It is worth noting that this is an ad. It is a law firm that is advertising their expertise in this field. And the product that they want people to buy is revealed in this passage:
Freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis therefore remains critical for market entrants. Whilst the primary patents have expired, a dense web of secondary patents, covering additives, coatings, and production methods, still poses infringement risks.
Of course Shoosmiths would be happy to do a FTO analysis for your potential product...for a fee.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't contain quality information. Law firms tend to make this kind of ad informative. But it does mean that there is an agenda.
It may be an ad but it has every reason to be perfectly accurate. The law firm is not selling LFP batteries.
Edit: for example, if somebody was selling their AWS course by providing detailed information on some aspect of AWS, that wouldn't be a reason to doubt the information itself. It serves as a sample.
If you make technology that spies really want the government will claim eminent domain and take your patent from you, with "fair" compensation, of course.
It's funny that never happens for things that actually matter.
BloombergNEF has over the years proven to have pretty solid forecasts. The current one about NEVs [1] has a few interesting points. Adoption of EVs is slowing down in the US due to policy changes but going to explode in countries like Vietnam because they are cheeper to buy an run. It is not BMWs and Mercs but Chinese brands.
In Europe and the US the Chinese EVs are kept outside with the help of tariffs but that is just closing the eyes to avoid facing the inevitability. Battery technology, production and raw materials is all China.
Last not least Europe is driving up KWh costs by an ideologically driven push for renewables which also doesn't help.
Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
(Plus, the ‘ideology’ in question would seem to be: it’s bad to fry the planet, and also bad to run even a small risk of radioactively contaminating one’s landmass, and IMHO neither of this positions deserves to be called an ideology).
Electricity costs in the UK (which I believe is still in Europe) are cheaper now than they've ever been if you have the right tariff and that's all due to renewables. Granted, that's primarily at night, but for EVs that's perfect.
One can get a tariff at <7p/kWh for 6 hours in the night. That's cheaper than gas (actual gas, not gasoline).
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical. Chinese BYD has developed blade batteries using this type of battery and has become the global sales leader in new energy vehicles. However, this battery faces range limitations and the issue of how to improve charging speed. Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing, but mass production may not be feasible yet. At least, it might take 3 more years for commercialization, and that's still an optimistic prediction.
> Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical
Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
> However, this battery faces range limitations
Yes they are less dense but plentiful for typical passenger car (and not so much for full sized trucks or even "mid-sized" US SUVs).
> the issue of how to improve charging speed
I think CATL demonstrated 1MW charging on these already. Definitely shipping 500kW charging (tho best measure is still average km/hr).
> Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing
Sodium will (great cold weather performance and even better charge rates), but it's less (vol) dense and prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).
The small handful of sodium batteries that are currently available retail all seem to have rather bad roundtrip efficiency compared to LFP and voltage drop starting at a high state of charge.
Also LFP prices dropped enough that shipping cost from China became a significant part of the price. This will be even more of a factor should the less energy dense sodium batteries ever reach the promised $30/kWh.
One thing I hadn't groked about Sodium Ion was the enormous Voltage range leads to a bit of an issue when it comes to current. You have a 4x voltage from top to bottom of the battery and this also means your current is 4x as well for the same power output. This becomes a bit of an issue and it is part of the efficiency equation, not just externally to the battery where wires have to be much larger than LFP or LI but internally due to internal resistance.
Sodium gravimetric density is same. Volumetric is worse. Shipping containers generally cost by volume, but given how dense batteries are I suspect this won't matter.
If it's suitable for sedans it's actually more suitable for SUVs. SUVs require less power per cubic feet of space. So there is more space available for them, even if they take more energy overall
such strange unit of measurement. cubic feet of space. especially for civilian transport when most of the time no one uses that space. i mean most of the time its one person per car without any baggage. what's important is weight of the car. and i bet suv is heavier than sedans.
I've tried to express SUV's as in American SUVs - full sized 7 seat monstrosity. Most EV SUVs right now are crossovers, i.e. Model Y. Cybertruck is closest approximation and it uses nearly 2x more power than Model Y. Even with ~most advanced batteries people still think Cybertruck's range is way too little whereas I'm pretty certain majority of Model Y's sold are LFPs.
