hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4140.txt

Episode: 4140
Title: HPR4140: Battery and Charging Technology 2024
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4140/hpr4140.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:07:45

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,140 for Friday the 14th of June 2024.
Today's show is entitled Battery in Charging Technology 2024.
It is hosted by Ahuka and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, interesting new developments in batteries and charging.
Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio and welcoming you to another exciting episode.
And what I want to do today is I want to talk about a technology thing that I find very
interesting.
And that has to do with the developments in battery and charging technology.
I started looking into all of this for the reason that the car that I'm driving now,
although it is doing very nicely, is a 2012.
It has about 250,000 miles on it.
It is still running just fine.
I get really good gas mileage, but I have already decided that my next car is going to be
either an electric vehicle or a hybrid vehicle.
It's going to be one or the other.
It's just a question of where are we going to be at the point that I need to make that
change.
Now, a lot of that depends on battery and charging technology.
So I started looking into it and I thought I would share with you some of the stuff
that I've been seeing that I think is some interesting developments.
If they come along fast enough, I may go for an electric vehicle.
If they're still lagging a little bit, I'll probably go for a hybrid.
So that's kind of what I'm looking at.
Now, I think I'm just going to say, I think it should be obvious to nearly everyone that
we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
Well, that's all well and good.
What do we replace it with?
We can have renewable energy sources that can provide electricity to run our vehicles and
power our homes.
But those energy sources tend to be intermittent.
The sun only shines half the day, winds come and go, and the key technology we need to
bridge the gap is battery technology.
When we talk about vehicles in particular, you have to have good battery technology to
run automobiles.
No question about that.
Now, fortunately, there have been some important developments that provide good news on this
front.
Unless this comes from China.
Now, China has no oil resources of its own and is therefore incentivized to push research
into alternatives.
When you understand that China has to import virtually all of the oil, it has pretty much
every foreign policy problem involving China starts to become really focused.
You can see that providing and securing the supply of oil that they need drives everything
that China does.
Now another country that's in a similar situation with no domestic oil supply is Japan, which
also has the same incentives and has also done good work in this area.
Now the United States, in contrast, is a major oil producer.
And so it has no incentive, in that sense, not anything like China and Japan, to get
into looking for alternatives.
And in fact, there's a lot of opposition, what we are seeing now in the United States.
We are seeing that various states, localities, etc., are actively hostile to any kind of alternative
energy.
The federal government is spending lots of money subsidizing fossil fuels.
And so we've got kind of a problem there, but the thing is, I think we're going to be pushed
whether we like it or not into making some changes.
Now in terms of automobiles, that's the big thing because so much of our fossil fuel
use is for automobiles.
And what we're seeing, and these are just the facts, the share of new vehicles that our
electric goes up each year.
And they will be the largest share of new vehicles sooner than many people realize.
Now some countries are getting there faster than others.
Interesting one of them, Norway, is in fact an oil producer.
Well, they're producing oil, but they're selling it to other people.
In 2023, Norway had 90% of their sales be electric vehicles in the first half of the year.
Now that includes both pure electric and hybrid electric.
So there's, you know, with hybrid vehicles, there is gas usage.
It's just tends to be less.
So comparable figure in Germany was 35% in China, 33%.
And when you say China, 33%, you know, bear in mind, China is, I think at this point,
possibly the second most populous country in the world, I think India just overtook them.
Now, I've got a link in the show notes, you can see some more about how different countries
are doing with all of this, and also how the US is doing.
Now, other news notes, California and Washington, two states of the United States, have mandated
that 100% of new vehicles will be electric by 2035, that's just 11 years away.
New Jersey has a similar mandate.
I would not be at all surprised to see other states join in this.
Now the main obstacle to increase the adoption of electric vehicles is what we call range
anxiety.
For example, most electric cars right now have about a 300 mile top range on a full charge.
And a full charge can take up to an hour at a time.
Now I do a trip each year from my home in Michigan to the rest of my family in New England.
It's my family and my wife's family, we met and got married there.
So we go there every summer to visit and see people, and that's about 800 mile trip.
Well that would mean stopping at least twice, going each way for up to an hour for a recharge.
Now the solution has to be some combination of higher capacity batteries and quicker
recharging times.
Now fortunately there is progress on both of these fronts.
Now first I'm going to point to, there's a company called Contemporary Amperex Technology
Company Limited, abbreviation CATL.
This is a Chinese company, it is the largest battery manufacturer in the world.
For that reason there are accusations in the US that they are a security concern, but
the rest of the world is not likely to worry too much about that.
What they have done technically is to improve the capacity and charging times of their batteries
significantly.
They are now shipping batteries that power a car for 400 kilometers, which is about 250
miles, on just a 10 minute charge.
So for my trip each year I would spend 30 minutes recharging instead of two hours.
That starts to look like a feasible plan.
