I'm not saying lithium ion is going to replace jet fuel, obviously the energy density of jet fuel is still way better. As a metric for how far battery tech has come though it works.
Lithium-ion battery technology is 1980's technology. EVs are still stuck using this old technology. Many EV believers are Luddites.
Gasoline engines have improved VASTLY since 1980!
600 miles? Almost not worth taking a plane (if we had less onerous airports that would not be the case), but if you tried to do that with lead acid batteries in 1970 it would be 50 miles i.e. lucky to get off the ground before the battery overheats. So we see a transition from actually pointless to a niche use case.
Nope. The battery is too heavy. It is not practical to build an aircraft that can carry a useful payload using lithium ion batteries and electric motors.
That's a bold statement, the planet is pretty big.
Every thirty years people pointed out that the known oil reserves would run out in 30 years but by the time the doomsday date arrived had found more reserves.
There are no reserves. Oil is formed continuously.
Lithium will be no different.
Lithium ore is plentiful, but is expensive to obtain. The mining and purification process are destructive to sensitive areas like deserts.
We even still keep finding gold veins although the concentrations aren't as high as our ancestors enjoyed.
Actually, they ARE.
Gold mining still produces gold in concentrations as before. The difference is that gold is not used as currency in the United States, thanks to the Democrats...which stole the gold (and build Fort Knox to store it in!), and issued fiat currency with no commodity backing (hence, the inflation we see!).
Well maybe we can do some calculations on that. Get a ratio of lithium mass to stored charge. Multiply it by the likely lithium available to be mined (although like I said that number has huge error bars on it), and then look at the kind of buffering that a 50x current power grid would need.
A battery is not energy generation. It is more like a bucket of power. They are also heavy and expensive.
Yea that's not making it easy, but they're doing that because of people fear mongering about the lighting on fire.
Lithium-ion batteries burn like a firework. Fires can start during charging, or just sitting there after charging, or if the battery is damaged in any way.
Given time more elegant solutions are possible.
None. It's the nature of lithium. Ya canna' change the laws of physics cap'n!
To give you a microcosm example companies like Dewalt, Ryobi, and Milkwake are basically sticking a bunch of 18650 cells in a plastic box with a controller and calling it their own propriety battery.
This practice is certainly irritating. I've standardized on the Baur system.
When market standardization takes over it is stable, but these silly "only invented here" strategies need to be defeated first. Look at the double AA battery and its counterparts.
AA is a size, not a type of battery. There are AA lithium metal batteries, AA lithium-ion batteries, AA alkaline batteries, and AA Nicad batteries. The type you typically buy in the grocery store is alkaline type (using a paste for the electrolyte that has a pH around 8). The electrodes for this type of battery are carbon and zinc. They are not rechargeable. An AA sized alkaline battery is capable of 2 amp/hrs and allows a current of up to 2A (due to internal resistance of the battery itself).
For multiple generations those standards held and anybody who rebelled died. There was no reason not to do the same thing with new battery chemsitry, all we needed to do was standardize charging logic chips, but like I said every company was pulling in their own direction and there was no big playbook to look towards.
Okay...let's look at battery chemistry.
Lithium is the lightest of the metals. The lithium-ion complex has an electron volt rating of 3.7V. This means lithium-ion is the lightest possible battery for the power it can produce when fully charged (41.2kJ/gm). Gasoline is 44.4kJ/gm, but it's not a battery.
Other battery chemistry is necessarily going to be heavier than the already heavy lithium batteries!
There is no standard logic chip of any kind.
That's a fixable problem.
What are you 'fixing'?
When I saw removable battery they could be entirely modular. Car batteries being a casing with a bunch of standardized small batteries with EEPROM about the chemistry and charge cycles and such that allows the casing charger to know how to use it.
Charging those batteries still means you have to put the same power into them to charge them. Removing an EV car battery is no simple undertaking. They are extremely heavy, delicate, and a serious fire hazard during the entire operation. Removing them requires specially equipped shops (read: Dealers). Such batteries are also liquid cooled. Those lines have be drained than filled by vacuum process just to change the battery.
It's not practical.
If any cell starts misbehaving cut it off and potentially eject it. Yes it's a lot of engineering effort at the start, but when something is standardized we can build a whole lot of them and that means we can use dedicated production lines so even complicated machines become cheap.
Cars are an excellent example of this fact. They are very complicated machines. Computers even more so. It's completely wrong to look at the cost of ordering 10 novel computers and say "that is the cost of a computer".
Or a one off car (which is like 10 million) and say "that is the cost of a car".
The real question is "how much would it cost per unit if we made a billion of these things".
More than they cost now. There is not enough material.
"the cost of integrating that into the grid is beyond any nations ability to pay for it"
What? With AC you sync the phase and you add power with a slightly higher voltage than the grid.
With insufficient generating capacity, grid frequency will drop, resulting in a collapse of the grid if not corrected within a few minutes.
Adding generating capacity is only part of the problem. You have to get all that power transmitted to the chargers which means installing many more transmission lines, upgrading distribution lines, and all the extra equipment to support it.
With DC it's even simpler (and we should switch to a DC grid).
Go look at why DC is not used for power distribution anymore.