What? How does an SUV require less power per cf than a sedan? I would think that aero alone would always be worse for an SUV, making sedans more efficient.
I think he means less power per total overall volume of the vehicle. SUVs are certainly less efficient per mile, but their power requirements don't scale linearly with volume so you have a lot more "extra" room to place batteries, even if it is still entirely within the frame. So you can get away with less space efficient batteries.
Drag scales by frontal area (and the coefficient of drag tends to actually be lower on longer objects), so as long as the SUV is longer than a sedan, it'll tend to have less aerodynamic drag proportionally (rolling resistance scales with weight, though, so you still have to pay that cost).
I think CATL is promoting a hybrid pack of LFP and Sodium that would give you the cheapness and density of LFP, but with maybe 30% Sodium that you could use for a quick partial charge, and could also be used when the car is cold-soaked. Once you drive for a while, the whole pack gets warmed up and you can use the LFP.
I think it is fairly likely that sodium catches LFP in the ~5 year timeframe since sodium has a lot more promise for grid scale storage since it has no expensive materials.
It still does have expensive materials (cheaper form of graphite), but a little bit less of it, namely lithium and there's something else I can't remember.
I wouldn't equate solid state batteries with fusion power. Solid state batteries do exist and work well, they are just very expensive. Meanwhile fusion power is still entirely within the experimental stage and there are no fusion plant prototypes that can produce power at any price.
It’s always 20 years away until it isn’t. Self driving cars are…I guess they are here already. AGI? Well, we have to move the goal post on that constantly.
Self driving cars have had many incremental improvements. I think fusion power is actually making progress, not clear about solid state batteries. Seems more companies closing than making solid progress.
Fusion is one of those things that will probably not be done in my lifetime (the hype cycle on that has been forever, remember cold fusion from U of Utah?). I'm much more optimistic about solid state batteries.
But, the real issue seems to be that fusion has a large nuclear waste problem. Ironically, probably more so than fission reactors. It can be fixed, but probably not in first gen reactors. However there are companies pushing designs that solve it already
If by here I meant planet Earth I think it is well qualified. Yes, they aren't using self driving car tech for ice trucking during winter down from Purdhoe Bay yet (another form of goal post moving), but the biggest challenges have already been solved and only capital and societal barriers remain.
I think it depends on what you mean by big challenges. City driving is maybe the easiest 80% of driving. There’s a long tail of odd challenges you run into in less controlled environments, and I’d call that the biggest challenge.
I think city driving is the worst — people popping out from nowhere, roads that shouldn’t be but are because they have always been. Suburban and highways seem easiest.
In the hills of LA you have sharp blind corners where people have installed public fisheye mirrors to help you see around, then you have crazy people in Hollywood throwing furniture in front of your car, and non-stop traffic and people passing on the wrong side of the road between blocks even when there is a median, school kids and crossing guards, emergency vehicles trying to through and people doing otherwise illegal things to help get out of the way…
Wouldn’t ice trucking be in that long tail? I mean, ya, there are lot of niche cases that companies like Waymo haven’t worked on yet, but…the money is in the cities so that’s where they start. Interstate trucking might come next, ice trucking might be one of the last use cases covered.
Anyways we’ve gone from “this won’t happen in our lifetime!” to “it doesn’t handle X niche use case yet.”
Solid state batteries seem to work, but the price of prototypes is very high. Samsung says they will soon be shipping earbuds and watches with solid state batteries, but the cost is too high even for phones. Xaomi showed an $800 phone battery.
Mercedes has one prototype car with solid state batteries. Honda has one motorcycle. EHang has one flying car. Nobody seems to be past one-off demos.
If your source on that is a Toyota press release, take it with a huge grain of (lithium) salt.
Toyota has been saying similar things for a very long time. But they continue to make extremely poor bets, except for their hybrids. There's something really odd about their management culture that prevents them from finding the common and easy path of lithium ion batteries that everybody has already taken.
I still find it borderline criminal that a few nations continue to be ruled by the hegemony of the automobile market. EVs have a place in the world. But there should be ten times fewer of them, because we should have cheap and plentiful public transit for most of our transportation needs. How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile? When will we do what's necessary to progress our society? (if we ever do)
> How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile?
