Solid State batteries to replace Li-Ion storage ?

Let me guess: Toyota sales person?

Discussed extensively on the forums in the past.

They exist from various manufacturers only as lab prototypes currently, it's scaling up the manufacturing in an efficient manner which is the biggest problem to be solved. That and some issues around how to stack the cells - apparently that's more or less solved at present.

But they will eventually become mainstream and replace li-ion, it's a far superior technology. Anyone who tells you who will be first to market and when is talking cobblers though - there are several hundred billion $ invested across several companies, which tells you that no one knows which one will eventually crack it!

It could be tomorrow that an all important patent is filed and a global announcement made, or, it could be 12 years, or 23 years.. once they're produced at the same sort of rate and cost as current batteries, they will change the world.

Great minds and all that...

I think that when solid-state batteries come to the market (two to ten years from now) it will be great news for the current EV owners, too. If the car has been produced in non-trivial volume, sooner or later someone is going to offer battery upgrades for older cars. You'd just choose how to split the benefits: longer range and/or considerably lower curb weight.

I also remember seeing a visualisation of the different battery technologies in the R&D pipeline. I couldn't find the one I thought of, but this summary from a consulting company listed a few of them.

The reported power density of the Lithium Sulfur battery (late development phase) was quite interesting: if it works out, a 150kWh battery would weigh about the same as the typical contents of a fuel tank (55-60kg). This would make EVs considerably lighter than combustion-engined cars.

Thanks for the reminder - I need to go and feed the horses!

I'm not convinced by these horseless carriages (talked to a sales person at the track, unicorns are apparently only two years from the market).

A car sales person isn't likely to know anything about solid state batteries. How do you know a salesperson is lying? They're talking.
Solid state batteries are like nuclear fusion and full self-driving cars - always 5 years away.
If they do hit the market in commercial volumes soon, word will surely come from a cell manufacturer, not a company that buys them to fit in their products.

Do you fear the future so much?

We did not even have a landline phone when i was young. Refrigerators were rare and obviously the microprocessor was yet to exist as we know it today.

Sinclair calculator, Zx80 and we move on.

Thank god my now long deceased parents were computer literate well over a decade ago in their mid, late 80s. I am utterly amazed that some cannot get on board with modern technology and they are drag on our future.

The new human challenge is to live a full lifespan without losing touch with progress too far before the end of it. The world moves exponentially faster for each generation.

I think TX might have been born a generation behind at the start and has since been lapped.

This. (We'd need the "like" button on this forum!).

The price of electricity already goes negative on occasion because of the overproduction of intermittent renewables. Pumping that extra energy into EV batteries (incentivised through schemes like Intelligent Octopus) is a win-win-win. Add one more "win" to those when the regulatory and business model issues around V2G get resolved.

Add a fifth, biggest "win" when the baseload electricity gets produced using solutions that are genuinely low carbon (IIRC we'd need to get below 50g CO2/kWH in reality, not just on paper). Technologies needed for this are already in production, no need to look into fusion.

Well it'll burn out in around 5 billion years but I don't think we'll have to worry about that.

You think because something exists elsewhere, that predated us by billions of years, that we can replicate it at home for our convenience...?

You invest in nuclear fusion, I'll invest in new battery technology. Whoever is right will get their prize