233: Age Defying Battery - CATL’s Latest News

https://youtu.be/wta-U5kE6IU

Matt and Sean talk about the longevity of energy storage and the feedback on CATL’s latest announcement around their energy storage system. It’s not a forever battery, but do you think it is moving things forward?

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

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.

On today's episode of Still To Be Determined, we're going to talk about helping our batteries last longer. Hello, everyone. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some stuff for kids, and I'm just generally curious about technology. And luckily for me, my brother is that Matt from Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at those very topics, emerging technology and its impact on our lives.

And together, Matt and I record this follow up to his show, where we discuss a little bit deeper and ask some questions that we find in the comments to dive deeper into the context of what Matt has been discussing. And Matt, how are you today on this, let's say pleasant, late August morning?

Doing pretty well.

Uh, got to admit though, I'm a little burned out, so I've been, uh, crunching on the channel, trying to get videos queued up and ready to go . Cause I'm going to be going, doing a lot of travel. I'm going to Vancouver for the everything electric show. Um, September 6th, to the 8th, I think it is. And by the way, if you want to go, uh, you can go buy tickets.

I have a discount. I can put that in the description of the podcast, but, um, getting ready for that. And then I have another event the immediate week after that, I'm going to, um, and so this past week I realized, I need a break. So, uh, you may notice something on the Undecided channel. There's no, there's not going to be any kind of scheduled regular videos, probably the first two weeks of September, because the way everything aligned, it was like, I don't know if I can do a quality video and keep pace of what I'm doing.

So my team and I were kind of taking a little bit of a breather and trying to get ahead, but so there'll be a little gap.

It's very, very easy to move one thing up thinking, well, if I move this one thing up, then it will benefit me later. And then you forget that you move that one thing up and you move a second thing and then you move a third.

And then pretty soon you're like, how come I'm doing twice as much work in this five day period as I would normally do. And it's because, Oh, I moved a full week of other content up one week. I do that to myself all the time. It's very easy to catch yourself in that burnout moment. So I'm glad for your sake that you recognized it before you went on your trip, because I usually recognize it after I do something big like that by just getting sick.

I like find myself in a position of like, why am I running a fever? Oh, I burnt myself out.

Well, it, it also came up cause it's like, um, I'm also, there might be a trip where I might be going to Mexico. At the end of October, uh, to go visit a production plant. I can't say who it is and what it's for yet. Um, but if that works out, that's another huge trip I'm doing.

And then in the first week of January, I'm going to CES. So I was planning all this out and that's when I just kind of had this epiphany of like, what, what, what am I doing? I'm not built for all this travel. This is too much. Uh, I need, I need a break.

Yeah. And I mean, it's funny, as you describe all of that, you're not built for all this travel.

I think of you as a pretty big homebody.

I do not think of you as the like, I can't wait to go. I can't wait to be there. I can't wait to see new sites. I think of you as the like. I will perhaps go there next year.

As we always like to do on this program, we'd like to follow up on our previous one before we get into the new content from Matt's channel. So this will be a brief visit to the mailbag from episode 232, Weird Solar Panel Technology. This was the algae solar panel discussion we had last time. And we talked a bit about

the weird science of this, we talked a bit about the fringe science of this. We talked about the research for research's sake, because part of our discussion was nobody out there is saying like, darn it, we have to crack the algae barrier, we have to get algae into the solar panels, so it became a discussion of kind of like when researchers follow their nose and just

wander into weird corners. And there was some conversation in the comments about that very thing. Like this from Jim Thane, who said, science for the sake of knowledge is a great thing. Someone really should be covering this stuff and making it sexy so that more people are encouraged to do science for the sake of knowledge.

So many useful things have come out of such science totally unintentionally, that we really ought to be heavily encouraging it, even if it only leads to a dead end. Thanks for discussing this weird and fascinating idea. And I really liked Jim's kind of, you know, wrapping it all up in a, this is great. And you don't know what by products might come out of this.