The people who don't want to sit and wait have bought personal vehicles. Mass transit can be great, but when it isn't, there's no sense of agency. At least with a personal vehicle, if it's not working, I can try to fix it or get it to someone who is more likely to be able to fix it.
When transit isn't running, I just have to wait. If it can't get me to where I want to go in a reasonable time, sucks to be me. If my stop is removed from service, I guess I better move.
Speaking as a big fan and avid user of public transit, I say: not gonna happen in many places.
Public transit works in densely populated areas, like in NYC where I live. Digging and operating a tunnel costs a lot, and only pays for itself if you can run many trains with many passengers, who live close enough to their nearest station. Buses are less expensive (though still are expensive), and require a driver per 50-100 passengers, not per 2000.
As long as many people prefer to live in suburbia (which may technically be considered a part of a city, like in Houston), they are going to use cars (or technically trucks), because it's the most economical way to get around. As long as the destination of their travel is not an utterly dense area that does not require a car (like commuting from NJ to lower Manhattan), people won't leave their cars mid-way and change for a train or a bus.
It's not the car lobby. It's people wanting to live quite separately from their neighbors, in detached houses that they fully own. Or maybe cities that enforce low density for a number of reasons (mostly NIMBYs who want to keep the price of their house and land high).
But this is 2022? By now the dust must have settled. Anyone that wanted to copy and use likely planned out before they expired and got moving once it did?
Who owned these key LFP patents? It was not clearly laid out in the article which countries owned them, let alone which companies.
If they were owned by Chinese companies, then is there some faint hope that Western companies can finally start making EVs that are no longer embarrassingly inferior to their Chinese counterparts?
> EU regulations requiring lithium-ion batteries to contain at least 6% recycled lithium by 2031, rising to 12% by 2036.
Seriously?
The EU should aim for massive growth in battery deployment in transportation and grid storage. If they hope for, say, 10x growth in deployed battery capacity within a time frame comparable to the lifespan of a battery, then even a 100% recycling rate would not produce enough lithium.
I suppose people could recycle batteries just to produce new batteries and acquire recycling credits, but this is absurd.
It will probably amount to recycling credit schemes I am sure. But that would definitely boost lithium recycling efforts.
From memory over 1million disposable vapes are thrown away each day, from 500 of the bigger cell vapes a Youtuber was able build a home battery to power his house. I don't think 100% recycled makes sense but there sure is a lot of lithium getting thrown into the bin. Incentives to recapture that are good.
this would be a tragedy if it leads to recycling batteries that could be repurposed, say 100kwh car batteries with decreased range that could have become 60kwh residential batteries.
I say as an electrician that car batteries have limited use. Chinese residential batteries can be installed by me alone. Even 40-60 kWh modular ones. Car battery needs forklift and every model has different interface. Economically sourcing used cells to build batteries also makes no sense. So either recycling or repair to continue using it as car battery.
What? Patents have been a non-issue for LFP batteries, and the original LFP patents are almost useless today. All the new advances that made LFPs competitive are still well-protected by patents, for at least another decade.
Sorry we handicapped ourselves and are now complaining about a competitor? Seems silly. The west made this tech unusable. I was building ebikes in 2006/7 and A123 was entirely unavailable unless you went and salvaged power tool packs.
They never became available at a competitive price, and then China bought the rights....
Now I can buy them in bulk as a consumer for 1/15th the price.
Our system is not meant for innovation by small players or consumers. We want tech easily locked away behind a contract.
The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year. This is approximately nothing, given that the overall battery market is estimated at about $200B.
The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.
I think we'll start seeing the first large lawsuits once the losers start realizing that they lost the innovation race.
> The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year.
This is often because someone holds an important patent but either isn't licensing it to others because they're actually manufacturing it (implying they're holding back everyone else in the market), or they're asking too much and then almost everyone uses the existing technology instead of licensing the patent, again holding things back. As soon as the patent expires everyone starts using it.
> The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.
