135
this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
135 points (83.3% liked)
Technology
58123 readers
4021 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Chinese batteries are plenty good enough for e-bikes. For that matter, CATL makes some of the best batteries for electric cars.
Iron and sodium based batteries are coming on the market, and those all e-bikes need.
9 of the 10 largest lithium Mines aren't in China. They're mostly Australia and Chile. Also, the largest known lithium deposit in the world is near Oregon, USA.
Right, but China has cheaper labor and few environmental regulations. Citizens of Oregon are less likely to send children and political prisoners into mines and factories.
So lithium is OK, so long as it's cheap and gotten off the backs of chinese?
Are you asking me what I would do given the keys to the nuclear arsenal? Or are you asking me what the current state of geopolitical affairs?
We won't win an economic trade war with China. China isn't the Soviet Union. We might win an actual war, but it would be the largest war ever fought on earth. China isn't Russia.
I don't want anyone mining lithium unless we can do it without destroying the planet where we live. I'd gladly trade my cell phone for universal human rights and clean water for my grandkids. But that ain't a button on my console.
Oregon is in the United States, a country where people expect life, liberty, and the pursuit of a jetski. The CCP treats its citizens like wheat for the thresher, and has zero qualms about turning some land into wasteland. Economically, you can't compete with that. If you want to place tariffs on Chinese lithium, let's do it. But we need to actually produce it here, and we have to be OK with the full, long-term cost of mining and manufacturing it, safely and cleanly.
Unless we do that, there's not much sense in acting like we're better than China. We just have a national NIMBY attitude, happily outsourcing our climate disasters and human rights abuses so we don't have to see it first hand.
Yeah. New battery tech is always almost about to come out......15 years and waiting.
It does come out. All the time. 5-8% per year, compounding.
There's a toxic positivity in how the news presents battery tech advances that leads people to think it's never coming. I'm not talking about stuff that's in a lab that may or may not be practical for mass production. I'm talking about stuff starting to come out of factories today.
Some minor changes here and there, but the underlying makeup of the batteries and their shortcomings have been largely the same. Lithium and issues with dendrites that cause them to go bad/lose capacity after around 2,500 complete charge cycles. Most of the improvements have consisted of pulse charging different cells at a time in large batteries and trying to always keep the batteries in the 30% to 80% capacity range to extend the lifespan. Batteries last longer if you put one big enough in a vehicle to go 400 miles, but only allow for a 200 mile range.
5-8% per year is a doubling every 9-15 years. This is not a small change. That means we've doubled at least once since the first Tesla Roadster.
We haven't doubled at all over the past 15 years, though. That's completely false. Not in capacity or cycles.
They have doubled in capacity: https://rockymntstage.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/slide-2-battery-charts.png