Hub and spoke is primarily used to fill large planes. If you have 10-20 passenger electric planes you'd land at some random county airport, eat a hamburger or a taco while the plane recharges, then get back on the same plane and finish the trip. So you'd have a layover like hub and spoke but all the concerns about missing connections go away.
They mention that they are doing electrochemistry. A huge portion of historical magnesium production is from electrolysis, including the only operating plant in the US. Past methods have used lime to precipitate magnesium (Dow) or evaporation ponds to concentrate it (the current Utah plant). Probably the new thing they are doing is using something like Chlor-Alkali to make base that precipitates the magnesium instead of using lime. Then the electrolysis of molten magnesium salts would be similar to products of today. There is some chance they have improvements in these areas, but there are really only so many options. The job descriptions they've posted support this hypothesis.
Recently most magnesium comes from China. They mine ore, throw it in a coal-fired furnace along with some reducing agents, then collect pure magnesium vapor. This process is more labor and energy intensive, but has significantly less CAPEX. Works for China.
Chlor-alkali is more expensive than lime and the back-end electrolysis is more expensive than thermal reduction. So I'd be skeptical they are going to lower costs without some kind of CAPEX reducing magic for molten salt electrolysis.
Not to be too snarky here, did you read the link to the research? It too uses electro-chemistry with the defining feature: "This new process produces pure magnesium hydroxide, allowing researchers to skip energy-intensive and expensive purification steps."
My reasoning was to note that the Magrathea collateral is pushing "low energy" to make the connection. I am NOT saying I KNOW that this how they are doing it. It is because this is a "mature market" in terms of well established players who are doing this with lime and salt ponds that I was wondering "Has anything changed that would convince a VC (or Angel) to fund a new magnesium producer?" What would have to be true in order to have a value proposition that would convince someone they could succeed against the established players?
And so I go off and search various "research news" web sites to see if there is any news on Magnesium extraction. If they are not using this research then I would be skeptical of their success given the existing market is well established and making a new venture using existing techniques is pretty capital intensive.
Yes, I read the underlying paper a while back. It only looks at the very first step of a Dow-like process, before any electrochemistry happens. Instead of dumping hydroxide in a tank, they expose it to hydroxide in a serpentine flow path. When I was reading into this before calcium didn't seem to be too big of a problem for the Dow process because the calcium compounds are more soluble than magnesium hydroxide. They were actually adding more calcium with the lime. So their comparison may be to a different method than the Dow Process. It didn't seem particularly useful.
Then you neutralize the magnesium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid to make Magnesium chloride and do molten salt electrolysis on it to make pure magnesium and chlorine.
Apparently US Magnesium is a major producer and they use evaporation ponds and brine from the Great Salt Lake. It's a bit of an environmental controversy because they use a lot of water and the Great Salt Lake is shrinking.
Will your system be robust to changes in solar farm design? Like if the industry goes towards the Erthos model of installing panels on the ground without racking or trackers?
Single-axis tracked solar isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but we are going to have to adapt if and when the industry changes. We're building relatively generic robotic primitives that should be useful for many different types of system.
Drilling cost is usually estimated for drilling in sedimentary rock with assumptions about how casing is run ;)
It is possible that drilling 30,000' of granite has conditions that make the estimation model irrelevant. 5 km isn't really deep enough, anyway. My next post will cover the thermo. It is pretty dang hard to get down to anything approaching $50/MWh. Definitely need more than cheap drilling.
It is important that we discuss cost, but I think the urgency of our need for mass generating non-intermitent power should override costs.
As an example Solar energy as it exists now would have been ridiculed in the late 80s as something that would never be cost effective.
It was the massive subsidies/tax rebate schemes in Germany and later on in other EU countries that open the window for manufacturers to produce at scale and make it the cost competitive source of energy that we see now.
I mentioned this in a previous comment on a biomass thread. We would be better off with EU funds allocated to solving the massification of geo-thermal or the massification of small vessel nuclear reactors, than to continue to pour money into converting coal plants into natural gas plants and opening up new biomass furnaces.
