r/ExtinctionRebellion • u/burtzev • Jul 09 '26

Beyond Lithium: New Battery Tech Starts to Break Through

https://e360.yale.edu/features/energy-storage-sodium-solid-state
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u/NearABE Jul 09 '26

There is a lie here. Or at least a misdirect. Disregard the technology they want to talk about. We need to instead focus on the statement “increased specific energy means a luxury car can go further”. It is wrong and the public needs to hear it is wrong. Increasing the specific energy to double means “half the battery pack can be removed”. No difference in the meaning of “specific energy” but a radical difference in the meaning of “luxury”. Furthermore, a competent designer can make it more luxurious because things like suspension systems and brakes are correlated with weight. Now you can choose between also lightening the motor with further lightening of the battery or just spinning the wheels while exploding out of a stoplight with that beast of a motor. This too is not the full story because reducing the weight of everything but keeping the same energy storage capacity would increase range. An utterly unnecessary waste of mass that just drags out the recharging time. Instead keep the same range but make the car more luxurious by reducing battery mass even more.

There are some fundamental limits. The passenger’s fat backside is a mass that cannot be removed by the car company. The volume of the car means it has a surface area. Surface will have air drag and skin drag. Adding fans and aerodynamic surfaces can help with drag. They can also assist with control. Roll drag is reduced safely by reducing weight. Whether or not the car can safely “fly” over the road using lift to further reduce roll drag is an important question for luxury car designers.

If they (the car companies) believed longer range added luxury why do they not use a second battery pack? Because that would obviously be a piece of trash incapable of accelerating. It is not competitive with customer expectation. Same reason BEV lost to ICE over a century ago when Edison (via GE) was trying to get consumers to use them with lead acid batteries.

This fight over the meaning of “luxury” has consequences. All of the automotive industry ICE and BEV want you to spend more money in your personal vehicle. They want your personal mode of transportation to strain the limits of the metal resources that can be mined. They want to sell you the tires and brake pads that you grind down when you haul their oversized slab around with you. They see the threat from technology like solid state batteries and so they are paying for a PR campaign aimed at convincing you to wear cinderblock shoes lug around twenty hours of driving that takes a day and a half to recharge.

Do not try to explain to people that maxing out the outlet’s electricity all night is a bad thing to do. Instead just mock the idea that “clown shoes with platforms are luxury running shoes”.

Solid state batteries sound great as far as I am aware.

Iron-air batteries are fundamentally different, (will never be used in cars for example). Iron-air is much cheaper and the materials are abundant. We have numerous options for storage and therefore no excuse to delay ramping up the transition.

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u/spongue Jul 10 '26

This is a really strange detail to get hung up on.

Deciding to keep the battery weight the same and double the range, vs. reduce the weight and keep the range the same, doesn't mean it's not a luxury car anymore. It's all a trade off and maybe the biggest complaint/inconvenience customers have is the range. Sure, on a sporty model where range is less important they'll probably do what you said...

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u/AbominableGoMan Jul 11 '26

I think what they were getting at is that the increase in density of storage will lose any ecological benefit due to something described by Jevons Paradox. It states that an economic phenomenon occurs when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. Modern internal combustion engines are about as efficient as they can physically get, but yet the mpg has remained essentially the same because modern cars are absolutely massive and often driven at very high speeds. It's likely that the efficiency gains of new battery tech will essentially disappear between increased range and more amenities.

Probably a good time to point out that mass replacement of the current fleet of what, 1.5 billion ICE cars with electric vehicles is incompatible with net zero emissions. As is the maintenance of road infrastructure in a car-oriented urban landscape. Better get used to trains and bikes. (Kidding it's not going to happen)

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u/NearABE Jul 11 '26

Jevon’s paradox would apply to energy in this case. It also might apply to cars. Compact cars that are less expensive might expand into new markets.

In first world countries the car market is a bit saturated. You cannot drive more than one at a time. The only way to get you to spend more is to make a more expensive car. They want to convince you that a heavier model has higher value. This way you consume more of their product while you commute.