This is often even worse, because then you have a hundred companies with patents and as soon as one of them goes out of business the patents go to a troll who starts shaking everyone down because MAD doesn't apply to trolls who don't make anything. And then companies wary of being subjected to that will be avoiding doing anything under patent until the patents expire.
Companies in industries like this should probably start using some kind of patent GPL where you have to permanently license all your patents to everyone else who does the same, the purpose of which is to thwart trolls because everyone has to put their patents in while they're still in business or they'll be sued, and then the patents are already in by the time a failing company gets liquidated.
Except that they charge fees, which retains the perverse incentive to accumulate low-quality patents and for smaller companies to avoid the pool's patents instead of joining it. And then when one that didn't join goes out of business everybody's got troll problems again.
Doesn't that indicate that patents are being used to suppress competitors rather than as a direct revenue source? I don't see how that indicates patents aren't an issue.
It is worth noting that this is an ad. It is a law firm that is advertising their expertise in this field. And the product that they want people to buy is revealed in this passage:
Freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis therefore remains critical for market entrants. Whilst the primary patents have expired, a dense web of secondary patents, covering additives, coatings, and production methods, still poses infringement risks.
Of course Shoosmiths would be happy to do a FTO analysis for your potential product...for a fee.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't contain quality information. Law firms tend to make this kind of ad informative. But it does mean that there is an agenda.
It may be an ad but it has every reason to be perfectly accurate. The law firm is not selling LFP batteries.
Edit: for example, if somebody was selling their AWS course by providing detailed information on some aspect of AWS, that wouldn't be a reason to doubt the information itself. It serves as a sample.
I mean one would take the ad with a grain of salt
If it gets people to pull the trigger on engaging with the firm - it’s likely to embellish how massive the changes are of these patent lapses
If you make technology that spies really want the government will claim eminent domain and take your patent from you, with "fair" compensation, of course.
It's funny that never happens for things that actually matter.
BloombergNEF has over the years proven to have pretty solid forecasts. The current one about NEVs [1] has a few interesting points. Adoption of EVs is slowing down in the US due to policy changes but going to explode in countries like Vietnam because they are cheeper to buy an run. It is not BMWs and Mercs but Chinese brands.
In Europe and the US the Chinese EVs are kept outside with the help of tariffs but that is just closing the eyes to avoid facing the inevitability. Battery technology, production and raw materials is all China.
Last not least Europe is driving up KWh costs by an ideologically driven push for renewables which also doesn't help.
[1] https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/electric-veh...
> an ideologically driven push for renewables
Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
(Plus, the ‘ideology’ in question would seem to be: it’s bad to fry the planet, and also bad to run even a small risk of radioactively contaminating one’s landmass, and IMHO neither of this positions deserves to be called an ideology).
Electricity costs in the UK (which I believe is still in Europe) are cheaper now than they've ever been if you have the right tariff and that's all due to renewables. Granted, that's primarily at night, but for EVs that's perfect.
One can get a tariff at <7p/kWh for 6 hours in the night. That's cheaper than gas (actual gas, not gasoline).
Would we price out cheap Vietnamese EVs (say) in the same way?
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical. Chinese BYD has developed blade batteries using this type of battery and has become the global sales leader in new energy vehicles. However, this battery faces range limitations and the issue of how to improve charging speed. Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing, but mass production may not be feasible yet. At least, it might take 3 more years for commercialization, and that's still an optimistic prediction.
> Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical
Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
> However, this battery faces range limitations
Yes they are less dense but plentiful for typical passenger car (and not so much for full sized trucks or even "mid-sized" US SUVs).
> the issue of how to improve charging speed
I think CATL demonstrated 1MW charging on these already. Definitely shipping 500kW charging (tho best measure is still average km/hr).
> Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing
Sodium will (great cold weather performance and even better charge rates), but it's less (vol) dense and prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).
> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
LFP charging in cold has pretty much been solved by adding a heater to battery pack.
> (Sodium-ion) prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).
Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.
> LFP charging in cold has pretty much been solved by adding a heater to battery pack.
That's a hack, not a solution.
> Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.
Wanna bet?
> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
I do all of my charging way above 0K. :-P
The small handful of sodium batteries that are currently available retail all seem to have rather bad roundtrip efficiency compared to LFP and voltage drop starting at a high state of charge.
