230: Battery Breakthroughs … Oh My

https://youtu.be/TI0rE6zZvpM

Matt and Sean talk about the new models of batteries that might solve our growing storage issues … and what’s taking so long. What batteries would you add to the list?

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Incredible Battery Breakthroughs to Watch https://youtu.be/EbFRp7K1z2o?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi6ObB8Ao0IpRhOgYO27wbSd

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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 why Matt is making so many puns about the phrase ION.

Ion....... Ion.... Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined. This of course is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. Like the recently released The Sinister Secrets of the Fabulous Nothings out now in bookstores and libraries near you.

Please go find it. And with me as always is my brother, Matt. He is That Matt from Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how are you today?

I'm doing pretty well. Although the heat, we were just talking about this before the, uh, show, it sounds like the heat in New York is brutal.

It has been

exhausting is not a big enough word. Um, the past two weeks where I work, we have been doing a large scale corporate gathering. All of our employees from around the world have been in New York and fair is fair. Those of us who regularly work in New York work hybrid normally. So a few days in the office, a few days at home.

But when you are having your staff travel internationally, it's not fair to say, well, the New York staff may or may not be in the building. So we were all there every day during the past two weeks. This is something the past two weeks has made me question. How did I do this for 20 years? And to do all of that at this time of year with the temperatures being what they are.

The subway being the way it is when temperatures get like this, the subway is not reliable, uh, and it's crowded, and it's uncomfortable. And I reached the end of the two weeks. It was lovely seeing my colleagues. I was so happy to see them all. They are now returning to their various countries, and I will genuinely miss seeing them face to face.

But I shut down completely emotionally and physically on Thursday and I have not yet recovered and I was just sharing with Matt before we started recording. Last night I had a full blown reaction to the heat here in the city. I have hot floors in my apartment, which is disgusting, which is disgusting.

Uh, if it was mid January, I'd be like, Ooh, heated floor, toasty. And the beginning of August, I'm like, Oh, heated floors. And last night I had a full blown, I think it was heat exhaustion kicked in and I spiraled very quickly, uh, it has not been easy, it is not comfortable, and I keep saying to people as we chat about it, there are places where it's worse than this.

And thank you, climate change. This is, it's upsetting. Yes. On now, away from that upsetting topic to something that may long term provide lots of solutions for our energy needs as we need to crank up the ACs and get ourselves through these dog days of summer. We are of course, talking about long term storage, but before we get into that, We always like to dive into the comments, our previous episodes.

So this would be from our last episode, episode 229, plastics and solar everywhere. And this comment, well, it's targeted right at me. KD7LXL jumped in to say, flush the buttons on the toaster with isopropyl alcohol. KD, thank you for the recommendation. This is a response to my sharing a story about my son opening a Dr.

Pepper with the carefree abandon of youth and spraying the entire kitchen with a shaken Dr. Pepper. And now my toaster oven clicks in interesting ways whenever you use it. The problem is. KD, the gaps are so small. I tried doing exactly this. I have doused it with isopropyl alcohol. It just can't get into every nook and cranny.

The thing is designed with too little of a gap between the button and the toaster and the knob and the toaster. And yes, I am dealing with a toaster that is not digital. It is physical buttons and knobs. I'm old school like that. There was also this comment from Corey Crehan who wrote in, I'm curious if anyone has done any sort of deep energy storage used more for the changing seasons rather than for peak shaving for day to day, this comment touches

kind of quickly on the topic of today's conversation, he goes on to say, the only thing I could think of is pumped hydro storage. It just seems like it would be useful to be able to store that during the summer surplus of summer for the winter. And then Corey goes on to apologize. I've left a couple of comments.

Sorry, not sorry. I just keep thinking of things. Corey. Don't apologize. Don't apologize. We want you to comment. We want you to comment as often as it takes. And we want you to be a part of the program. That's why we share these comments in the program. So Matt, how do you feel about this uh, storing energy for seasonal goals.

Do you want to simply table this and loop back to it in our conversation about today's episode?

Yeah, we can loop back to this one. Let's, let's loop back to it. Let's do that.

That'll keep, that'll keep at least Corey tuned in

listening to the podcast.

Finally, this from DS who wrote in to say in Minnesota, they are experimenting with putting solar on the noise walls.

In other words, the giant walls that are between the roads to block sound along highways and such things. And DS speculates it might work. I think this is one of those things where if you are far enough away from the roadway, you're not going to get kicked up rocks. You're not going to get, uh, debris blowing against it, especially in parts of the Midwest where when you end up with wind blowing small rocks at high speeds, even if there's not traffic, you could end up with some debris.