Natural gas and biomass are just a means for governments to play with statistics on 'renewable' pie-charts. Until we solve the problem of mass energy storage of intermitent renewables or a far away nuclear fussion we need to start _now_ deploying non-carbon emitting non-intermitent energy generation.
We have to be realistic and accept that we need to find a means of replacing coal and not all regions have the resources for hydro-generation, geo-thermal is the next best bet considering the time and friction it would take to roll out more nuclear for example.
Tesla was founded in 2003, Rivian in 2009. So Tesla took five years to start Roadster production, while Rivian has taken 12 years until first customer deliveries. Maybe Rivian will ramp faster. Sam Korus tracks the numbers and so far Tesla is ramping faster than Ford, making it the fastest ramping car manufacturer in American history. I wouldn't be surprised if some Chinese companies could go faster. It is much faster than what Toyota did. They are very methodical, which is why they have almost zero pure EV sales.
The data is observational, which generally means you should ignore it. It is too noisy.
There were those studies that showed moderate alcohol use improved health and only heavy drinkers saw detrimental health effects. The problem was that "no drinking" group included people that weren't drinking because of poor health. Later studies compared drinking vs. a "no drinking" sample of people that drank around two glasses of wine per year. The improved health effects completely disappeared. The more you drink, the worse it is for your health.
So this study is like that in using a potentially unhealthy comparison group. They try to offset that a little by also throwing in people that quit drinking. But it is likely that some people quit drinking because of health problems. So I'd guess that this study has the same problem with an unhealthy comparison group. The study probably can't tell you what the actual relationship between alcohol use and dementia with any authority.
Data like this is difficult, yes. Ignoring it outright may earn you accolades online where cynicism is often mistaken for intelligence. But it’s just scientific defeatism.
There is no way to study this issue, and many similar in nutrition, but with observational data.
The problem here is the form factor of the cell as much as the chemistry. Pouch style cells are very difficult to regulate temperature in. This is a key reason why other automakers like Tesla use the small cylinder cells. Chinese companies like BYD have always used lithium iron phosphate. It has less energy density than lithium nickel batteries like NCA and NMC, but is cheaper. The patent was never taken out in China and the key patent expires for the rest of the world in April 2022. As much as 3/4 of vehicle batteries might end up being LFP. Improvements in the chemistry and less need for cooling systems and packaging mean its disadvantages aren't so glaring. Plus there aren't enough nickel mines to supply the coming avalanche of demand. Lithium, iron, and phosphate are plentiful.
FYI nickel is plentiful and unlikely to ever be in shortage. It's just so cheap right now that most nickel deposits are "non-economic", and thus not counted as part of proven reserves. The same thing is true with uranium for example.
see here for the difference between resources and reserves,
We are currently extracting 2.5 MT of nickel a year, from reserves of 94 MT. Resources are estimated at 300 MT, which is definitely a lower end, as prospecting tends to concentrate profitable ores. If the price of nickel went up, we'd see more resources becoming reserves and more discovery of new resources.
If batteries are easily swappable with minimal tools, then a lot of range concerns go away as well. I think battery ownership and care needs to be decoupled from the vehicle. I also think the federal government should enforce interoperable batteries between vehicle brands.
The cars shape and structural components are designed around the battery. The cars software, motors, charging electronics, software, cooling systems, etc are all designed for the specific battery. The battery eats up a significant fraction of the cost of the car, and the systems designed around it a significant fraction of the remainder.
Asking for interoperable batteries between vehicle brands is like asking for interoperable engines between vehicle brands, it's ridiculous. The government should not be saying "hey, that $xx,xxxx item with a million constrains and optimizable variables, why don't you make it meet this arbitrary standard so people could theoretically put it in another chassis that wasn't designed to let you optimize it as well as possible".
Certainly no one should expect to be able to swap the main batteries that are embedded into the chassis of the car. The total weight of the batteries in a Tesla are around 1200 lbs.
But it seems like there could be a hot-swappable portion of the battery, kind of like a separate "reserve tank" (although it wouldn't actually be reserved).