Also LFP prices dropped enough that shipping cost from China became a significant part of the price. This will be even more of a factor should the less energy dense sodium batteries ever reach the promised $30/kWh.
One thing I hadn't groked about Sodium Ion was the enormous Voltage range leads to a bit of an issue when it comes to current. You have a 4x voltage from top to bottom of the battery and this also means your current is 4x as well for the same power output. This becomes a bit of an issue and it is part of the efficiency equation, not just externally to the battery where wires have to be much larger than LFP or LI but internally due to internal resistance.
Sodium gravimetric density is same. Volumetric is worse. Shipping containers generally cost by volume, but given how dense batteries are I suspect this won't matter.
If it's suitable for sedans it's actually more suitable for SUVs. SUVs require less power per cubic feet of space. So there is more space available for them, even if they take more energy overall
such strange unit of measurement. cubic feet of space. especially for civilian transport when most of the time no one uses that space. i mean most of the time its one person per car without any baggage. what's important is weight of the car. and i bet suv is heavier than sedans.
I've tried to express SUV's as in American SUVs - full sized 7 seat monstrosity. Most EV SUVs right now are crossovers, i.e. Model Y. Cybertruck is closest approximation and it uses nearly 2x more power than Model Y. Even with ~most advanced batteries people still think Cybertruck's range is way too little whereas I'm pretty certain majority of Model Y's sold are LFPs.
There are variants of the Model Y with LFP batteries.
What? How does an SUV require less power per cf than a sedan? I would think that aero alone would always be worse for an SUV, making sedans more efficient.
I think he means less power per total overall volume of the vehicle. SUVs are certainly less efficient per mile, but their power requirements don't scale linearly with volume so you have a lot more "extra" room to place batteries, even if it is still entirely within the frame. So you can get away with less space efficient batteries.
Drag scales by frontal area (and the coefficient of drag tends to actually be lower on longer objects), so as long as the SUV is longer than a sedan, it'll tend to have less aerodynamic drag proportionally (rolling resistance scales with weight, though, so you still have to pay that cost).
I think CATL is promoting a hybrid pack of LFP and Sodium that would give you the cheapness and density of LFP, but with maybe 30% Sodium that you could use for a quick partial charge, and could also be used when the car is cold-soaked. Once you drive for a while, the whole pack gets warmed up and you can use the LFP.
Using lfp at low temp is not an issue. Charging is the problem.
> Charging is the problem.
Which also occurs while driving, whenever you're decelerating.
> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
Doesn’t the thermal management system of the battery packs handle this?
Yes, the largest issue is that they heating isn't enabled unless it's charging or 'knows' it will be soon.
Ps: the heating is increasingly heat pump based instead of resistive.
It does, but it costs is complex, requires power and time.
It's noticeable even in climates like NZ.
There are coldgating stories about LFP. Some even reduce output and very low SOC and temperature, so you drive 60km/h in highway.
Sodium is vastly superior here and CATL is not going to be giving it away for free.
I think it is fairly likely that sodium catches LFP in the ~5 year timeframe since sodium has a lot more promise for grid scale storage since it has no expensive materials.
It still does have expensive materials (cheaper form of graphite), but a little bit less of it, namely lithium and there's something else I can't remember.
When are the aluminum batteries coming?
Solid state batteries and fusion power, always 3 years away.
I wouldn't equate solid state batteries with fusion power. Solid state batteries do exist and work well, they are just very expensive. Meanwhile fusion power is still entirely within the experimental stage and there are no fusion plant prototypes that can produce power at any price.
It’s always 20 years away until it isn’t. Self driving cars are…I guess they are here already. AGI? Well, we have to move the goal post on that constantly.
Self driving cars have had many incremental improvements. I think fusion power is actually making progress, not clear about solid state batteries. Seems more companies closing than making solid progress.
Fusion is one of those things that will probably not be done in my lifetime (the hype cycle on that has been forever, remember cold fusion from U of Utah?). I'm much more optimistic about solid state batteries.
The obvious fraud from the 90s?
