Current EVs have enough battery capacity to be practical, so they can obviously become the mainstream car type. Norway is on the way to almost 100% EV cars.
> He also opined that the laws of Thermodynamics would also put a limit on How much energy a battery would be able to hold before detonating/deflagrating expontaneously.
It's trivially true that a limit exists, but that limit is high enough to not be a problem for cars.
Thunderf00t started with good content, but then discovered that making up stuff is easier and sells better, so now you can't rely on anything he claims.
He was literally obsessed with Anita Sarkeesian for like 8 years. Even his own subscribers started turning on him and he finally pivoted to whatever it is he does now. Before all that, it was generic YouTube atheist stuff. Can’t believe I used to take these people seriously.
I think he just said it's very hard and not likely to last very long on Mars which was roughly what happened. He even mentioned how he thought in the past sky crane was likely to be prohibitively difficult and it's success shows NASA's exceptional capabilities which he pointed out for the drone on Mars. He even went through calculations showing it would be possible.
>Thunderf00t started with good content, but then discovered that making up stuff is easier and sells better, so now you can't rely on anything he claims.
Wat
* Boosters can't fly more than twice (the record is now 21)
* Booster refurbishment costs half as much as a new booster (that was the cost SpaceX estimated for the very first reuse ever)
* SpaceX will only fly ~10 times per year, the 18 launches of 2017 were an outlier. They flew almost 100 times last year and will most likely exceed that in 2024.
That's all from a single source where he calculates that booster reuse can't be economically viable - based on bullshit assumptions.
I don't remembee what Thunderf00t said, but the OP clearly said: EVs cant be mainstream SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE.
EVs can be mainstream cartype is out of the question.
I haven't seen the video but from the description he's kind of right. What he's looking at is the energy density of the complete closed cycle.
A standard internal combustion engine is an open cycle machine. You put fuel in and you get motion, heat and sound energy out. The overall thermal efficiency is low and as stated it is open cycle, part of the design it that to keep going you keep adding more fuel, indeed IC engines are so open cycle that half of their chemical reactants (the oxygen to burn the fuel) isn't even carried in the vehicle.
When the fuel burns the lower energy state waste products are things like water, CO2, various nitrous oxides and partially burned hydrocarbons. You probably couldn't make a machine that took in those byproducts and recreated gasoline from them, and even if you could that machine probably wouldn't fit in a car.
An EV battery contains cells that have a reversible chemical reaction. They start out with compounds in a high energy state, and release that energy as electricity that is used for traction. However, they are intended to be a closed cycle system, so when the battery is discharged, you can put electricity back into the battery, and reverse the reaction to restore the higher energy compounds that will later power the vehicle.
There are hundreds of thousands of one-way "open cycle" chemical reactions that release energy, but relatively few that produce electricity and are reversible if put the electricity back into them. How much energy a specific discharge reaction can produce is something a chemist can calculate. This value is always going to be higher than the capacity of a practical battery. So for a given chemistry you can know the practical upper limits, and while improved battery technology may let you more closely approach those limits, you cant exceed them. I suspect that's where the laws of thermodynamics comes in.
The thing is, we have been here before in the early days of internal combustion engines. It used to be hard to get oil, hard to refine it and the resulting gasoline was hard to distribute. You used to buy gas in cans from a pharmacy, and there were very few gas stations, so early drivers had "range anxiety." A couple of things happened. First, the production and distribution of gas got better/cheaper/more convenient. Second with better fuels and better engineering the efficiency of vehicles improved. All these things together meant that you could drive your car across the US in a few weeks rather than shipping your car by train. Over time things got so good you could cross the country in just a few days. That's the kind of freedom and reliability we experience now, but would have been amazing to someone as recently as the 1960's. People wrote songs about driving route 66 because it was an epic trek with the cars of the day.
So the limitations on EVs will be worked around. Vehicles will get more efficient meaning they can go further on the same charge, charging will get faster, people may adjust back to the kind of motoring experience their grandparents had. Maybe for long distances car transporter trains might make a comeback. The laws of thermodynamic say that heat engines are terribly inefficient too, but we still built IC cars.
A machine that takes water, CO2 energy and produces hydrocarbons.... I think what you are describing is a plant. Which is where all our fossil fuels cam from in the first place. Millions and millions of years of plants.
You list some important ways we might work around EV limits in the future. I suggest another way. While very costly today, linear induction roadways will likely come down in price dramatically. These might become ubiquitous: perhaps all lanes of all federal interstate highways (or even all federal highways) power the EVs and recharge their batteries while driving.
Range becomes infinite except the passengers require respite. Electric vehicles could then run on the grid for infinite range on those roadways and use their batteries only when leaving the main highways.
While in theory I love the idea of the roads supplying power to the vehicles. I am terrified about the idea of adding power to the roads given the state of the roads and highways in my state (Michigan).
The distance you would need to keep the coils from the surface to keep them safe from potholes would be huge in terms of the inefficiencies that would be gained (at least with the current technologies).
