Scottish Battery ‘Breakthrough’ Could Charge Electric Cars In Seconds

[BlackTortoise + 103]

Scottish researches claim breakthrough in flow battery technology that could see electric vehicles being charged in a fraction of the time of current standards and powered by either electricity or hydrogen. Using this technology, which is still in prototype stage, EV drivers would be able to refuel cars in much the same way as is done at the petrol station today. If this is real then this will be game changing.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/scottish-battery-breakthrough-could-charge-electric-cars-in-seconds-75196/

[Sofia + 35]

Breakthroughs don't turn into anything salable for 10-20 years.
 

[Adam Varga + 123]

Heard it before. Takes a long time for “breakthroughs” to make it to real production. A long time. Decades. It’s great because we need these this, but don’t expect something next year or in five years.

[Stormysaga + 62]

If someone can make it workable in a consumer application, it has some nice revolutionary potential. A lot of people have been trying to get flow batteries to work for a long time, though. This seems like good research but that may or may not translate into real world success.

[Vlad Kovalenko + 115]

There are working flow batteries already, but they're all 20Wh/kg or lower, so they're only suitable for stationary applications. They're a good technology because they keep electrons in a liquid, and to get electric energy out you pass the liquid through a collector. So they're infinitely expandable as long as you have storage for the electrolytes.
 

[DanilKa + 443]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-018-0109-5

does anyone know cost of "exotic rust" Li6 [P₂W₁₈O₆₂]?

[Jonathan Galt + 40]

On 8/16/2018 at 10:39 AM, Sofia said:

Breakthroughs don't turn into anything salable for 10-20 years.
 

Blanket rules are nonsense.  It truly depends on the technology and the manufacturing techniques.

Traditional LiIon battery plants cost nearly $1 billion to build for output the scale of Tesla's plant.  A different startup from MIT took a different approach, attacking the manufacturing aspect of batteries, and spun off 24M (whose first plants are being built in Australia last I heard).  That took about 5 years from the lab, and those plants can be built to similar capacity for around $10-20 million vs $1 billion.

The beauty of flow batteries is that the "battery" part is really small, and therefore production can scale rapidly unless it requires some exotic materials or crafting.  Can't tell about that from this article, but if they can keep it simple then the biggest part of such a "battery" is simple storage tanks.  Shouldn't take more than a few years to scale up with that model.