And I was wondering from your perspective, uh, just based on the research that you've done, you've now been doing your channel for, for many years on a scale of, Like one to 10 or a percentage perhaps is an easier way to do it. What percentage of technology that you talk about has in some way origins that started from research for research's sake?

Oh, man, uh, I wouldn't be able to really put a number on that, but it's a, it's going to be a high number. That one of the things that, this isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it's kind of like there was a number of years ago I talked about this, um, fusion company here in New England called Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

They have this design for a spark reactor, which is really tiny, um, where The ITER project over in Europe is this massive boondoggle of a fusion thing that they're building. They've been building it for 30 years and it's still falling behind and it's just a waste of money and it's this huge kind of mess at the moment.

The spark reactor is like that shrunk down to something really tiny and it's like, well, Why are we still doing ITER if we have this little spark reactor that they're building and they're hoping in the next five years to have it up and running for testing? It's like, uh, why is that possible when the big guy is having trouble?

And well, the reason is because there were discoveries around like magnets and superconductors that This rib, this ribbon material breakthrough for this superconductor that is being used in the spark design. So it's like the spark design wasn't possible until somebody else discovered this thing over here on this left side over here.

And it's like, well, what's the practical use of that thing? Oh, well, Hey, look, you know, here's the spark reactor over here. That's like, Hey, we can use that. It's like that kind of stuff happens all the time. And so it's like, I think Jim, the way he said it. was perfect. It's like, it's like exploring this stuff, even if it hits a dead end, at some point down the road, it may unlock something for a completely different person, a different group to make their thing possible.

It's like, you don't know what you don't know. So we have to kind of just kind of throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Um, but the accident, like the accidental discovery, like you're talking about like the, like the, like NASA stuff, like what, wasn't it silly putty? Well, yeah, that was an accident, yeah, stuff like that.

But also just, just in the sense of, like, you often on your channel share, and one of the things we're going to be talking about in today's episode is a follow up to your most recent video, which talks about battery technology and the battery technology isn't new. It's been expanded upon and utilized in a new way to make it more efficient and trying to lower costs.

But the technology itself would have started decades ago and I couldn't help but wonder how much of that research decades ago started as research for research's sake that kind of hit a dead end because they were like, well, there's nothing we can really do with this right now. And I know you've mentioned that in other videos, so I'm not trying to pin you down to answer the question, but I just think it's an interesting thing to ruminate on and think in terms of, like Jim said, it's, You never know what byproduct might come out of this thing.

And to say, we need to have a direct application. I don't even know how we would make progress into new fields if everything was related to a direct application. We're seeing that happen constantly right now. I can't help but think of AI. AI is being developed as a thing in and of itself without it being like, Oh, we're answering this request.

Yeah. It touches on. Oh, I could go down a rabbit hole in that. We won't, we won't dive into that one this week. We'll save that for another time. A couple more comments I wanted to share. These were followups on our conversation about Matt's dog, uh, enjoying tearing my books apart. And as Aromatic Snail points out, if anything, Matt's dog is confirming that Sean's books are food for thought.

There we go. And finally, to wrap up the weird science of it all, Ryu jumps into the comments to say weird science episodes. Yes, please. But I now have that song stuck in my head. You're welcome. It is it is an earworm. On now to this week's episode of Undecided and it was Matt's Recent episode, which dropped on August 8th, 2024, how this new battery is changing the game.

And it, as we just briefly mentioned, this is not brand, brand new tech. It is a new way of utilizing older technologies and creating a, ultimately Matt, am I right in saying that the goal here is to lower the cost and increase the longevity as the two, the one, two punch for this. Yeah.

It's increasing the longevity, which helps to reduce the cost.

Cause you have to change your batteries less frequently. You get more bang for your buck out of a battery like this. It's kind of like, um, there's a recipe that we have for something and it's somebody figured out how to tweak one part of the recipe just to make it even better than it was before. It's like, that's essentially what's happening with this battery.