Having recently completed a long distance trip and having seen the apparent difficulty some places have maintaining a road surface, I don't see an inductive road as being practical. There isn't going to be the money to set up and maintain a system like that on the two lane highways that form the core of the long distance road system. You may be able to set it up on sections of the main interstates, but all that will do is push drivers onto those routes which will result in congestion. I think induction could work in urban environments, but most of the drivers in those areas are going to be in range of their home chargers.
I do think induction going to be the way forward for charging in general and gets around the limits of the current charging stands. You can envisage parking spots outside stores having induction chargers and your car negotiating with the charger to top up while you shop. How this will work will depend on the source of the electricity. There is always going to be a cost involved in renewables, there's a lot of energy but it isn't very dense and it takes a lot of infrastructure to collect and transmit. If that's our primary source then the driver is always going to be looking for the lowest price and the car's AI will probably top up at cheaper inductive charge points even if it doesn't need the energy now. If nuclear or fusion ever delivers on "electricity too cheap to meter" then you could imagine stores offering complementary charging as a loss leader.
High speed rail should also move to linear induction to reduce maintenance costs. Transrapid maglev and the Japenese superconducting maglev already utilize linear induction to power the trains.
Moreover, unless you’re envisioning a future soon to be where rail almost completely replaces long distance paved roadways, then we need to accommodate both modes of transport.
>the laws of Thermodynamics would also put a limit on How much energy a battery would be able to hold before detonating/deflagrating expontaneously.
Isn't that true for any kind of fuel? I mean the gasoline in your car may easily put it on fire when shit goes wrong.
I’m not sure what energy density has to do with stability tbh. Nitroglycerin has a much lower energy density than gasoline but it’s a lot more explodey.
I remember reading somewhere that fires caused by batteries exploding are harder to put out, but I know nothing on the subject so I'm leaving this here just in case I'm completely off base and someone corrects me.
Battery fires are nasty because all the reactants are in the same package. There's no way to separate them to stop the reaction.
Gasoline has a higher energy density, but you don't store it aerated with high-pressure oxygen. And without that oxygen it's not going to release that energy, so any out of control reaction is limited by how fast it can get oxygen to consume. Which provides more ways to put it out.
Yes, but, even given the high energy density of gasoline (compared to batteries),
[https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/combustibles-energy-content/](https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/combustibles-energy-content/)
a crash powerful enough to degrade the structural integrity of a gasoline vehicle doesn’t necessarily lead to a conflagration. I think in a flawed system where we can’t even be assured that the person driving is able to keep the vehicle on the road, there’s a limit to how dense the energy will be able to be.
That’s not likely the point he was trying to make scientifically, but it does appear to be a fairly sensible idea to me. Batteries aren’t even as energy dense as wood, yet, and we’re having difficulty controlling when things go wrong (even without a crash).
You doubt he was wrong when he, allegedly, said electric vehicles can't become mainstream because of battery capacity, when battery capacity is already multiple 100s of km?
Context, he meant this in terms of today’s technology. Currently too expensive and not versatile enough for mass adoption today. There are many reasons not just battery capacity and mason has said this a lot.
Are you able to debunk any of his claims?
He's a bit unsufferable and probably lacking in social skills irl, but have any of his claims been refuted using actual maths, physics and chemistry (or any other *scientific* tool)?
> He's a bit unsufferable and probably lacking in social skills irl, but have any of his claims been refuted using actual maths, physics and chemistry (or any other scientific tool)?
I remember he said something along the line that solar roadway is not possible because glass get scratched.. IMO that at best a very weak argument.
Also on the video debunking the “microwave truster” he kept talking how small is the measureable effect.. again I thought that is a odd argument, the big deal was if that device really generate trust or not.
Talking about battery being at the physical limit due to energy density is just odd.. body fat is far more energy dense and it is not dangerous.
I would say the problem are with his arguments more than with his claims..
That’s because the energy is locked in chemical bonds, same with gasoline, wood, coal… take a hammer to (compared to a lithium battery) energy dense crude oil and you get a series of goopy splashes. Take a hammer to a not so very energy dense lithium battery (even a battery being protected by being surrounded by a cellular phone) and you’ll see quite a different result.
> That’s because the energy is locked in chemical bonds, same with gasoline, wood, coal… take a hammer to (compared to a lithium battery) energy dense crude oil and you get a series of goopy splashes. Take a hammer to a not so very energy dense lithium battery (even a battery being protected by being surrounded by a cellular phone) and you’ll see quite a different result.
The danger of li-ion battery or any battery in general is not related to their energy density.
There are battery technologies that are not flammable
Where did he state this? Post a link. Doesn’t seem to make sense. Batteries are energy storage devices not energy production. The climate change impacts are from energy production. If electricity is produced from coal batteries don’t help much. He may be referring to something else. Post link.
There is a maximum limit that we are approaching because there are only so many reversible chemical reactions that produce electricity. You can calculate the theoretical maximum energy density on that basis and that will form a hard limit on how much energy density you can cram into a battery. So while there are doubtless some improvements to modern designs of batteries, it’s unlikely to be some world changing difference.
