Agreed. I think that about ten years out, when solid state batteries are widely available, lithium-ion batteries bigger than laptop-sized will be prohibited.
Once we have solid state cells I really hope the entire industry moves over to them and we just have solid state, LFP and Sodium Ion, all nicely non combustable chemistries that offer different price, power and weight density trade offs.
Solid-state batteries will never be suitable for all applications, even if they should suffice for the most frequent of them.
Batteries with liquid electrolyte will always be able to provide greater power (i.e. greater current) within certain physical constraints. This should not matter for smartphones or laptops, but it should matter for many things with motors.
In a battery with a liquid electrolyte, the interfacial layer between the electrode and the electrolyte is fractal in shape, created by a carefully engineered chemical reaction between the electolyte and the electrode to maximize the surface area. You can't really do that with any solid battery chemistry we are currently studying.
I think the issue is overblown. Most users who need high power also benefit from high energy, and you can always run more batteries in parallel.
It's the common problem with almost anything in physics or chemistry.
The Good Stuff has some horrible flaw that makes it incredibly dangerous.
When we invented refrigerators first, they used ammonia as a refrigerant which was awesome at moving heat around. It's still used industrially but people die from ammonia leaks. Then they swapped it for freon, which was just about as good at moving heat around, but rotted holes in the ozone layer. So they got replaced with R-134 which wasn't as bad for the ozone layer (but still not great), slightly more toxic, and still quite nasty stuff to handle.
At present the best bet for refrigerants turns out to be good old propane, which if anything is a little too good at moving heat around (and your evaporator will freeze if you're not careful), reasonably non-toxic (don't breathe it in, but unlike ammonia a tiny amount in a room won't dissolve your lungs), and its only real downside is that it burns. People are worried about using C3 or C5 (pentane) refrigerant in cars, but the worst that would happen is you'd release about a deodorant can's worth of the stuff into something that's already on fire and contains maybe 70 litres of petrol. Your petrol tank is a bomb, made of a leaky plastic bucket full of explosive. The aircon having a cupful of LPG in it is not your problem in an accident.
Thus it is with batteries.
It turns out that one of the best kinds of batteries you can make in terms of longevity, power density, and stability is a couple of bits of lead in a bucket of sulphuric acid. They work great. They're in production today, and will probably be forever. Your car has at least one (mine has three, a massive one up front for starting the engine and a couple of smaller ones in the back for running things like the radios and inverter when I'm stopped).
However, lead compounds are pretty nasty, sulphuric acid is pretty nasty, they're heavy, they will stop working if you leave them discharged, and in general people would like something smaller, less corrosive, and less dependent on digging up vast areas of China to pull poisonous dust out of the ground.
So we have NiCads (oh dear, cadmium, one of the nastiest poisonous metals because it's poisonous all by itself - it doesn't need to be complexed to something organic to get in you), then NiMH (cheaper, non-toxic, and more-or-less a drop-in replacement for NiCads in any given application). Then we've got the various rechargeable lithium batteries which can do exciting things when damaged.
But for high power density, low cost, and and high current applications where you don't have to worry about carrying them or tipping them over, you're going to be stuck with lead in a bucket of acid for a while I suspect.
> They're in production today, and will probably be forever.
I suspect their days are numbered, because they have become _far_ more expensive to dispose of, and that's only going one direction.
> But for high power density, low cost, and and high current applications where you don't have to worry about carrying them or tipping them over, you're going to be stuck with lead in a bucket of acid for a while I suspect.
You'd think, but they _haven't_ seen a lot of use in, say, grid-scale applications.
> I suspect their days are numbered, because they have become _far_ more expensive to dispose of, and that's only going one direction.
They're insanely easy to recycle. You melt lead, you recast it into new plates. Sulphuric acid is very easy to make, and we need to make a lot of it as part of the process of making fertilisers.
> You'd think, but they _haven't_ seen a lot of use in, say, grid-scale applications.
Every telephone exchange you have ever dialled through is powered by massive lead-acid battery, with cells about the size of a decent microwave oven.
> You'd think, but they _haven't_ seen a lot of use in, say, grid-scale applications
Their power density is integer multiples worse than Li-Ion no matter what you look at. Not to mention numerous other problems. So it's not surprising at all.
> Their power density is integer multiples worse than Li-Ion no matter what you look at. Not to mention numerous other problems. So it's not surprising at all.
Yes, but you can use them in areas where you can't use Li-Ion.
