluminum‑Ion Breakthrough Means for You https://youtu.be/svHeBLgpRQs?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, What This Aluminum‑Ion Breakthrough Means for You https://youtu.be/svHeBLgpRQs?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
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Creators and Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined. We're talking about aluminum or aluminium. Aluminum. Aluminium. Aluminium. Depends on where you are in the world. We're talking about something. Anyway, welcome to Still to Be Determined. This is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I am not Matt Ferrell. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm his brother. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, some horror, some stuff for kids. And with me, as always, is the aforementioned Matt. Matt, how are you doing today?
Matt Ferrell: I'm doing great. How about you?
Sean Ferrell: You ready to talk about batteries for a change?
Matt Ferrell: I'm all charged up, Sean.
Sean Ferrell: Oh, boy. Well, yeah, if you're looking for bad jokes and dad puns, well, I've got a comment for you. Just wait till we get to that point. Before we get into talking about Matt's most recent, in which he's shared some recent breakthroughs in aluminum battery technology. We're going to take a look at our most recent episode, which is 294, in which we talked about heat pumps and other items from previous episodes and of both our podcast and of Matt's podcast. And there was this right off the bat, we had been talking about sodium batteries and the weathered Elder jumped in. I like the username Weathered Elder. It presents a picture of like, you're still ticking despite taking a beating. So good for you. They write the Silver Symbol Channel just did a puncture test on a bluetti with a sodium battery. It was a fireworks show. I have no clue whether this fits in the battery safety conversation, but I don't feel the need for a grain of salt just yet. So one of the things we've talked about, sodium batteries, the option is a good one from a safety standpoint because they don't explode like everything else explodes. Or do they?
Matt Ferrell: They can.
Sean Ferrell: They can. I think this is one of those things where if you're testing whether something does something, when you drive a nail into it, what are you testing at that point?
Matt Ferrell: Well, well, there is something called a puncture test that is typically done when you're testing safety. And there's different ways to do it. And typically in a professional lab, they have a little rig that can puncture the cell in the same way every single time.
Sean Ferrell: Right.
Matt Ferrell: So you can do apples to apples to apples. Something in their garage, just ramming a nail through it or rooting at it and digging into it. It's like you're going to get very mixed results. You're not going to be able to replicate that each time. For a scientific study, this is just a dude in his garage doing something. It's not to say it's not valid. It's just you got to take it with a giant grain of salt, pun intended. But any battery, the amount of energy that's stored in a battery. Batteries can be dangerous no matter what they're made of, because there's just so much energy that's just crammed in there through the chemical reactions and everything that's going on inside. So that has to be kept in mind. Second thing is one of the things that burns is the electrolyte. The electrolyte can burn, the polymers can burn that are like encasing things and doing the separators, all that kind of stuff can burn. So when you puncture the separator between the cathode and you get that little spark of life going and you make that connection, it's going to arc and it's going to cause things to burn.
Sean Ferrell: Right.
Matt Ferrell: It doesn't mean the sodium is burning. It means the electrolytes and the polymers in there are catching on fire and sparking and causing issues.
Sean Ferrell: Right.
Matt Ferrell: So it's not that they are thermal runaway proof. It doesn't mean that they will never catch on fire. It means they are far less prone to having that happen. And the thing that to keep in mind would be like, you know, remember a number of years ago when the Samsung phones were just catching on fire all by themselves? Yeah. And the. Those little scooter things you could get, those electric scooters that people were buying were just catching on fire left and right. It's because they were poorly manufactured batteries that were just. You dropped it once and suddenly something inside the batteries went a little wonky and a little dendrite formed and something happened and a little arc and then suddenly the thing is just swelling and catching on fire by itself. That's what some of these batteries are far less prone to have happen. So it's like, I think it's kind of like I don't want to cast shade on anybody. But it's, it's. There's a misunderstanding, I think, from a lot of people going on around this. There's a lot of nuance and nuance. It doesn't do well on social media. So. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: I remember when CDs came out. Showing my age now CDs came out. And one of the things that. I don't know if you remember this, Matt, but the marketing around CDs right out of the gate and this in hindsight is just absolutely ridiculous. The marketing around CDs was, they're indestructible. You can do anything to them. Nothing harms them. And I had a friend in college who bought some CDs, and he was just like, yeah, these things are indestructible. And he started chucking them like Frisbees at the wall. And he ended up destroying, like, 12 CDs of music that he had purchased because he and his friends were just chucking them like Frisbees, and they were scratched all to hell. And then he put them in, and everything was like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And it was, what happened to indestructible? And I watched this guy's face fall, and he went pale because at that point, they were $15 a pop, and he had just destroyed all this stuff that he had spent money on. And I feel like there's this again. We're talking about. The media sees one line in a research paper, and then they turn it into, oh, well, this thing is like, these things don't ever explode. You're gonna.