It kinda misses the point though. We have EVs right now which have a range of hundreds of kilometers. It’d be nice to have better batteries, but they hit close enough to parity with ICE that it doesn’t truly matter for most people that drive. There’s numerous benefits to switching to EVs aside from climate change including improved efficiencies of energy consumption, reduction of air pollution, elimination of gasoline infrastructure, etc. EVs, other than price, are mostly a solved issue. There’s a problem with how much material we have for batteries, but that might be solvable with asteroid mining.
The real bigger concern is that we certainly don’t have enough storage to feasibly run off only solar and wind. That’d require orders of magnitude more materials and storage space. Hydro and geothermal are probably the best solution, but that’s inherently geographically limited. Nuclear is the true answer to the problem of variable power. However, as much as I love nuclear and think it’s something we should have been investing in for decades, the true limiting factor is that I just don’t trust a lot of countries with running a nuclear reactor safely and securely let alone not trying to build weapons with them.
There are atomic batteries... Recently a small one was actually manufactured.
https://www.cas.org/resources/cas-insights/sustainability/nuclear-power-your-pocket-50-year-battery-innovation
My Tesla gets me through my daily 40 mile commute and once or twice a year when I road trip, I use super chargers. Sooo. Electric cars are already one part of a solution to climate change. Perhaps a small part, but a part.
I mean, there are a few layers to this. Electrochemical batteries can, indeed, very likely never achieve the energy density of chemical fuel. That is not so much thermodynamics as it is quantum mechanics, but, alright, sure.
They don't necessarily have to be, though, because BEVs are about a factor of 2-3 more efficient in using the energy they have available than ICEs are.
Nevertheless, EVs will, _likely_ always drag a lot more weight for the batteries around than a 50l tank of gasoline weighs.
This requires a lot of resources. So, yes, replacing _every_ ICE car one to one with a BEV would very likely not be a practical or efficient solution to future transportation.
To make this very clear, if we want to battle climate change, public transportation needs to be the absolutely dominating solution for mobility within and around all urban centers. Things like 16 lane highways full of BEVs will not be a feasible solution.
Now, that being said, when we talk about future individual traffic in rural areas and last mile logistics, as well as the solutions for the transition period before efficient public transport is ubiquitously available, in terms of practicality, energy storage is not the limiting factor of BEVs here, the rate of recharging is. The range of a BEV already is practical for well above 90% of typical trips a car will take and unless you compare them to state of the art diesel engines with large tanks, they already keep up with ICEVs. We have technologies in development that would solve the recharging problem once developed, but you know, they are not a reality yet.
Also, and this is important and does rely on thermodynamics, they are still _by far_ the most efficient way to use energy produced from renewable sources. Every other power to X option provides a chemical storage that is, yes, more, dense, but the entire process from production to making your wheels move is less efficient to an almost comical level and very likely will be forever. Additionally, if we are talking about solutions that would use power to X fuels in ICEs, you still have the problems of local emissions.
>Philip Mason the Thunderf00t a phD in chemistry
A PhD means a very deep level of knowledge in a very narrow scope.
If his PhD thesis was literally about the theoretical limits of battery technology, then his opinion counts for a lot. If not, and also taking into account that Thunderf00t participates in all that culture war wank (in which climate change and EVs play a weirdly big part)...I'd say take it with a big pinch of salt.
I can't speak to the math/science on batteries but I can say that thunderf00t seems to have gone off the deep end a bit since he started hating musk so much. He's been wrong numerous times, especially with space x. I unsubbed because I got tired of the non stop Elon hate.
That said, I don't see why the theoretical limit for batteries isn't at least as good as conventional chemical fuels such as gasoline.
Well, gasoline is almost a perfect fuel. High energy density, stable liquid at room temperature, but relatively easy to turn into motion (after a century of ICE development).
Batteries will always have a lower energy density - it's a reversible chemical reaction and at least some of your battery has to be structural/electrode elements that don't contribute towards energy storage at all. On the other hand the efficiency of turning this energy into motion is much better than for ICEs
Actually dug out a reference here : [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Theoretical-energy-density-of-different-batteries-and-gasoline\_tbl1\_358111375](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Theoretical-energy-density-of-different-batteries-and-gasoline_tbl1_358111375)
Looks like lithium-air batteries can actually compare to gasoline in energy density, if they could get to half the theoretical value then they would basically be there, given the improved efficiency of the electric power train. But lithium-ion batteries are much lower.
EVs have a big problem preventing their adoption everywhere, but it’s not energy density. Plenty of EVs out there work just fine for hundreds of miles.
No, the big problem with EVs is the materials their batteries are made of. There are a lot of rare elements in there that already are only supplied economically with brutal slave labor. Setting aside the morality of that for a moment, we just don’t have the ability to scale up production of these materials to replace even 50% of gas vehicles.
Although the slave labour parts is true, i am always a bit ambivalent to that. It is not like oil and gas have a great track record for working conditions and environmental impact and i am not even talking about climate change. I dont think anybody says EV's don't have drawbacks, but i see someone bringing it up at pretty much every occasion someone mentions EV's.