But, the real issue seems to be that fusion has a large nuclear waste problem. Ironically, probably more so than fission reactors. It can be fixed, but probably not in first gen reactors. However there are companies pushing designs that solve it already
>Self driving cars are…I guess they are here already.
They may be where you are, but they aren't generally here.
If by here I meant planet Earth I think it is well qualified. Yes, they aren't using self driving car tech for ice trucking during winter down from Purdhoe Bay yet (another form of goal post moving), but the biggest challenges have already been solved and only capital and societal barriers remain.
I think it depends on what you mean by big challenges. City driving is maybe the easiest 80% of driving. There’s a long tail of odd challenges you run into in less controlled environments, and I’d call that the biggest challenge.
I think city driving is the worst — people popping out from nowhere, roads that shouldn’t be but are because they have always been. Suburban and highways seem easiest.
In the hills of LA you have sharp blind corners where people have installed public fisheye mirrors to help you see around, then you have crazy people in Hollywood throwing furniture in front of your car, and non-stop traffic and people passing on the wrong side of the road between blocks even when there is a median, school kids and crossing guards, emergency vehicles trying to through and people doing otherwise illegal things to help get out of the way…
Wouldn’t ice trucking be in that long tail? I mean, ya, there are lot of niche cases that companies like Waymo haven’t worked on yet, but…the money is in the cities so that’s where they start. Interstate trucking might come next, ice trucking might be one of the last use cases covered.
Anyways we’ve gone from “this won’t happen in our lifetime!” to “it doesn’t handle X niche use case yet.”
There are self driving trucking companies.
Solid state batteries and fusion might in the end suffer from a similar economical problem. That they turn out to simply be too expensive.
Solid state batteries seem to work, but the price of prototypes is very high. Samsung says they will soon be shipping earbuds and watches with solid state batteries, but the cost is too high even for phones. Xaomi showed an $800 phone battery. Mercedes has one prototype car with solid state batteries. Honda has one motorcycle. EHang has one flying car. Nobody seems to be past one-off demos.
Does look as if ssb are close.. Esp Japanese ones.
If your source on that is a Toyota press release, take it with a huge grain of (lithium) salt.
Toyota has been saying similar things for a very long time. But they continue to make extremely poor bets, except for their hybrids. There's something really odd about their management culture that prevents them from finding the common and easy path of lithium ion batteries that everybody has already taken.
Toyota does have a conventional BEV, so they can do it if they want. They just don’t seem to be enthusiastic about it.
I still find it borderline criminal that a few nations continue to be ruled by the hegemony of the automobile market. EVs have a place in the world. But there should be ten times fewer of them, because we should have cheap and plentiful public transit for most of our transportation needs. How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile? When will we do what's necessary to progress our society? (if we ever do)
> How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile?
The people who don't want to sit and wait have bought personal vehicles. Mass transit can be great, but when it isn't, there's no sense of agency. At least with a personal vehicle, if it's not working, I can try to fix it or get it to someone who is more likely to be able to fix it.
When transit isn't running, I just have to wait. If it can't get me to where I want to go in a reasonable time, sucks to be me. If my stop is removed from service, I guess I better move.
Speaking as a big fan and avid user of public transit, I say: not gonna happen in many places.
Public transit works in densely populated areas, like in NYC where I live. Digging and operating a tunnel costs a lot, and only pays for itself if you can run many trains with many passengers, who live close enough to their nearest station. Buses are less expensive (though still are expensive), and require a driver per 50-100 passengers, not per 2000.
As long as many people prefer to live in suburbia (which may technically be considered a part of a city, like in Houston), they are going to use cars (or technically trucks), because it's the most economical way to get around. As long as the destination of their travel is not an utterly dense area that does not require a car (like commuting from NJ to lower Manhattan), people won't leave their cars mid-way and change for a train or a bus.
It's not the car lobby. It's people wanting to live quite separately from their neighbors, in detached houses that they fully own. Or maybe cities that enforce low density for a number of reasons (mostly NIMBYs who want to keep the price of their house and land high).
A lot of people prefer living in less dense environments and personal vehicles will always be more efficient there than public transport
Likely once sufficient numbers of boomers die off - and their property inheriting children don’t take up their parent’s views
But this is 2022? By now the dust must have settled. Anyone that wanted to copy and use likely planned out before they expired and got moving once it did?