Are you surprised by anything about this? In the form of the speed with which the development of battery technology is happening recently. We've talked about batteries. It feels like we talk about batteries once a month. Roughly, it feels like, it feels like it's, it's the ever returning content of your channel.

So it's the ever returning content of this channel and it's different forms. Oh, there's a salt battery. Oh, there's a effectively a rust battery, a heat battery, a sand battery, like all the different permutations of these different things. And I'm wondering, is there. And I use this term without even intending to get to the pun of it is the research in this in the field here energized by the massive need that you point out in your video of people are using more and more power and we have the ability to generate more and more power in more sustainable ways.

Even if you don't take one coal plant or one gas burning plant offline, if all you do is add solar panels and wind turbines to energy generation, your energy levels go up, but you need to store that technology, that energy because you can't rely on, well, the solar panel is feeding my television right now.

That's not the way it would work. So is that what's driving all these wild field researches into different new technologies around battery storage? Okay. I

have to break this down a couple of different ways. Yes. It's like, if you look at I was, uh, recently looking at some research and some graphs and papers on how batteries have evolved over the past 30 years.

And Like, prices of batteries have dropped almost 100%. I think it's like 97 percent in the past 30 years from what they cost. It was like 6, 000 a kilowatt hour or something crazy. And now it's like a hundred and something dollars per kilowatt hour. It's like the drop in 30 years is crazy. And then that graph, If you invert it, it's kind of like that's the amount of money being spent on R& D in batteries.

The amount of money has been poured into this is just skyrocketing. It looks almost like an exponential graph. Then if you look at the use of batteries, how many batteries we need and we use, Same thing. It's like 1990s, this like little blip. And then like, as you get to the 2000s, it gets higher because people are using laptops and phones and all those kinds of things.

And then EVs, and then suddenly it just skyrockets. And it's not that it's just utility energy storage. It's EVs, utility energy storage, iPhones, laptops, mobile phones, all these batteries just permeate everything in our world today, which is why it's just like an exponential growth. And so all these things kind of go hand in hand.

More demand for energy storage has caused more investment into it, which has made more advances in it, which has reduced the cost of manufacturing it because they got better and better at it. So all these things kind of play together. And one thing I noticed in the comments of this most recent video is there's this undercurrent of a thread of just enough with the batteries.

I'm sick of this. Another game changing battery. I'm sick of this. To those people, my reaction is it doesn't have to be a battery that's available for you to buy today to talk about it because there is so much happening in battery research In this space, we got to talk about it because we have to understand where is this stuff heading?

Like, I'm curious to see where this is going to be five years now, 10 years from now, to be able to understand that I have to look at the entire battery industry and see what's happening and talk about those different things. And so it's when I say this is a game changing the game, it's changing the game because it's taking a battery we've known and making it a longer lifespan, which means it's going to last longer and be cheaper to make these installations.

It's going to have a major impact on the industry over the next few years because it's coming out like now. So it's like, I find that perception Impr uh, Viewpoint on how many battery videos I'm making interesting, cuz like I don't share that sentiment obviously cuz I talk about it a lot. But at the same time, I have hit a glut on my channel over the past like two months.

There's been a lot of battery videos, and I'm gonna be dialing that back because I do have to find a better blend of topics, or the cuz it's just like I'm kind of batteryed out myself a little bit, because I'm talking about it for so much so frequently recently, but at the same time, it's we can't ignore it.

It's like this is happening because there's so much investment into batteries today, and there's so much advancement happening. So, you're literally talking about changing up the batteries. Yes. Exactly. The other thing I find funny is that there are people saying like, this is being talked about all the time and the batteries we're using today are the same they've been used for 30 years.