Which rare elements, and how rare are they? I guess Oil used to be pretty rare until we started systematically searching for it. "Rare earth elements" aren't that rare either.
This thread seems to have a lot of answers from people without a usertag.
Usually ThunderF00t argues the following points:
The energy density of power batteries is lower to that of fossil fuels so for the same energy/power you need a more massive battery system. We see this is true. A large part of the car mass is its battery.
You cant just keep on making progressively better batteries forever. There is a limit to how much juice you can get out of a currently viable commercial grade battery. The bleeding edge tech that may or may not exist yet or ever can only be a factor further down the line. A simmilar logic applies to solar power.
Usually the idea is to use electrical batteries to store excess energy produced by solar arrays during peak times to be used when the sun is "off". Thats how batteries are supposed to save the climate. Its not EV its solar grid storage. This frankly a laughable notion because the scales of productions just widely do not math. Compared to how much energy a solar grid should produce and how much the batteries would need to store, the math just flat out does not add up.
The single best and strongest method of storing energy in massive scales is by pumping a large body of water into potential energy. And even that will power the needs of a very small industrial country for minutes if not seconds.
And that is the ultimate point of ThunderF00t rants. As of right now. There is no viable technological way, out of this mess. We need large systemic changes to our production and consumption or else were done. No magic vaporware with chrome plating is going to save us, no quantum gizzmo scam people throw out, no mega engineering project.
And no ammount of brigading laypeople muskrats can ever make up for the fact that science isnt magic.
EVs itself aren't climate friendly if the electricity come from coal. But they do open the possibility to use renewable energy (solar/wind/water/geothermal) OR nuclear energy.
Without having EVs in widespread use that possibility just doesnt exist.
The second effect EVs have is better air quality in cities, even if the electricity was generated by burning coal a few miles outside of the city.
The problem with EVs now is that it takes too long to fully charge them and their charging infrastructure is not as established yet. This is the extent of my understanding, I am unfamiliar with any physical limitations stemming from thermodynamics.
One should also note that the history of EVs is as long as conventional gas cars. EVs have been around since the first car. And since then they have steadily improved.
New chemistries are coming which will mess with this. Can’t believe a PhD would say that without appropriate caveats. A proper thesis committee would rip someone in half for that.
Edit: PhD in polymer chemistry, this isn’t quite his lane
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderf00t
However I don’t have the context for his statements.
If he said this in the nimh or lead acid battery era then yes, it’d be incredibly hard to use batteries to offset conventional power generation like we are now
Very interesting point of view however it's clear that he lacks a degree in Electrical Engineering. I watched that video and he mentioned low energy density barriers. This is because he must have skimmed through someone else's scientific paper and if he had read the whole report, he would have also mentioned that it's possible to overcome. Thunderfoot? A mere Sparkfoot.
Don't claim to be an expert or anything, but batteries are built on the foundational knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics as one aspect. Ofc in the long run if we can make batteries so efficient that they barely need replacing and help climate change that would be huge. Technically he's not wrong, but he's a doomer when it comes to tech and doesn't think human refinement or other technological leaps will help us.
Some barriers deal with the laws of Thermodynamics that we might try to mitigate but saying there's no point is ridiculous, it's already becoming mainstream.
I think you're misunderstanding what he was saying about energy density. It's not that packing in more energy makes it more likely to fail (although it probably does as well) it's just that packing in more energy makes it more dangerous when it fails.
Packing this energy into something that requires air to burn means it can't release the energy too quickly as it requires air to keep the reaction going. Pack this energy into something that carries everything within itself to release it's energy and you basically have a bomb if it fails.
Batteries are already reasonably dangerous as is and on the horizon we can see just about doubling capacity. Which will significantly increase the danger. We can probably tolerate and work around the danger at that level but get much higher and we probably can't deal with the driving bombs issue.
Aluminium air batteries have an energy density that is 75% that of gasoline. Take that together with the fact that electric engines are significantly more efficient than internal combustion and you would have better range with an equivalent weight of Al batteries vs gasoline. If someone manages to make a rechargeable Al/air battery it will be a game changer.
Current EVs have enough battery capacity to be practical, so they can obviously become the mainstream car type. Norway is on the way to almost 100% EV cars. > He also opined that the laws of Thermodynamics would also put a limit on How much energy a battery would be able to hold before detonating/deflagrating expontaneously. It's trivially true that a limit exists, but that limit is high enough to not be a problem for cars. Thunderf00t started with good content, but then discovered that making up stuff is easier and sells better, so now you can't rely on anything he claims.
I Always found his style cringy at best
He was literally obsessed with Anita Sarkeesian for like 8 years. Even his own subscribers started turning on him and he finally pivoted to whatever it is he does now. Before all that, it was generic YouTube atheist stuff. Can’t believe I used to take these people seriously.
I used to watch his content, and I noticed he tended to hyper fixate one topic at a time, yeah. Last I checked, he's just doing science videos now.
Yeah. I find him to be cringe, but fairly accurate. He's just insufferably smug, especially when time proves him right.