Exactly, this is a 3 year old post. That's why you started seeing LFP battery banks showing up on Amazon a few years ago.
Who owned these key LFP patents? It was not clearly laid out in the article which countries owned them, let alone which companies.
If they were owned by Chinese companies, then is there some faint hope that Western companies can finally start making EVs that are no longer embarrassingly inferior to their Chinese counterparts?
> EU regulations requiring lithium-ion batteries to contain at least 6% recycled lithium by 2031, rising to 12% by 2036.
Seriously?
The EU should aim for massive growth in battery deployment in transportation and grid storage. If they hope for, say, 10x growth in deployed battery capacity within a time frame comparable to the lifespan of a battery, then even a 100% recycling rate would not produce enough lithium.
I suppose people could recycle batteries just to produce new batteries and acquire recycling credits, but this is absurd.
It will probably amount to recycling credit schemes I am sure. But that would definitely boost lithium recycling efforts.
From memory over 1million disposable vapes are thrown away each day, from 500 of the bigger cell vapes a Youtuber was able build a home battery to power his house. I don't think 100% recycled makes sense but there sure is a lot of lithium getting thrown into the bin. Incentives to recapture that are good.
500? thats just 5x10x10, even the bigger cell vapes would result in a tiny battery to power a house...
It was under 3kWh.
It wasn't huge no, but we are talking about cells we throw away in the millions. Scale up the battery as needed, the cells are basically free.
> recycled lithium
this would be a tragedy if it leads to recycling batteries that could be repurposed, say 100kwh car batteries with decreased range that could have become 60kwh residential batteries.
I say as an electrician that car batteries have limited use. Chinese residential batteries can be installed by me alone. Even 40-60 kWh modular ones. Car battery needs forklift and every model has different interface. Economically sourcing used cells to build batteries also makes no sense. So either recycling or repair to continue using it as car battery.
This could open the door to cheaper EV batteries and more players entering the market. Should make things move faster.
What? Patents have been a non-issue for LFP batteries, and the original LFP patents are almost useless today. All the new advances that made LFPs competitive are still well-protected by patents, for at least another decade.
What makes you say they've been a non-issue?
As far as I'm aware they've been an issue (outside of China) for the last 20 years.
Sorry we handicapped ourselves and are now complaining about a competitor? Seems silly. The west made this tech unusable. I was building ebikes in 2006/7 and A123 was entirely unavailable unless you went and salvaged power tool packs.
They never became available at a competitive price, and then China bought the rights....
Now I can buy them in bulk as a consumer for 1/15th the price.
Our system is not meant for innovation by small players or consumers. We want tech easily locked away behind a contract.
The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year. This is approximately nothing, given that the overall battery market is estimated at about $200B.
The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.
I think we'll start seeing the first large lawsuits once the losers start realizing that they lost the innovation race.
> The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year.
This is often because someone holds an important patent but either isn't licensing it to others because they're actually manufacturing it (implying they're holding back everyone else in the market), or they're asking too much and then almost everyone uses the existing technology instead of licensing the patent, again holding things back. As soon as the patent expires everyone starts using it.
> The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.
This is often even worse, because then you have a hundred companies with patents and as soon as one of them goes out of business the patents go to a troll who starts shaking everyone down because MAD doesn't apply to trolls who don't make anything. And then companies wary of being subjected to that will be avoiding doing anything under patent until the patents expire.
Companies in industries like this should probably start using some kind of patent GPL where you have to permanently license all your patents to everyone else who does the same, the purpose of which is to thwart trolls because everyone has to put their patents in while they're still in business or they'll be sued, and then the patents are already in by the time a failing company gets liquidated.
In your last paragraph you are basically talking about a licensing authority like MPEGLA is.
Except that they charge fees, which retains the perverse incentive to accumulate low-quality patents and for smaller companies to avoid the pool's patents instead of joining it. And then when one that didn't join goes out of business everybody's got troll problems again.
Doesn't that indicate that patents are being used to suppress competitors rather than as a direct revenue source? I don't see how that indicates patents aren't an issue.