No, they're not. The batteries in our mobile phones today are not the exact same batteries that were being used 20 years ago. They are not. They are, they are modern versions of batteries are better than the batteries they were 10 years ago. So it's like, or five years ago, it's like, you just don't recognize it because it's like hidden inside the devices we use and we're not aware of it.

But these advances are ending up in the devices we're using every day around us. It's like, come on.

Yeah.

Just those kinds of statements. I don't understand.

It yeah it, it raises, there's the aspect of, um, given the opportunity to learn information isn't a requirement to learn that information. So there's always the next channel.

If like, Oh, I'm batteried out. Come back next week. Matt will have a different topic, but, uh, there was also like, as you, as you pointed out, these are not all interchangeable. These are not all apples, even though they're all batteries. They are, have different aspects to them. And there was a comment that I wanted to share from Hassan who jumped in to say, I'm a BESS engineer working with all of these systems mentioned in the video and many more.

I'm under NDA for all of these. So I can't say anything that's not public, but all I can say is there is a lot coming and we are just at the start. I think that is. Exactly. That's a really intriguing perspective for somebody to say, yeah, we're not done. And I mean, some of the angles that you can take on this are really funny.

There's inadvertent humor that comes out of it. Like I recently saw somebody pointed out. That they had purchased a, a set of wired earphones for their Mm-Hmm iPhone. And on the box it says, requires Bluetooth connection. Yes. So I saw the expression in your face, you're like, Hmm. And it was, yeah. Like what?

Like the guy's, like, I got these from Amazon. What is going on here? And somebody in the comments pointed out they were probably super, super cheap. Yes. That's because companies have discovered ways of making super, super cheap Bluetooth headphones. And it's cheaper to not have a battery and to use the iPhone as the power.

So they have a wired connection. Only for power, but they are Bluetooth earphones. And I'm like, we've reached a level of absurdity with our technologies where is it a battery? It is it a new battery? Is it technology that's old? Is it changing anything? We no longer have the ability to identify that easily.

And your channel might be a way for people to learn how to tell Oh, yeah, the needle has moved a bit. This is not what we had 10 years ago. This is a little different. This is not doing exactly what the other one is doing. And to get back to the content of this particular battery pack, there were comments about the five year warranty, the five year plan of there being no degradation.

I say the word warranty because that was one of the comments that kept coming up is. What does a system that's saying it will last five years without degradation actually doing? And there was some speculation that what it might be doing is there might be something in the system that is using power cells in the batteries on a selected basis.

So that not every cell is being used all the time and it may be sharing the work over a period of time so that they avoid the normal degradation to get to that five year window. I don't know if that even matters. Big picture. If you create a system that is using older tech in a new way that creates a five year promise of no degradation, I don't know that it matters that it's not doing something magical and new under the hood, if it's still achieving that five year window.

My question though. Is, do you know anything about what the company is promising as far as a warranty, as far as here's this tech and it's going to have no degradation for five years? Do you know anything about what the companies are doing to stand behind that promise? From CATL, the specific battery

that we're talking

about?

No. Because this is like utility grid scale. You're buying a gigawatt hour of storage in a container. They don't have on their website or their materials. And we offer a 30 year money back warranty on this. It's not like a consumer product. It's something very different. There'd be different warranties, different guarantees, and I could find nothing about it.

The big marketing that they're putting out about it was this new SEI layer system that they've come up with when you first charge the battery improves the battery life span. So that first five years, there's no noticeable degradation in this use. It does degrade over time, but that first five years, it's like, if you think about like a graph, it looks like a prior S curve where it's like almost flat and then it slowly starts to go down.

Um, That's what it looks like for the degradation. That's why they're saying it's five years. I don't think it's a better battery energy management system. Like the commenters are saying that's playing some kind of trick to make it work. I don't think that's the case, but of course, I don't know. Maybe, maybe it's part of that.

But again, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. If they're selling you a gigawatt hour battery and it's got a gigawatt hour and it doesn't have any signs of degradation for five years, it's like, you got what you paid for. It does what it says on the tin. That's the thing that I think is interesting.