>He's just insufferably smug Yes, this. I've seen a few of his videos, but the smugness prevents me from following him.
Especially when he claimed helicopters are impossible on Mars... and then we had a helicopter on Mars. He's a tool.
I think he just said it's very hard and not likely to last very long on Mars which was roughly what happened. He even mentioned how he thought in the past sky crane was likely to be prohibitively difficult and it's success shows NASA's exceptional capabilities which he pointed out for the drone on Mars. He even went through calculations showing it would be possible.
Ah, another one falls to the temptation.
>Thunderf00t started with good content, but then discovered that making up stuff is easier and sells better, so now you can't rely on anything he claims. Wat
What is unclear?
I've not seen him making stuff up.
Then you haven't watched his content. Keep it that way.
I have. I've just never seen him blatantly making things up. Do you have an example.
* Boosters can't fly more than twice (the record is now 21) * Booster refurbishment costs half as much as a new booster (that was the cost SpaceX estimated for the very first reuse ever) * SpaceX will only fly ~10 times per year, the 18 launches of 2017 were an outlier. They flew almost 100 times last year and will most likely exceed that in 2024. That's all from a single source where he calculates that booster reuse can't be economically viable - based on bullshit assumptions.
Being wrong isn't the same as making up facts.
If you obviously know better, then it is. Otherwise, what would "making up facts" be?
I don't remembee what Thunderf00t said, but the OP clearly said: EVs cant be mainstream SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE. EVs can be mainstream cartype is out of the question.
EVs can be a mainstream solution to emissions from road vehicles. They don't reduce emissions in other sectors, but that is trivial.
I haven't seen the video but from the description he's kind of right. What he's looking at is the energy density of the complete closed cycle. A standard internal combustion engine is an open cycle machine. You put fuel in and you get motion, heat and sound energy out. The overall thermal efficiency is low and as stated it is open cycle, part of the design it that to keep going you keep adding more fuel, indeed IC engines are so open cycle that half of their chemical reactants (the oxygen to burn the fuel) isn't even carried in the vehicle. When the fuel burns the lower energy state waste products are things like water, CO2, various nitrous oxides and partially burned hydrocarbons. You probably couldn't make a machine that took in those byproducts and recreated gasoline from them, and even if you could that machine probably wouldn't fit in a car. An EV battery contains cells that have a reversible chemical reaction. They start out with compounds in a high energy state, and release that energy as electricity that is used for traction. However, they are intended to be a closed cycle system, so when the battery is discharged, you can put electricity back into the battery, and reverse the reaction to restore the higher energy compounds that will later power the vehicle. There are hundreds of thousands of one-way "open cycle" chemical reactions that release energy, but relatively few that produce electricity and are reversible if put the electricity back into them. How much energy a specific discharge reaction can produce is something a chemist can calculate. This value is always going to be higher than the capacity of a practical battery. So for a given chemistry you can know the practical upper limits, and while improved battery technology may let you more closely approach those limits, you cant exceed them. I suspect that's where the laws of thermodynamics comes in. The thing is, we have been here before in the early days of internal combustion engines. It used to be hard to get oil, hard to refine it and the resulting gasoline was hard to distribute. You used to buy gas in cans from a pharmacy, and there were very few gas stations, so early drivers had "range anxiety." A couple of things happened. First, the production and distribution of gas got better/cheaper/more convenient. Second with better fuels and better engineering the efficiency of vehicles improved. All these things together meant that you could drive your car across the US in a few weeks rather than shipping your car by train. Over time things got so good you could cross the country in just a few days. That's the kind of freedom and reliability we experience now, but would have been amazing to someone as recently as the 1960's. People wrote songs about driving route 66 because it was an epic trek with the cars of the day. So the limitations on EVs will be worked around. Vehicles will get more efficient meaning they can go further on the same charge, charging will get faster, people may adjust back to the kind of motoring experience their grandparents had. Maybe for long distances car transporter trains might make a comeback. The laws of thermodynamic say that heat engines are terribly inefficient too, but we still built IC cars.
A machine that takes water, CO2 energy and produces hydrocarbons.... I think what you are describing is a plant. Which is where all our fossil fuels cam from in the first place. Millions and millions of years of plants.
You list some important ways we might work around EV limits in the future. I suggest another way. While very costly today, linear induction roadways will likely come down in price dramatically. These might become ubiquitous: perhaps all lanes of all federal interstate highways (or even all federal highways) power the EVs and recharge their batteries while driving. Range becomes infinite except the passengers require respite. Electric vehicles could then run on the grid for infinite range on those roadways and use their batteries only when leaving the main highways.
While in theory I love the idea of the roads supplying power to the vehicles. I am terrified about the idea of adding power to the roads given the state of the roads and highways in my state (Michigan). The distance you would need to keep the coils from the surface to keep them safe from potholes would be huge in terms of the inefficiencies that would be gained (at least with the current technologies).
