Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

If you know more than others do, that's great! But please contribute by sharing some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn, rather than putting others down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As for wood batteries,

Most usage of the term 'battery' is independent of technology, outside of usually wanting electricity as the interface. The fact that most batteries people talk about happen to be electrochemical cells is incidental -- it's irrelevant to whatever they are actually talking about. So yes, a lot of the time 'battery' happens to refer to electrochemical cells, but it also refers to energy storage devices in general, which wood obviously is.

The problem with wood being a "solid-state battery" is surely the solid-state part.

Q: I mean how does that even work, solid-state combustion?

A: No, it's still obviously a normal chemical cell. You do a chemistry and these special "electrodes" turn the result into electricity.

Q: Can you recharge it?

A: Well, not in your own home, but in your backyard, maybe sort of.

If we are to use the term 'solid-state' to refer to anything that is solid, as in "solid-state battery", and we can get electricity from burning wood, I don't see the problem with referring to wood as a solid-state battery.

For the purist in doctrine and structure, wood is not a battery. If one is somewhere between neutral and radical, then wood is a battery that was built by its integrated disposable solar cells.

Where fiber optic is used though, that is the limit. That is a minority though.

There's also payload and loiter time to consider.

If you have a drone that can watch the battlefield for hours instead of minutes that is incredibly useful. Same story if you have a drone that can 3x its payload.

    TNT.....:  4 kJ/gram and  7 MJ/liter
 
    Gasoline: 43 kJ/gram and 33 MJ/liter

The fuels which afford the highest rates of storage tend to release it more slowly. Chemical explosives typically have about 1/10 the energy storage capacity (by mass) of fuels, as several people have pointed out.

Similar relationships exist for other forms of energy storage. For electricity, fuel cells, chemical cells ("batteries"), flywheel / reaction storage, and capacitors tend to offer a trade-off between total storage capacity and reaction time. Capacitors can react at intra-phase rates (that is, within a single 60Hz power cycle), whilst batteries and flywheels can take longer to come online.

See for example: "Battery Parameters" <https://www.monolithicpower.com/en/learning/mpscholar/batter...>.

Energy density of gasoline is approximately 44 to 45 megajoules per kilogram.

Energy density of TNT is approximately 4.184 megajoules per kilogram.

"Petrol and diesel can only explode when under pressure and mixed with air and in the case of petrol, have a small amount of energy added in the form of a spark or a flame. Engines pressurise the fuel/air mixture in the cylinder and so produce small, confined explosions which turn a crankshaft and drive the wheels."

"When cars are involved in collisions, fuel lines are often torn and petrol leaks out onto a hot engine. Liquid petrol can catch fire in the presence of air. But it can’t explode because it’s not under pressure and is in the liquid phase rather than a vapour."

https://theconversation.com/fast-x-why-cars-dont-really-expl...

My high-school crowd stopped just short of building a multistage FAE device. I left early for college and everybody else was short of cash, and that was the end of our neighborhood R&D program. All pre-9/11, needless to say. It's a lot less fun when the possible punishment goes from detention at lunch to waterboarding in Gitmo.

What it does do is slowly polymerize, becoming useless as an ICE fuel in time, typically in a year or two. This is why backup generators should run on propane, which has no degradation mechanism.

I like the way you think. Putting a meaningful amount of capacity in something luggable by an average human would open up a lot of possibilities. Not just for cars, but everything. Our battery powered future looks bright already, but this would be incredible.

I believe it is becoming fairly common to use batteries as a buffer at fast chargers. The demand charges for bursting megawatts of power from the grid are apparently really steep, so it makes sense to put in a big battery and steadily draw a lower amount of power and then just charge cars from the battery.

Just wait for people to be priced out of ICE cars. EV's should be and will be significantly cheaper to buy and manufacture.

I don't know about production, it is a hypothetical and I just assumed you had a bunch of plutonium-238 available, but as I understand it, rather than being an enrichment problem as with uranium-235/238, it is just not made using the same process as plutonium-239 to begin with.

You build a power plant on a geothermal vent in Iceland. The electricity it produces is plentiful and cheap. You run it full tilt charging batteries.

You ship those batteries to wherever you need cheap power, and send them back empty. This works with hydro, wind, solar, ...

Batteries do drive down energy costs because even ignoring transmission lines, they let you move energy in both space and time, pushing all energy costs towards the cost of the cheapest means of generation on its best day.

I had previously been hopeful that battery storage would allow more shared used of land, but the fire risks of batteries have been pretty severe. And since the land usage requirements are fairly low, there's no need to enhance the risk by putting batteries, say, in enclosed spaces of former natural gas generation facilities [1].

I'm hopeful that we'll see a lot more storage, say a shipping container's worth, at the end of distribution feeders, which helps suck up residential solar with minimal resources, but solving the problem of "who pays for the benefits for all" when the utility is incentivized to keep grid costs high means that nobody is knocking down doors to make that happen...

[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/moss-landing-fire-battery-s...

Until that ratio falls by at least 3x to 5x in favor of batteries being cheaper than generation, extra generation is going to be the way that grids actually get built out. Batteries and generation are both falling in cost fairly quickly, but generation still has the overall edge in learning rate. Cost decreases won't bottom out for at least a decade, because there's been no slow down yet, so I wouldn't expect this ratio to change for a minimum of 20 years, which means that pretty much a full energy system interchange will have happened by the time that this price ration changes.

So there's at least a few assumptions about the current industry and it's future development that underlie my assertion that a month of storage makes no sense, but I'm confident enough that I'd place money on the bet, and there's very very few things I'd bet on.

Edit: one thing that would break my assumption is the industrial development of storage that's super cheap for once-per-year usage. Most storage now needs to be cycled about 300x per year to make economic sense. "Long duration" storage is actually better defined as "economical storage at few battery cycles per year". There's nothing like that in the research hopper, but that doesn't mean it couldn't appear tomorrow and be deployed within a decade. Something that only gets used once or twice a year has to be dirt cheap, even if you could get 10x or 20x normal electricity prices for it.

A Lithium ion has the same charge in magnitude as an elecron. Electron is much lighter. Why and how is it that Li+ ions are able to, but electrons can't?

A same number of ions and electrons should be generating on the electrodes.

>> Generally move

When there no free electron space in atoms, instead of electrons being stuck, should still move the electrolyte as free particles just like ions.

Seems like they can't in this case. Why not?