It's a little bit like if you bought a car and you were told, like, it uses gasoline, but it gets A hundred miles to the gallon. You could say, well, I don't want it because it's still gas, but you shouldn't be upset that it's not somehow magically not gas. It's the, the ultimate goal of improvement is what's being offered.

Not necessarily a super secret sauce that nobody's heard of before.

This ties back to the very first comment that you were talking about. It's going to seem like I took a hard right turn here. Electric toothbrushes. The reason this popped in my head was I used to have a Sonicare electric toothbrush for like a decade.

I think it was great. And it needed to be charged about every two weeks and perfectly happy with it, but it was getting kind of, it was kind of starting to break down. So I had to replace it. I bought this different brand of toothbrush. I think it was called the LifeN, some Chinese toothbrush thing, half the cost.

It's super tiny, like more compact. And I don't know what voodoo magic they're doing inside this thing, but the battery life is somewhere over 30 days before it has to be charged. I've had this thing for a month and have not charged it yet. And it's like, okay, I don't understand this. Are they using some kind of wizard battery in here that just lasts forever?

Or is the motor in here way more efficient than the motor that was in the Sonicare? It's like, there's probably like a little from column A, column B, column C, like all these like little things that are probably a little bit better that make the lifespan of the battery, the toothbrush, the product last longer.

At the end of the day, I don't care. This battery has not been charged yet. That's been a month. It's, there's probably some kind of wizardry, wizardry going on with the CATL battery that goes beyond just that system that came up with the SEI layer, that new system. There's probably more to it than that.

But at the end of the day, what's the product

actually do? Two final comments that I wanted to point out to conclude our conversation on this one, this one first from Dan Harold, who went directly to the point of the newness of a tech and the lack of the tech being on the market. A complaint that we see in your videos off and on, depending on what you're talking about.

People complaining, Oh, if this is so great, why isn't it available yet? And Dan points out people are complaining that battery cell tech never makes it to market. It can take years to get from the lab to commercial penetration. 1996, John Goodenough, and his team at the University of Texas at Austin discovered the LFP cathode material. Patent was granted in 1999.

The global LFP share increased to 34% in 2022. November, 2023 LFP batteries captured 31% of the passenger EV market. The forecast is to reach 39% by 2024. In China, LFP batteries now make up over 50 percent of the EV battery market with gigawatts term. Interest in battery cells has increased somewhat and perhaps will accelerate the required time.

This is A marathon. This is not a dash. Yes.

Yes. Dan, you said it perfectly. Thank you for saying that. That's a really great way to kind of frame

it. And finally, wanted to give you an opportunity. Was this a correction that is in fact a correction or is there a confusion on either your part, the scripts part or our commenters part? Little Wolf jumps in to say that at three minutes and 44, you mentioned that the energy market has tripled and Little Wolf points out the energy storage market almost tripled, not the energy market.

Is that just a typo in the script that made it through?

Yes. And I got to apologize. There were a few typos in the script on this one. Um, this was not the only mistake. There was one that was in there that I completely missed. And one of the very first comments that came on the video when it launched. I was like, uh oh, and thank you for the YouTube editor tool.

I just went in there and snipped the mistake out and took it out. Uh, I don't know how these little errors got through, but it's like, it is a little, it seems insignificant on the surface, but it has a distinct difference in meaning. So yes, that is the correct energy

storage market. So listeners, viewers, what do you think about all of this?

Jump into the comments and please let us know what you think. As always, your comments help not only the content of this program, but they help the Mothership Undecided with Matt Ferrell as well. And of course, leaving a comment, subscribing and sharing with your friends are three very easy ways for you to support the podcast.

And if you'd like to more directly support us, you can click the join button on YouTube. Or you can go to stilltbd. fm. Click the become a supporter button there. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads and we appreciate the welts. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.