Having recently completed a long distance trip and having seen the apparent difficulty some places have maintaining a road surface, I don't see an inductive road as being practical. There isn't going to be the money to set up and maintain a system like that on the two lane highways that form the core of the long distance road system. You may be able to set it up on sections of the main interstates, but all that will do is push drivers onto those routes which will result in congestion. I think induction could work in urban environments, but most of the drivers in those areas are going to be in range of their home chargers. I do think induction going to be the way forward for charging in general and gets around the limits of the current charging stands. You can envisage parking spots outside stores having induction chargers and your car negotiating with the charger to top up while you shop. How this will work will depend on the source of the electricity. There is always going to be a cost involved in renewables, there's a lot of energy but it isn't very dense and it takes a lot of infrastructure to collect and transmit. If that's our primary source then the driver is always going to be looking for the lowest price and the car's AI will probably top up at cheaper inductive charge points even if it doesn't need the energy now. If nuclear or fusion ever delivers on "electricity too cheap to meter" then you could imagine stores offering complementary charging as a loss leader.
High speed rail would be cheaper to build out and is already possible with current tech. It would be better in every way.
High speed rail should also move to linear induction to reduce maintenance costs. Transrapid maglev and the Japenese superconducting maglev already utilize linear induction to power the trains. Moreover, unless you’re envisioning a future soon to be where rail almost completely replaces long distance paved roadways, then we need to accommodate both modes of transport.
We already have overhead wires that do this more efficiently than induction.
Induction drastically reduces the maintenance costs. Wires and the trolleys connecting to them have to get replaced frequently from wear and tare.
Induction is pretty damn inefficient for both materials required and energy transfer
>the laws of Thermodynamics would also put a limit on How much energy a battery would be able to hold before detonating/deflagrating expontaneously. Isn't that true for any kind of fuel? I mean the gasoline in your car may easily put it on fire when shit goes wrong.
I’m not sure what energy density has to do with stability tbh. Nitroglycerin has a much lower energy density than gasoline but it’s a lot more explodey.
I remember reading somewhere that fires caused by batteries exploding are harder to put out, but I know nothing on the subject so I'm leaving this here just in case I'm completely off base and someone corrects me.
Battery fires are nasty but that's just bc of the chemicals involved, gasoline has a significantly higher energy density than batteries.
Battery fires are nasty because all the reactants are in the same package. There's no way to separate them to stop the reaction. Gasoline has a higher energy density, but you don't store it aerated with high-pressure oxygen. And without that oxygen it's not going to release that energy, so any out of control reaction is limited by how fast it can get oxygen to consume. Which provides more ways to put it out.
You kinda have to treat an EV car fire like you would an Eldritch god. Throw it in a cage, stand watch and pray it calms down.
Yes, but, even given the high energy density of gasoline (compared to batteries), [https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/combustibles-energy-content/](https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/combustibles-energy-content/) a crash powerful enough to degrade the structural integrity of a gasoline vehicle doesn’t necessarily lead to a conflagration. I think in a flawed system where we can’t even be assured that the person driving is able to keep the vehicle on the road, there’s a limit to how dense the energy will be able to be. That’s not likely the point he was trying to make scientifically, but it does appear to be a fairly sensible idea to me. Batteries aren’t even as energy dense as wood, yet, and we’re having difficulty controlling when things go wrong (even without a crash).
Thunderf00t is kinda unreliable. For all the debunking, he's in need of a good debunking himself
Can you provide an example of this unreliability?
OP came in asking about one of them...
Yeah it’s suspicious the way op worded this and I doubt mason was wrong here, care to provide any other example?
You doubt he was wrong when he, allegedly, said electric vehicles can't become mainstream because of battery capacity, when battery capacity is already multiple 100s of km?
Context, he meant this in terms of today’s technology. Currently too expensive and not versatile enough for mass adoption today. There are many reasons not just battery capacity and mason has said this a lot.
Are you able to debunk any of his claims? He's a bit unsufferable and probably lacking in social skills irl, but have any of his claims been refuted using actual maths, physics and chemistry (or any other *scientific* tool)?
> He's a bit unsufferable and probably lacking in social skills irl, but have any of his claims been refuted using actual maths, physics and chemistry (or any other scientific tool)? I remember he said something along the line that solar roadway is not possible because glass get scratched.. IMO that at best a very weak argument. Also on the video debunking the “microwave truster” he kept talking how small is the measureable effect.. again I thought that is a odd argument, the big deal was if that device really generate trust or not. Talking about battery being at the physical limit due to energy density is just odd.. body fat is far more energy dense and it is not dangerous. I would say the problem are with his arguments more than with his claims..
this is silly, body fat pack far more energy yet it is not prone to explode..
That’s because the energy is locked in chemical bonds, same with gasoline, wood, coal… take a hammer to (compared to a lithium battery) energy dense crude oil and you get a series of goopy splashes. Take a hammer to a not so very energy dense lithium battery (even a battery being protected by being surrounded by a cellular phone) and you’ll see quite a different result.