Some back of the envelope math says that if 1200 lb battery gets you 250 miles, a 200 lb hot-swap battery would get you 40 miles. Possibly enough to get to your next destination.
> a 200 lb hot-swap battery would get you 40 miles.
According to one report, for a Tesla Model 3, a supercharger can add ~100 miles of range in ~10 minutes. It's hard to see how any improvement over that could possibly justify the immense additional complexity of physical battery swapping for only 40 additional miles of range.
Does the Supercharger network come with a fleet of drones that can autonomously repair a charger in the middle of nowhere, that broke down one late evening of a particularly snowy winter Sunday?
That said, it's probably a UX problem. Once EVs stop competing on range so much, it'll make sense to just designate the last 10% of battery as "reserve" and not count it in the battery level indicator.
Somehow gas pumps get repaired/maintained in the "middle of nowhere" today. Eventually the economic incentives will align that that the charger networks get maintained no matter where they are.
Arguably it should be far easier to get those economic incentives aligned as chargers are far simpler mechanically (they are just plug sockets with weird over-engineered male adapters) and most of what breaks on them is either vandalism or a small subset of existing problems of gas pumps: credit card reader malfunctions, display/screen problems, internet connectivity issues for account management/credit card transactions. (All the human UX points of contact.)
> Once EVs stop competing on range so much, it'll make sense to just designate the last 10% of battery as "reserve" and not count it in the battery level indicator.
Most already do (even while still competing for range) because it's a battery maintenance requirement. Li-Ion cells generally don't like being 100% full, especially not for long periods of time, and sometimes have a preferred "directionality" (ie, a cell should only be charging until it hits 100% and then you can draw from it and vice versa once you start drawing from the cell you should keep doing so until it hits 0%) so battery controllers already have to do a bunch of math to keep a "reserve" so that they don't violate "directionality" (you always want cells in the "charging" direction available even while driving for regenerative braking storage, for instance) and don't generally hit 100% charge for long rest periods, but instead 95% or so.
I thought we were comparing fast charging to battery swapping. Surely a machine that physically swaps out a battery is going to be significantly larger and more complex than a supercharger, and therefore also much more likely to break down..
Every ICE car I've ever driven did exactly that with the 'reserve' where the needle is already at (or below) the zero line but you still get about 50 km of range.
I've been wondering about that with the cars with digital displays, particularly the ones that report your estimated remaining miles.
I once, embarrassingly, found myself on the highway with an empty tank of gas and 20 miles to the next gas station. I watched the estimated miles remaining indicator tick down mile after mile, ticking precisely my passage. At 3 miles estimated remaining, I pulled over because there was a very wide safe shoulder, and I didn't want to putter out in a less-safe spot.
I don't want to try the experiment of letting it tick down to zero and seeing if I still have 10 miles or so left.
I think the use cases for field-swapping a (part of the) battery pack are the same as for carrying extra fuel canisters with you, which I can only speculate about, because I've never been in such situation with an ICE car.
That’s what BMW did with their i3 REX models: a scooter engine and a tiny tank, hooked up to the electrical system. Turns out though that the extra weight impacted the performance without adding much in the way of range to the point that it wasn’t really worth it.
A 2000W inverter generator could give a Chevy Bolt an extra 14 miles of range after 3 hours of charging. A 240V generator could shorten that time or lengthen the range but would also be larger and take up more room in the car. Carrying gasoline in the back of your car all the time in case you run out of battery is somewhat dangerous. The generator means less cargo space as well. For a long trip to the middle of nowhere it may make sense to carry a generator and some gas. For a trip into town it may not.
> Asking for interoperable batteries between vehicle brands is like asking for interoperable engines between vehicle brands, it's ridiculous.
Engines are interoperable to a large degree; you can switch out the engine+ecu of your car for the engine+ecu of another car more easily than you'd think because the majority of the effort will be in changes requiring an adapter plate and shaft for the transmission.
There are hurdles that make it harder (for example, auto transmissions have software that expects a particular set of engine characteristics), but by and large most engines are isolated enough from the rest of the car and the drivetrain that you don't need to worry.