Matt Ferrell: But. But it's also that nuance. It's like sometimes what's said is not incorrect, but without the. The context around that phrase that is stated, it sounds like it's. It sounds like something that is not. So it's like saying, these are far less prone to catching fire. It's like, oh, well, they're fireproof or they won't burst into flames. Like, no, they're less prone to it. They're gonna be. They're gonna be a little more robust and can take more of a beating than a typical battery, in theory, should. So it's. It's the same thing for solid state batteries. It's like the same thing is said about them. It's like, they're gonna be far safer. And, like, there are solid state battery camps that show their cell, and they'll take scissors and they'll, like, cut a corner of the cell, the pouch sell off, and it's still going, and it's not catching on fire. It's like, that's a great demo, but bend it a few more times and stab it a couple more times, and then it's going to suddenly swell and catch on fire. So it's like, you have to. There's a lot of nuance to this.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah. I don't know what it says about me and my social media feed and the algorithm that I've created through what I enjoy watching, but I saw a video recently of a. It was from a security camera above in in like a pawn shop and people are taking apart phones and like taking out the battery and taking the, you know, stacking up the phones and taking the batteries out and putting them on the, on the counter. And there's this one guy and he picks up one of these batteries and he starts to absent mindedly chew on it.
Matt Ferrell: Oh my God.
Sean Ferrell: And then it explodes in his mouth and it's so like a fireball erupts from his mouth and kind of envelops his entire head and then he like falls backwards and it, it's over as quickly as it started. So like he's fine, but he, he's literally spitting fire from this battery. And again, I don't know what it says about me and my algorithm, but I watched that.
Matt Ferrell: That's why you're getting that, Sean.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Then there was this from junkers who writes about our conversation around the gentleman who did a mini split in his home which started in his garage and then it spread to his home proper and then the power of his, his furnace died and he ended up being able to be in Montana in sub freezing temperatures. But he was comfortable. Not super, super cozy, but comfortable in his home because he had done this and junkers jumped in to pat him on the back with the complement of nice mini split solar story. DIY is the bee's knees when it, when a person is able to do it. I diyed my whole home solar and battery system and I am seriously considered diying a whole home heat pump replacement for my furnace and home AC this year. I've been running a small portable heat pump window unit in my living room this winter as a test with good results. So I want to ask you, Matt, on a scale of 1 to 10, one being no shade intended to our mother, but one being our mom could do it, and 10 being you need to hire a professional to take care of this. Where do you think DIYing of this scale and this type of DIY lands? Because I know, I hear you talk about DIY. I hear this from commenters. I see the comments from people who say I did this, I did that. I'm like, I know it's possible. I know with research and time I could probably do it myself. But my immediate reaction is a gut check of no way, shape or form am I going to try and do anything like that. I'm not diying electrical or heat pump or just on the off chance that like, what do you mean this is under pressure and then kaboom. I don't want to toy with that. But is that just Sean's nervous or is that. Yeah, the DIY scale. Somebody like junkers, somebody like our commenter from last week, they have some sort of experience or technical know how from maybe school or lived experience or just somebody who's taught them these things that gives them a leg up. So on that scale of 1 to 10, where do you put this kind of project?
Matt Ferrell: The problem is, Sean, that scale is gonna be different for every single person. But I'd be putting like this kind of stuff. If you're doing a mini splits, I don't wanna say those are easy, but they're definitely easier. So I could see that being maybe like a 5 or a 6 if you're handy doing. If you're doing something like what I've got, where you're having, maybe you're installing new duct work and then you're having to have a central system where you're having to do a manual J to calculate how much like tonnage of your system you. All that kind of stuff on top of like custom electrical stuff. That's where you're starting to get into the like 7, 8, 9 territory for me of like, oh boy, you might want to. Unless you actually are an electrician or you've been doing this your entire life and you feel super comfortable with it. You should not screw around with that stuff, in my opinion. But that's just me. So everybody's scale is going to be different.
Sean Ferrell: But yeah, there was this from Tanaku, who wrote in to talk about sodium batteries again, in the perspective of could they be something that you would have in your car in the future, replacing the current technology, which we've talked about it before, a little more safety and a little more weatherproof. Tanaku says I could see sodium batteries being used in this as the smaller batteries to start cars as well, since it holds heat better and maybe have lithium for the bigger battery. Do you think that this is a pairing that makes sense or is this the kind of thing where you're going to have a car that's going to be one or the other?