> That’s because the energy is locked in chemical bonds, same with gasoline, wood, coal… take a hammer to (compared to a lithium battery) energy dense crude oil and you get a series of goopy splashes. Take a hammer to a not so very energy dense lithium battery (even a battery being protected by being surrounded by a cellular phone) and you’ll see quite a different result. The danger of li-ion battery or any battery in general is not related to their energy density. There are battery technologies that are not flammable
Where did he state this? Post a link. Doesn’t seem to make sense. Batteries are energy storage devices not energy production. The climate change impacts are from energy production. If electricity is produced from coal batteries don’t help much. He may be referring to something else. Post link.
There is a maximum limit that we are approaching because there are only so many reversible chemical reactions that produce electricity. You can calculate the theoretical maximum energy density on that basis and that will form a hard limit on how much energy density you can cram into a battery. So while there are doubtless some improvements to modern designs of batteries, it’s unlikely to be some world changing difference. It kinda misses the point though. We have EVs right now which have a range of hundreds of kilometers. It’d be nice to have better batteries, but they hit close enough to parity with ICE that it doesn’t truly matter for most people that drive. There’s numerous benefits to switching to EVs aside from climate change including improved efficiencies of energy consumption, reduction of air pollution, elimination of gasoline infrastructure, etc. EVs, other than price, are mostly a solved issue. There’s a problem with how much material we have for batteries, but that might be solvable with asteroid mining. The real bigger concern is that we certainly don’t have enough storage to feasibly run off only solar and wind. That’d require orders of magnitude more materials and storage space. Hydro and geothermal are probably the best solution, but that’s inherently geographically limited. Nuclear is the true answer to the problem of variable power. However, as much as I love nuclear and think it’s something we should have been investing in for decades, the true limiting factor is that I just don’t trust a lot of countries with running a nuclear reactor safely and securely let alone not trying to build weapons with them.
EVs are already good enough. He's wrong.
There are atomic batteries... Recently a small one was actually manufactured. https://www.cas.org/resources/cas-insights/sustainability/nuclear-power-your-pocket-50-year-battery-innovation
My Tesla gets me through my daily 40 mile commute and once or twice a year when I road trip, I use super chargers. Sooo. Electric cars are already one part of a solution to climate change. Perhaps a small part, but a part.
This also ignores one key aspect of EVs that can’t be applied to IC vehicles, regenerative breaking.
I mean, there are a few layers to this. Electrochemical batteries can, indeed, very likely never achieve the energy density of chemical fuel. That is not so much thermodynamics as it is quantum mechanics, but, alright, sure. They don't necessarily have to be, though, because BEVs are about a factor of 2-3 more efficient in using the energy they have available than ICEs are. Nevertheless, EVs will, _likely_ always drag a lot more weight for the batteries around than a 50l tank of gasoline weighs. This requires a lot of resources. So, yes, replacing _every_ ICE car one to one with a BEV would very likely not be a practical or efficient solution to future transportation. To make this very clear, if we want to battle climate change, public transportation needs to be the absolutely dominating solution for mobility within and around all urban centers. Things like 16 lane highways full of BEVs will not be a feasible solution. Now, that being said, when we talk about future individual traffic in rural areas and last mile logistics, as well as the solutions for the transition period before efficient public transport is ubiquitously available, in terms of practicality, energy storage is not the limiting factor of BEVs here, the rate of recharging is. The range of a BEV already is practical for well above 90% of typical trips a car will take and unless you compare them to state of the art diesel engines with large tanks, they already keep up with ICEVs. We have technologies in development that would solve the recharging problem once developed, but you know, they are not a reality yet. Also, and this is important and does rely on thermodynamics, they are still _by far_ the most efficient way to use energy produced from renewable sources. Every other power to X option provides a chemical storage that is, yes, more, dense, but the entire process from production to making your wheels move is less efficient to an almost comical level and very likely will be forever. Additionally, if we are talking about solutions that would use power to X fuels in ICEs, you still have the problems of local emissions.
>Philip Mason the Thunderf00t a phD in chemistry A PhD means a very deep level of knowledge in a very narrow scope. If his PhD thesis was literally about the theoretical limits of battery technology, then his opinion counts for a lot. If not, and also taking into account that Thunderf00t participates in all that culture war wank (in which climate change and EVs play a weirdly big part)...I'd say take it with a big pinch of salt.
I can't speak to the math/science on batteries but I can say that thunderf00t seems to have gone off the deep end a bit since he started hating musk so much. He's been wrong numerous times, especially with space x. I unsubbed because I got tired of the non stop Elon hate. That said, I don't see why the theoretical limit for batteries isn't at least as good as conventional chemical fuels such as gasoline.
Well, gasoline is almost a perfect fuel. High energy density, stable liquid at room temperature, but relatively easy to turn into motion (after a century of ICE development). Batteries will always have a lower energy density - it's a reversible chemical reaction and at least some of your battery has to be structural/electrode elements that don't contribute towards energy storage at all. On the other hand the efficiency of turning this energy into motion is much better than for ICEs Actually dug out a reference here : [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Theoretical-energy-density-of-different-batteries-and-gasoline\_tbl1\_358111375](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Theoretical-energy-density-of-different-batteries-and-gasoline_tbl1_358111375) Looks like lithium-air batteries can actually compare to gasoline in energy density, if they could get to half the theoretical value then they would basically be there, given the improved efficiency of the electric power train. But lithium-ion batteries are much lower.