But if the solar panels are strong enough. I would think that if you have enough of them, it doesn't really matter angle of the sun. You're just constantly collecting that energy and it's going to build up over time. And then it leads once again into our topic today, which is the bigger issue might be energy storage, actually holding onto that energy.

We did a video on the channel a while back about having been doing solar wrong all along, exploring vertical solar, and it works. So it's like the extra benefit of being in Minnesota, you get snow. Being vertical, you don't have to worry about snow buildup on the panels. It's like the panels are going to be pretty much exposed all year round.

So even in the middle of winter, you'll be getting production off these things. It's like, it's very clever. I'm really curious to see how it actually works out for Minnesota because it's kind of a test bed. Does this work? If it does work, you're going to start seeing it more and more places.

On to our discussion about this week's episode.

We're jumping right into faster, cheaper, lighter, incredible battery breakthroughs to watch. This is from Matt's most recent episode. And Matt, I didn't write down the date that this episode dropped, but it had to be July 31st. I mean, I think so.

Time is a flat circle, Sean. Time is a flat circle. We're

recording this on a day when it's, this is not going to air today.

So it's yesterday? No, it was earlier this week, but we're talking about battery breakthroughs. There were some questions that popped immediately into my mind about this, but we're going to visit the comments first, before we leap into my thoughts. Starting right off with my teaser at the beginning, Oscar points it out.

Oscar Marble jumps in to say, what kind of batteries am I keeping my eye on? Matt, this episode of yours in particular, I thought you did a masterful job of not giving a tell when you dropped your puns, but there were at least five that I counted with references to charge, references to solution, references to ions.

Mm-Hmm. you and your team. I think the only reason you make. The videos for your channel is for the puns.

My favorite puns are the puns where there's no wink or nod. It's just like you just deliver it straight. If you catch it, you catch it. And my favorite thing about this pun, so many people commented on it with like the drumroll like emoji or eye rolls or things like that.

And I work that specific pun into almost all my battery videos. I can't help myself. I'm beating a dead horse with this joke,

but I'm going to keep going. Again, once more, a million dollar t shirt idea, just undecided with Matt Ferrell. What are we keeping our Ion? You're welcome. And now a username that rolls right off the tongue.

I'm talking of course about user-mc5im9ir5m. Not to be confused with user-mc5im9ir5n. They get confused all the time. User jumps in to say, but sodium, and this is in reference to one of the battery types that Matt points out in this video, where they replaced lithium with sodium, which is far more easily found on the planet, and it has a different way of being used in order to use it for battery storage.

It's not going to be a one to one replace for lithium, but user jumps in with a question that points out, maybe we need to chat a bit about the use case scenarios. Sodium is three times heavier than lithium. This means that batteries are also three times heavier. That doesn't work at all. I'm not quite sure it works like that, Matt.

Do you want to jump in? Let me know. Is it literally you replace a chemical with a chemical and therefore you end up with the new weight based on that chemical? In my understanding, battery sizes can be adjusted and we're not talking about replacing lithium batteries one to one with sodium.

Right. The reason he's saying it doesn't work at all is if you want a Like a one megawatt hour battery, it's going to be heavier.

So he hit that one megawatt hour than a standard lithium ion battery. And he's not wrong, but here's the thing. It does work. It still works as a battery. It's still a viable energy storage device. And no, you're not going to be putting this in a car because a car would get heavier. Yeah. It's more about stationary energy storage, which is what I brought up in the video is like, when you have this space, it's like, you don't.

The weight's not a huge concern. So it's like build a huge storage system for the utility, for the grid and the weight's not a problem. So this does absolutely work, but it's work. It will work in specific use cases. It is not a one size fits all solution at all because of that problem.

And to lean in what UserMC says about Like size and weight.

Does it impact cost in a negative way? If you are saying, okay, we're going to try and build this using sodium versus lithium and the battery is going to be X number of times larger because lithium is makes a smaller battery. This is going to make a bigger battery. Do the other components, does the cost begin to balance out or does the lower cost of sodium still keep the overall battery cheaper than a lithium battery?

It does. It, I wouldn't say it balances out, but like you have to look into the future because the initial batteries. The easier batteries, the earlier batteries are going to be not super price competitive, but as you get further in the future and costs start to come down even further, it's one of those, even though it takes more components to make it like more material, it's still that much cheaper than lithium that yes, it's still going to come out ahead.