Matt Ferrell: I think it could be. We could see hybrids. I mean, we already do to a certain extent. It's like you have your lead acid battery as your starter for a lot of EVs, and then you have nickel manganese cobalt batteries on the bottom of the car that are actually making the car go. So it's like that's kind of par for the course. Some companies have transitioned to those being lithium ion as well for the kind of like ancillary electronics. But yeah, I can totally see some case where it's like you've got a small battery, a sodium battery system for exactly this kind of use case where the rest of the battery pack is some kind of lithium ion chemistry that's a little more energy dense and lighter weight. So I could totally see that. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: And is the lithium going to be affected by the weather in the same way we talked about lead acid?
Matt Ferrell: They all have different temperature ranges. But like, if you're talking about like a typical lithium ion battery, like a nickel, manganese, cobalt, once you get below freezing, it's the. The car will go like you can get in your car and push the little start button and it's going to drive just fine. But you try to charge that sucker up and it's going to be like, nope, not right now. Kind of warm me up there, buddy. I'm a little frozen. Where sodium ion battery might be able to still be charged because it can go to a lower temperature than nickel, manganese, cobalt.
Sean Ferrell: And what about a sodium battery that is in the car and part of its job is to help warm the lithium battery?
Matt Ferrell: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, just like a mini charge that's just there to keep it at the right temperature if you're driving in cold weather. So, yeah, BK Nesheim came into the comments to say to you, Matt, maybe it's time for a refresher video. Matt has included it before, but it should really get more attention. And that is using electricity for cooking. It saves energy and is much better for the indoor climate. We talked about this previously where we talked about not only is it cost effective, it's not. And it's better for the environment, the indoor climate being what they, they said in their comment. But it's really about toxicity in the indoor environment. Gas cooking, it's not so good for the health. And I say that as somebody who has a gas stove and uses it every day and discovered that I was. I noticed a trend in certain months when the windows were closed. Yeah, I would feel terrible by the time everything was done cooking. And it's reached the point now where here we are. This is by far the coldest winter we've had in easily a decade here in the city. Temperatures last weekend we were hovering at about a 5. It was going down to negative with wind chill.
Matt Ferrell: This is Fahrenheit, by the way, everybody.
Sean Ferrell: This is Fahrenheit. Yeah, we're not talking. Yeah, we are not. We're not somewhere in deep space. I didn't mean to imply to anybody who's thinking Celsius. What are you talking about? No Fahrenheit. And we have a AC in our kitchen window today. Like, we just. We left it in because I was like, it's better for us to have this draft. It's healthier.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, Sean.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: That's so bad. Yeah, so bad. It's better. That's the thing that drives me nuts about, like, you watch those home improvement shows and they redo the kitchen and then got this massive, just gas burner, and I'm just like, what are you doing? It's like, I love cooking with gas and hope Timmy doesn't have asthma. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's so not good for your health.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah. On now to Matt's most recent. This is what this aluminum ion breakthrough means. So take us real, like, quick sketch, picture what has happened that has led to this breakthrough. What do they think they can do with aluminum that they couldn't do, didn't think they could do a few years ago?
Matt Ferrell: Well, it's not. They didn't think they could do it. It was just trying to get it to a stage where they can actually start making it, manufacturing it, and getting it out there. The big takeaway for this is around what these aluminum ion batteries can do where they're not going to be as energy dense as what we were just talking about before. So you're not going to see this in a car. But these are fantastic potential things for the grid, because on the grid, you need incredible response times. So, like, a lot of times, capacitors and super capacitors will be used to manage those very quick fluctuations that happen. Because a capacitor can't store a lot of energy. It stores a lot of energy, but it can't. It's not like kilowatt hours. It may be able to run for a couple minutes at max power, where a battery could have hours of energy stored in it. Where these aluminum ion batteries are kind of like this wonderful kind of hybrid. It's kind of got a little bit of a capacitor behavior for how much power it can just pump out quickly, like super fast. But it can still have a little more energy density than a capacitor typically has. It's more like what you'd expect out of a battery. So you kind of get this wonderful kind of bit of both worlds where you. You can really shore up for those voltage spikes that happen on the grid that could lead to blackouts, things like that. So it's like this is kind of the stuff that's going to help stabilize the grid and make it more effective.
