By Irina Slav
October 06, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -
When earlier this year
Tesla’s Elon Musk said the company could soon have
batteries lasting for over one million miles, many
probably took it as yet another grand promise with
less substance than realism requires. Now it seems
Musk may have not been exaggerating.
Last month, Wired
reported on a paper by researchers from
Dalhousie University in Canada, which detailed a
battery that “should be able to power an electric
vehicle for over 1 million miles.”
The researchers from Dalhousie University have an
exclusive agreement with Tesla, and two months ago
they
reported that they had designed battery cells
with higher energy density without using the
solid-state electrolyte that many believe is a
necessary condition for enhanced density. What’s
more, the battery cell that the team designed
demonstrated a longer life than some comparable
alternatives.
This second paper builds on that, it seems. It
details a “moderate-energy-density lithium-ion pouch
cell chemistry” that, according to the authors,
should serve as a benchmark for other researchers.
Those other researchers will probably appreciate it
because “cells of this type should be able to power
an electric vehicle for over 1.6 million kilometers
(1 million miles) and last at least two decades in
grid energy storage.”
Two decades of grid energy storage sounds almost
better than the 1 million miles in an EV as demand
for energy storage—the Holy Grail of renewables—garners
growing attention. But back to EVs.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
Range and battery durability—and
cost—are the biggest obstacles to mass
EV adoption. On the one hand, drivers
want to know their car won’t die midway
to their destination because its range
is too short. On the other, they also
want to know the battery will last.
Realistically speaking, no car needs a battery
that can last for a million miles, simply because
few people keep their cars for that long. Most cars
have exhausted their useful life at about
200,000 miles, according to the Observer’s Harmon
Leon. Yet it does sound impressive, and what’s even
more impressive is that, according to the
researchers, the new battery cell only loses a tenth
of its energy density over this extended lifetime,
which makes it more efficient than existing
batteries.
And here’s what’s even more impressive. The paper
is open to anyone interested in reading about how
this new and improved battery works. Why? Because,
as one former member of the Dalhousie University
team told Wired, Tesla patented an even superior
battery before the paper came out. The carmaker
announced it had received a patent for a battery
very similar to the one described in the paper, with
team leader Jeff Dahn listed as one of its
inventors.
So, it seems it’s true. Tesla has made a battery
capable of lasting a million miles even if other
components of the car might not be able to survive
that long. Now all it needs to do is make this
battery
cheap enough to turn it into something that is
actually usable in a car. This may take a while
given that most carmakers have yet to make current
batteries more affordable to bring down the price of
an EV enough to motivate more people to buy one.
This article was originally published by "Oilprice"-
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