So that's the whole argument around sodium ion. It's, it's, Easily, you can get to it easily. You can, it's, there's, we have abundance of it. Sodium is everywhere. It's not hard to find. There's arguments that people say, Oh, there's not enough lithium in the world. It's like, well, you're not going to say the same thing about sodium.

There's plenty of sodium out there. So it's, it's one of those, because of the accessibility. The costs are just so much cheaper. That means it's still going to come out ahead, but it's not like three times cheaper. It's going to be closer than that. But with the actual cost ends up being, that still remains to be seen because it's still early days.

So you'd kind of have to look into the future and look at reports that project what it might look like five years from now or 10 years from now. Uh, cause the initial stuff is not going to be crazy cheap.

And other than the sodium replacing the lithium, are there other. You're talking about the chemicals that make up the reaction itself to create the charge or to hold the charge.

Are there other components that you haven't talked about as much that are going into battery tech that could potentially also alleviate some of the cost concerns around this. In other words, research about the external pack itself, the various components that would make up the battery physically other than these chemicals.

You just opened up a can of worms, Sean, because it's like, yeah, there are, there's too much to bring up now, but like, in general, it's like, there's a reason why people want to get cobalt out of batteries. There's safety concerns. There's obviously human rights concerns. Cobalt's very expensive. So there's, there's a whole bunch of reasons why Companies are exploring different battery chemistries because, oh, this chemistry doesn't need cobalt, which means we save X amount of dollars.

Here's sodium, which is cheaper than lithium. And this one doesn't need nickel. And that one doesn't need this.

It's like, that's going to reduce the cost. It's gonna make it cheaper. And then you've got, Oh, this doesn't have cobalt. That makes it even cheaper. So there's, these companies are exploring so many different ways to try to drive those battery prices down as much as they can while keeping them reliable, safe

and easily producible. So it's like we're still in the early days of where this could possibly go. And it's only because of the burst of EVs and the desire for energy storage that has like over the past decade just exploded. That's what's driving all this.

Maybe it's time for a refresher video. I know we've talked about Cobalt in the past, but maybe it's time for a refresher video about the non catalyst Components of long term energy storage and the various research that's going into that, that aspect.

I think that's one of the things that I think is an interesting forgotten aspect of this. Like it reminds me of years ago, there was the development of the iPhone. Corning was developing Gorilla Glass. And Gorilla Glass was a breakthrough, no pun intended about a glass pun, uh, a breakthrough in glass technology.

And you don't think about glass technology, but it was Corning developing a glass that would survive impact and drops from higher and higher heights. It's not research that was done and owned by Apple. It was a secondary company, a second tier of the development of the iPhone, but it was a corporation that we all know.

Corning is an old, uh, corporation from central New York. And it's just kind of a fascinating little like footnote on the phone. And we think of, Oh, phone development, but it's not just the phone itself. It's the components that go to the phone. So. I think it's, uh, interesting topic for maybe us to circle back around to on another day.

Well, to also tie back to Corey just for one quick second, there's other storage technologies. He brought up pumped hydro, no chemicals in that at all. It's literally just mechanics using weight and mass, water and gravity, yeah, yeah, exact gravity. Um, Yeah, basically a giant gigantic gravity battery. There's other things at play in that realm that make a lot of sense for long term energy storage.

Pumped hydro is a good solution for that, but it's very dependent on where you are because you need gigantic bodies of water that are, at different elevations. There's, uh, compressed air energy storage, which is I'm actually working on a video right now about that, where you could just like, just take the air, compress it down, and just hold onto it.

And then you just release that air when you need to basically spin a turbine to make energy. That's also perfect for long duration, huge amounts of energy storage. So there's different pathways to get to those peaker plants, which is like lithium batteries are great for replacing a peaker plant or energy triage arbitrage.

Then you've got pumped hydro, compressed air energy storage, these other systems that are meant for these longer term duration stuff. And then there's also heat energy storage, thermal energy storage, which I am just fascinated by. There's ways that you can store heat for weeks, if not months, so you could store that heat up for the wintertime and then use it when you need it.

It's, there's some crazy stuff that's being tried out there and it's really, really, really cool. No pun intended.

More of a deep, uh, deep dive into your video. You talked about multiple tech types of batteries and I'm curious which one of them is the oldest and why do you think that if it is older, why do you think it is maybe getting a bit of a foothold and looking more promising than it has in the past?