Sean Ferrell: Is there a possible use case like this one pointed out by commenter Stalkin, who says these batteries, from what it sounds like, would be great at a car charger station, A slower grid could constantly charge them as they provide a high dump to an EV fast car charger. So is that the kind of thing that we're talking about where it's just constantly filling up and bottoming out as the energy is being shunted into the vehicles? You're not trying to use it in the form of long term storage, even overnight?
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, exactly. It's kind of similar for your house. Let's say you buy an EV and you want to put a level 2 charger in your house, which means you're going to want to get a higher power charger. Typically, if you live in a house in the United States and you have 100amp service, an electrician's going to show up and go, you need to upgrade 200amps to be able to support this. And this can be a very expensive upgrade. It's a similar thing for EV charging at scale because you could have build out a whole like supercharger station that has 12 chargers on it and there has to be special, you know, electric lines run and upgrades done to the grid to help support that extra power. This might help to alleviate systems like that where you don't have to do that. You could just have a lower grade. Maybe something already exists in that location that's already driving power to it. You don't have to do utility upgrades. You just put some kind of like high power system like these aluminum ion batteries that act as kind of like this glorified capacitor that can kind of charge itself up. So when people are charging, it just discharges really quickly to charge the cars fast. But it helps take the burden off the grid so you're not like, it's distributing how that power is being delivered. That's exactly where this kind of would shine.
Sean Ferrell: Quick question from me about this technology and the ability to put it to market. We've talked in the past about one of the key things at play in all of these technologies is the availability of the materials. What is the availability of aluminum in this case to be able to start building these kinds of tech? Because we've talked before about like, well, you know, we could do it, but this is going to be super expensive because there's not a lot of availability of this thing. And it feels a little bit like we keep pointing to advancements, but, yeah, there's not advancements in availability necessarily. So aluminum. I remember a couple years ago there was talk about, like, there's kind of an aluminum shortage.
Matt Ferrell: Aluminum is one of the most. It's one of the most abundant metals on the planet. It's infinitely recyclable. It's one of the best metals we could use. So it's like, think about like the tin foil in your drawer. It's just like, it's everywhere. It's ubiquitous, it's easy to recycle, it's easily available. It's not like, oh, all the aluminum in the world comes from China. It's like, nope, it can come from pretty much anywhere because it's all over the place. So this would not be a supply chain shortage issue with something like this. This is the kind of materials, sodium ion batteries, sodium is everywhere. Aluminum is everywhere. It's very easy to get to. So these are the cheap materials that we want to use for stuff like this.
Sean Ferrell: Suddenly the future seems like it is just tinfoil hats and salt. There was this comment from Ken Johnson that stood out to me because I think it's an important one to keep in mind when we have these conversations, because I think there's. Sometimes it's easy to land in a confusing spot when you can use the terms that sound similar but do not mean the same thing. And I wanted to get a sense of where you think this new technology lands and what we've been talking about most recently in a lot of our videos, Ken points out grid stability and grid storage are entirely different applications requiring entirely different battery technologies, which can work conjunctively. So lately it feels like we've been talking a lot about grid storage. This one feels like it's more about grid stability. Do you think that there's one or the other of these two angles that is getting too much attention? They both are important, but they are not, as Ken points out, they're not interchangeable.
Matt Ferrell: If you're talking about, like, battery batteries, like what we're typically talking about on the grid, like these gigantic, like Tesla's big megapack system in Australia and all these other ones that are springing up, they tend to be for grid stability. And part of the reason for that is it still has been very expensive to get. Like, you can build out a battery system that can give you three to four hours worth of, you know, output, but you'd actually, for grid storage, you'd want 12, 24, 48 hours of storage ideally. And that's when you're getting into like, systems that exist today are like pumped hydro, where it's like literally a gigantic lake that funnels water down to a lower lake and you recoup the energy and you pump it back up to the top. That's, that's grid storage. But these other systems that are out there are mainly for grid stability because it's basically doing energy arbitrage where it's like, you know, buy low, sell high.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: So it's helping to shift things to make the energy cost cheaper, it's helping to maintain the voltages from renewables, all that kind of stuff. So that's basically what all the systems have been doing today so far as far as like chemical batteries are concerned. So this aluminum ion doesn't really change that equation specifically, but it's a better battery for that task. Meanwhile, other chemical batteries are getting so cheap, we're actually able to start to get to that 8, 10, 12 hour range now. So it's like, I think Ken is 100% correct. It's two kind of different tasks. It doesn't have to be one battery type. It's kind of a combo that we'd be looking at for the grid.