Or with a full charge it could go 700 kilometers, which is about 435 miles.
So I could get a full charge before leaving home, do a couple of 10 minute charges on the
way and be there with power to spare.
That's totally doable.
You know, my wife and I are senior citizens.
I can assure you we spend more time than that in the bathrooms as we go.
These batteries are fairly conventional as rechargeables go, being lithium-iron phosphate.
If you start reading literature you will often see that abbreviated LIP and that is the chemistry
they use.
That is the standard now.
lithium-iron phosphate is safer than the older lithium batteries.
But otherwise it is fairly for lithium conventional.
Now the next thing that we can look at in terms of battery technology is what is called solid
state batteries.
Now one of the leaders with this technology is Toyota.
Now Toyota was the early leader in hybrid vehicles.
But hybrid vehicles contain both a gasoline or petrol engine with batteries and electric
motors.
And because Toyota got off to an early start they probably have more automotive experience
with batteries than any manufacturer in the business, even though they are a bit later
to the fully electric vehicle market.
There is always a debate about hybrid versus fully electric.
At some point we are going to go to fully electric.
That is obvious.
But the question is when?
Now my suspicion is at some point there is going to be a very rapid shift.
Because that tends to be the way these things happen.
It is like we are not ready.
We are not ready.
We are not ready.
Suddenly yes we are ready.
Then things shift overnight.
Now the thing about solid state batteries, which is what Toyota is looking at, they can
avoid using lithium.
They will be lighter.
They will have a higher energy density.
Now because this is new technology, it probably won't appear in production for about three
or four years.
But Toyota claims they should be able to produce a car that will go 1200 kilometers or 750
miles on a 10 minute charge.
I put a link in the show notes.
You can take a look at Toyota's plans and see what they are looking at doing.
Now the main competition with Toyota in the hybrid market is Honda.
As I said, I have been researching this.
I have come to the conclusion that if you are going to get a hybrid vehicle, you want
to get either a Toyota or a Honda, there is like no one else comes close.
So Honda is Toyota's main competitor.
They also have their plans for solid state batteries.
Again, there is a link in the show notes.
Now there is a Chinese manufacturer NIO that has a semi solid state battery right now that
can go 650 miles or just over a thousand kilometers on a single charge.
Now, it's worth noting that the idea of solid state batteries is not all that new as Michael
Faraday first discovered them in the early 19th century.
What's new is the technology to scale up the batteries into something that can power an
automobile.
Now, I've put a few things in the notes.
If you want to learn more about solid state batteries, first is an explanation from Harvard
University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and then there is one from New
Scientist Magazine and a Wikipedia article.
All of these links are in the show notes.
Now there are other technologies.
BYD is a Chinese company that is the world's largest producer of electric vehicles.
Now they employ a technology that is called the Blade Battery.
This is a variation on the lithium iron phosphate technology, but the company claims it is
safer as a longer range and a longer lifetime.
Again, link in the show notes if you want to read more about blade batteries.
Sodium ion batteries are a coming thing as well.
Now this is not surprising since sodium and lithium are in the same chemical family, both
being alkali metals, so they should have similar properties.
But one advantage of sodium is that it is a lot more abundant.
Lithium is fairly rare and so there are concerns about whether a handful of countries could
tie up the lithium supply.
No one is going to do that with sodium.
So sodium ion batteries should cost less and unlike lithium produce no toxic byproducts.
There is a Swedish company called NorthVolt that has made great progress in this area and
I put a link to an article from the Guardian that is in the show notes that will give you
more information about that.
The biggest problem is the lack of infrastructure around battery recharging and that in my opinion
is where there is a good role for the government.
In the US, which I am most familiar with, the government has in the past intervened to promote
transportation innovations and in 19th century it was the promotion of railroads, which the
government aided through substantial land grants, and in the 20th century it was building
the road network.
Those things would not have happened if the government had not made those investments.
I would suggest that there is a need now to build out charging infrastructure at a speed
and scale that the private sector cannot accomplish.
That would solve the last problem preventing widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
Companies are now producing or will be shortly the batteries we need.
Right now with my fuel-efficient car, it takes me two tanks of gas or petrol from my European
friends to make my trip each year, because I can go about 500 miles on a full tank.
We should, within the next few years, have batteries to exceed that range.
What we lack is the charging infrastructure to make recharging as easy as refueling is
now.
The obstacle is not technology, it's politics.
The other issue that should be concerned to some Americans, perhaps, is that all of
the leading work on these vital technologies is happening in other countries.
Now, I'm less concerned about that because the problems are global, but I find it odd
that some American politicians consider technology from China to be a security threat, yet
seem to have no interest in developing the technology here, that strikes me as rather
odd.
Well, anyway, that's enough on this topic.
This is Ahuka, signing off from Hacker Public Radio and as always encouraging you to support
free software.
Bye-bye.
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