I can't tell you definitively off the top of my head which one's older because a lot of these technologies have been known and researched for a very long time, decades. It's like some of this stuff is not new in the sense of we didn't know that it did this. We knew that it did this, but there was some kind of roadblock.

Didn't know how to do it. Or know how to control it or how to turn it into a thing. How to manufacture it. How to make it a viable product or the cycle life just didn't compare to a lithium ion battery so it was just kind of getting a dead end because it just did not meet. Because a new technology has to be as good or better than the existing technology to really catch on for a specific use case.

So, some of these things may have not met that criteria, so they just kept bubbling around in the background, research kept happening, breakthroughs kept happening, oh, now we got the cycle life up to a thousand cycles, we got the cycle life up, you know, to two thousand cycles. Or, what I've heard from numerous people is that the place that's actually one of the most difficult places is manufacturing.

It's like, it's easy to come up with an idea, and it's easy to show the research of why it works, but then to take that idea and turn it into a product, it's where so many ideas go to die, because you could have the best thing, and it requires all new tooling, all new machining, all new everything, because it's a totally, radically different way to make a battery, and the upfront costs of doing that are just so astronomical.

It just, it just, dies on the vine right there. So it's like, that's one of the things that can stop these ideas from happening. It's one of the reasons why it takes so long. Like we hear about this research on, oh, this is really cool. And the battery technology that could power the future. It's like, that's awesome.

And it's like five years later, well, where's that battery? 10 years later, where's that battery? Well, it's like, they're still trying to figure out how to make it to manufacture the stupid thing. They know how to make it. It's just, how do we manufacture it at scale? How can we scale this up? How can we make it

safe, reliable, and cheap to make? So that's one of the biggest challenges around most of this tech that I've explored. It's, it's, it's frustrating. It's really frustrating because it comes across to a lot of people, including myself of like, okay, hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. It's like, we're getting impatient.

It's like, come on. So when you say, what's the oldest, some of these things, like I said, we've known for decades. Um, it's just now becoming, oh, there's a path. We, they finally have found a path to make this battery. That's what we're seeing right now.

Yeah, not only have you answered my question, but you've also touched on Ever X Fund's comment where Ever jumped into the comments and said, wow, there are so many new battery quote breakthroughs, and yet we still use the same 30 plus year old battery tech.

I wonder when the new amazing batteries enter the market and change the world. I have been waiting for at least 10 years now. And you just talked very eloquently about all of that. It's we've kind of inverted the conversation because you did cover. Like we are in a headline cycle that does not mesh with the actual availability.

And that's not something new to our conversations on this channel. We are always talking about the fact that there is the headline new battery breakthrough, and then we're still taking our Duracells and plugging them into the back of our flashlights and saying, how come I'm still doing this? So of the ones that you talked about.

You talked about five and I'm wondering, is there one that was number six is the one that just barely didn't make the cut? And if it, if there was, what was it?

There are, there are so many that we could have included, but didn't. Uh, one of the ones for me is, um, actually there's two, uh, niobium ion batteries.

I've talked about them before on the channel. That was a close sixth. Um, Aluminum ion, there's another one, uh, the reason I didn't include those was They, they still feel, uh, the niobium ion battery, the company I've talked about about them, they've, they've, they're making big progress and they're closing deals with the US military for things. They're, so, They're ramping up stuff is happening, but it's still so early days and it's, it's not necessarily even going to be a major, I don't think it's gonna be a major player in the battery market. It's gonna be a very niche player. And then aluminum ion to me, there's still a lot of question marks around that technology that made me go, eh, not quite like sodium feels like a more of a closer bet to me than aluminum does, but, uh, Again, this is just my opinion.

It's like, there's, there's a dozen that we could have included in this. And I'm curious to hear what people out there think. I know some people have already commented on that video saying, why didn't you include X? Why did you include Y? It's like, well, this is my kind of top five list. It's like, you got your own five list.

But I want to hear it. It's like, what kind of batteries are getting you guys going?

Yeah. Jump into the comments here as well as on Matt's main channel. What do you think that Matt left out of his video? Not for ignorance sake, but what would you point out as you think something has a lot of promise that puts it in line with the five that he did talk about?

Let us know in the comments. Don't forget your comments are a huge part of the program. They help support the program. And if you want to support us in other ways, you can also leave a review wherever it was, you found this and don't forget to subscribe and share it with your friends. Those are great, easy ways for you to support our podcast.

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And we'll talk to you next time