Sean Ferrell: So Ken kind of points out at the usage stage the kind of overlapping technologies that could be at play at that angle. H.W.Keir comes into the comments kind of at the in your home stage where you started off your video talking about your lights flicker. And H.W.Kier points out, when my lights flicker, the most likely cause is a branch falling on a line. A recloser trips, then recloses. It is usually a local event on the distribution line. It could be more widespread, but most often isn't. These are the kinds of interactions with our daily usage that make it hard for people in their home to fully engage with what's going on in the bigger picture. What do you think other than watching your channel? What ways do you think that the public could become more informed about what's at play? When like recently we've been getting our utility bills here at my home and my wife received a utility bill and was like, wow, this is double what it was last year. And there's a lot of reasons why that might be the case, including it's colder right now than it was a year ago. It is, you know, like we have maybe more competition in buying electricity. Electricity prices are higher. There could be any number of things that go into that. But it all feels so opaque on our side. We turn on the light, we turn off the light. We get a bill, say, holy cow, that's twice as much as it used to be. So what are ways that people can get more informed? Like HWKier is pointing out, my lights just flickered. Was it because the grid is fluctuating or is it because it's a windy day and a branch fell on a power line? What are ways that people can become more informed about what's going on in their lives in the bigger picture? So there's less confusion and maybe more opportunity to advocate for change.
Matt Ferrell: I can't remember off the top of my head, but there's this great website that you can go to. It's US specific, but you can go to and you can like, basically put in where you live and it will show you what your ISO, which is what your utility section is like. You and me, we live in kind of a New England ISO grid. And you can see exactly like it shows you precisely where the energy is coming from. Like X percentage is coming from nuclear right now, coming from coal, coming from natural gas. Whatever it is, it will detail that exactly where the generation is coming from. It's things like that that need to be surfaced more to all of us to understand where our energy is coming from. Because like you said, it's opaque and it's opaque on purpose, which is really frustrating.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And it creates a situation where. Let me back up for a quick second because I'm actually working on a video right now with one of my writers, the ticket, when I created it, I called it the National Grid is Dead. All hail the Grid. is what I wrote. I'm doing a deep dive in why micro grids. And an interconnected grid with less generation from one central location is actually a better approach. And in digging into this, we've stumbled upon a bunch of experts that have already been pushing this for years. I'm actually interviewing one of them tomorrow. So it's funny that you brought this question up, but one of the things that this person I'm going to be interviewing.
Sean Ferrell: To our listeners and viewers, not by design. I had no idea about this.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, he had no idea. But one of the things he's written about for the past 30 years is how the system is opaque. And we don't even, because it's so removed from us, we don't take into account. You plug something into your wall outlet and you don't care where the electrons come from. It's just things. Power on, lights flicker, who cares? It's like you don't think about it because you don't think about it and you don't know about it. We don't advocate for change. We don't understand the dangers that are involved with things that are happening or why our prices are spiking when if we knew what was going on, we might actually advocate for please stop doing that or what the hell is this on my bill saying special disconnection charge. What is that? Renewable energy charge. What the hell is this? Renewable energy charge. That's $6 on my account. There's all opaqueness that utilities put in there by design. And it's like the best way to do it is to get informed, understand what your energy generation is on in your location, understand where it's coming from and then try to basically just advocate for yourself with your utilities. In some locations you have choices for where your generation comes from. Like in Texas and ercot. They you could change. It's like changing mobile providers. You could like shop around every month and go to a different company that has better rates and better things. But in where you and I live, we don't have that choice so much. So it's. It's pretty frustrating, I should say.
Sean Ferrell: So finally, the best worst comment we have two this week on Matt's video. Sometimes it's hard to pick. This is one of those weeks. Colin jumped in to say, Matt, you missed the opportunity to say a disturbance in the force at 4 minutes and 25 seconds.
Matt Ferrell: Yes. Yep.
Sean Ferrell: And then James jumped in to say if battery density increased the way that the groaners per video density increased, we'd be finished researching battery technology. Yep. James, I told you there'd be a comment about bad dad puns and there it is. Thank you so much, James. Thank you so much, Colin, for your comments and to everybody for leaving a comment. Listeners, viewers, what did you think about this conversation? Was there something you think we missed? Jump into the comments and let us know. As always, your comments not only form the content of the show, but they help drive the content of the mothership Undecided with Matt Ferrell. If you'd like to support the show, leaving a comment, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends, those are all very easy ways for you to support us. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can click the join button right here on YouTube or you can go to stilltbd.fm, click the join button there. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of apologizing for making bad jokes. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.