Batteries are to the same degree. if you really wanted to, you could take a bunch of liquid cooled Tesla modules and fit them in a old leaf, when it’s batteries degrade.
It's not ridiculous but it does lead to this conclusion: That there is probably a single optimal "skateboard" type design. Manufacturers are converging on this anyway.
This is nonsense. That's like saying 'everybody converging on a 4 wheel design'. The details of how the platform is built and integrated is still very different.
> Then the real truth that no one wants to hear, is that there is no need for so many different types of passenger vehicles.
Good that we have you to tell us what vehicles people should drive.
> Asking for interoperable batteries between vehicle brands is like asking for interoperable engines between vehicle brands, it's ridiculous
No, it is like asking batteries for radios follow the norm (so that they can be swapped), or petrol to be the same for all cars, with the same pouring mechanism (a round hole), or USB connectors to be the same between devices.
I'd say it should be possible to have a certain degree of compatibility just like I expect my GPU to work on any of the MB on the market supporting PCI-e(Space and cooling issues asside).
The battery should be just a battery with a protection system. Charging and BMS should be separate and replaceable along with the battery. The OS of the car should support x number of BMS systems with a unified protocol.
You want a Li-Ion pack? This BMS and this shielding are required. You want Lead batteries? This BMS needs to charge it. Do you want that new battery tech? You need the new BMS for it and an OS driver for the BMS.
Plug it in and it's done.
The battery is the most expensive part... which susceptible to wear, abuse and fraud. (and fire). Making them easily swappable with minimal tools means they'll be easily stolen.
The negative replies to this are largely valid, but ignore the fact that we can have multiple strategies at the same time.
I for one would love to be able to take my battery out, swap it, have a few so some are always on solar charge. Be able to take one onto the boat. Use a new one for higher performance special occasion driving, and an old one for bumper to bumper slow commute which I can wrong every last mile out of. Have a few which default to home backup and can support the grid.
The highly optimised around the battery argument is very good. But it doesn't mean that we can't also have a company focusing on interchangeable batteries with a third party market.
Let the buyer decide. Neither solution will get 100% of the market, or zero. Why write one off right now with confidence when both could have a healthy market for the hugely diverse users (ie not just SV nerds)
The fed enforcing interop wouldn't be black and white. Just like Mercedes are allowed to sell super low MPG AMG Sports cars because they also sell lots of small city cars. The fed could encourage things in this direction without being black and white and mandating 100% of batteries be replaceable.
I think the downvotes of the parent comment here aren't what downvotes should be for. He or she brings up a very interesting point
The people I know with electric cars charge at home the vast majority of the time. Swapping adds a lot of complexity and cost in the pack design. NIO is doing swaps as another commenter pointed out, but more customers in China live in apartments. In the end, I think charging stations will be ubiquitous, even for apartment dwellers, and swaps will be rare.
In practice this would probably mean something like: a vehicle hoist, a suitable lifter, a couple of sockets and a racket handle, and a screwdriver or two.
Tesla actually had a battery swapping machine at one point, I think it was at the Kettleman City location. There's no reason the battery and charging infrastructure can't be leveraged for all passenger vehicles. The battery on your electric vehicle should be like the propane tank on your gas grill - just swap it out when you need to. (This doesn't preclude recharging it)
Not to mention, when the battery reaches the end of its normal life cycle. Just goes straight into the recycling pipeline.
Tesla's swapping machine was just for tax credits. It was never built to be something they'd sell to customers. They built that one demo location and then abandoned battery swapping completely as not viable.
If they legitimately cared instead of faking it they could probably do better. Especially if the target is a maintenance-style machine setup rather than a 30 second gas station rival setup.
You can rent the batteries and upgrade and downgrade the capacity as you like. It also makes it easy to replace the battery in the future if you buy it outright.
They offer 70 and 100 kWh packs now. They're aiming for 150 kWh packs next year:
This must be surprising to people, but the prairie co-evolved with ruminants like cows and buffalo. It literally dies and undergoes desertification without them. Buffalos can't breed fast enough to fill this niche for a long time. If we want healthy prairie we will have to have herds of cattle munching on the grass whether we choose to eat them or not.