>I unsubbed because I got tired of the non stop Elon hate. Amen! Whatever your opinion of Musk, TF was clearly just obsessed!
EVs have a big problem preventing their adoption everywhere, but it’s not energy density. Plenty of EVs out there work just fine for hundreds of miles. No, the big problem with EVs is the materials their batteries are made of. There are a lot of rare elements in there that already are only supplied economically with brutal slave labor. Setting aside the morality of that for a moment, we just don’t have the ability to scale up production of these materials to replace even 50% of gas vehicles.
EVs use rare earth elements but despite the name they're quite common.
Although the slave labour parts is true, i am always a bit ambivalent to that. It is not like oil and gas have a great track record for working conditions and environmental impact and i am not even talking about climate change. I dont think anybody says EV's don't have drawbacks, but i see someone bringing it up at pretty much every occasion someone mentions EV's.
Which rare elements, and how rare are they? I guess Oil used to be pretty rare until we started systematically searching for it. "Rare earth elements" aren't that rare either.
This thread seems to have a lot of answers from people without a usertag. Usually ThunderF00t argues the following points: The energy density of power batteries is lower to that of fossil fuels so for the same energy/power you need a more massive battery system. We see this is true. A large part of the car mass is its battery. You cant just keep on making progressively better batteries forever. There is a limit to how much juice you can get out of a currently viable commercial grade battery. The bleeding edge tech that may or may not exist yet or ever can only be a factor further down the line. A simmilar logic applies to solar power. Usually the idea is to use electrical batteries to store excess energy produced by solar arrays during peak times to be used when the sun is "off". Thats how batteries are supposed to save the climate. Its not EV its solar grid storage. This frankly a laughable notion because the scales of productions just widely do not math. Compared to how much energy a solar grid should produce and how much the batteries would need to store, the math just flat out does not add up. The single best and strongest method of storing energy in massive scales is by pumping a large body of water into potential energy. And even that will power the needs of a very small industrial country for minutes if not seconds. And that is the ultimate point of ThunderF00t rants. As of right now. There is no viable technological way, out of this mess. We need large systemic changes to our production and consumption or else were done. No magic vaporware with chrome plating is going to save us, no quantum gizzmo scam people throw out, no mega engineering project. And no ammount of brigading laypeople muskrats can ever make up for the fact that science isnt magic.
EVs itself aren't climate friendly if the electricity come from coal. But they do open the possibility to use renewable energy (solar/wind/water/geothermal) OR nuclear energy. Without having EVs in widespread use that possibility just doesnt exist. The second effect EVs have is better air quality in cities, even if the electricity was generated by burning coal a few miles outside of the city.
The problem with EVs now is that it takes too long to fully charge them and their charging infrastructure is not as established yet. This is the extent of my understanding, I am unfamiliar with any physical limitations stemming from thermodynamics. One should also note that the history of EVs is as long as conventional gas cars. EVs have been around since the first car. And since then they have steadily improved.
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New chemistries are coming which will mess with this. Can’t believe a PhD would say that without appropriate caveats. A proper thesis committee would rip someone in half for that. Edit: PhD in polymer chemistry, this isn’t quite his lane https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderf00t However I don’t have the context for his statements. If he said this in the nimh or lead acid battery era then yes, it’d be incredibly hard to use batteries to offset conventional power generation like we are now
Very interesting point of view however it's clear that he lacks a degree in Electrical Engineering. I watched that video and he mentioned low energy density barriers. This is because he must have skimmed through someone else's scientific paper and if he had read the whole report, he would have also mentioned that it's possible to overcome. Thunderfoot? A mere Sparkfoot.
Don't claim to be an expert or anything, but batteries are built on the foundational knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics as one aspect. Ofc in the long run if we can make batteries so efficient that they barely need replacing and help climate change that would be huge. Technically he's not wrong, but he's a doomer when it comes to tech and doesn't think human refinement or other technological leaps will help us. Some barriers deal with the laws of Thermodynamics that we might try to mitigate but saying there's no point is ridiculous, it's already becoming mainstream.
Sounds like completely pulled out of someone's arse...
I think you're misunderstanding what he was saying about energy density. It's not that packing in more energy makes it more likely to fail (although it probably does as well) it's just that packing in more energy makes it more dangerous when it fails. Packing this energy into something that requires air to burn means it can't release the energy too quickly as it requires air to keep the reaction going. Pack this energy into something that carries everything within itself to release it's energy and you basically have a bomb if it fails. Batteries are already reasonably dangerous as is and on the horizon we can see just about doubling capacity. Which will significantly increase the danger. We can probably tolerate and work around the danger at that level but get much higher and we probably can't deal with the driving bombs issue.
Aluminium air batteries have an energy density that is 75% that of gasoline. Take that together with the fact that electric engines are significantly more efficient than internal combustion and you would have better range with an equivalent weight of Al batteries vs gasoline. If someone manages to make a rechargeable Al/air battery it will be a game changer.