Sandy Munro Talks Battery Battles, Calls Solid State “Kiss of Death” for Gas
Serious question, how would we charge these new high density batteries? Just to charge our current EV&#x27;s, we need to run dedicated circuits at max capacity and it still takes a couple hours. Are we going be running 1000v circuits in our homes? How do we upgrade the local grids to have this amperage in each home? I&#x27;m not an EE, but are our current batteries just poor at &quot;absorbing&quot; this energy while our chargers just waste tons? While these new solid state batteries will hold it all? There&#x27;s high power fast chargers, but I want to come home and plug in my car after work.<p>It just seems like batteries aren&#x27;t the bottle neck. It&#x27;s our efficiency to produce and distribute this electricity.<p>ICE isn&#x27;t perfect, but it&#x27;s an extreme dense form of energy and the output of it rotational energy. Which is exactly what our end goal is.<p>In electricity production we outsource it, then store it. Basically the same concept as winding up a spring loaded toy then letting it go when we want to use it. The spring isn&#x27;t the source of power, it&#x27;s just the energy storage. Just because we made the spring bigger and output more doesn&#x27;t make it more efficient. Simply mean we need to spin it more, and with more energy.<p>We cannot even make the electric motors more efficient, we already run at 80-90% efficiency. What will we see? 1% more? 2% more?<p>It really depends where your energy comes from. If your energy comes from dams&#x2F;solar&#x2F;wind, those have low impacts and can be an efficient way to &quot;wind up your spring&quot; but they generally aren&#x27;t extremely reliable and cannot power an entire city of EVs. If your energy is from coal, those are horribly inefficient. They run around 33% efficency [0].<p>All this electricity needs to transported but the power lines waste power, the charger wastes power, the AC-DC converters waste power, the EV motor wastes power. It&#x27;s so many little losses outsourced to someone else.<p>I like the idea of EV. There&#x27;s many pros, but far too many cons still. And it&#x27;s not the cars fault. It&#x27;s already maximizing what it can do with what it can get.<p>Personally, the battery pack prices are the biggest killer for me. I drive a 90s Toyota pickup. It&#x27;s been problem free. I&#x27;ve driven it for years. Unless it rots to the ground, I&#x27;ll never see a surprise bill in 10-20 years saying I need a new battery pack. My motor could entirely fail and it would be a $500 fix. Not to mention, it&#x27;s entirely recyclable. People will give me money just for the metal.<p>It seems like EV is a nice option for rich people at the moment but if the majority switch over, the concept really falls on its face.<p>Although, high capacity cell phone&#x2F;laptop batteries would be pretty sweet. However, we already have problems with phones being pretty dangerous.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov&#x2F;fecm&#x2F;transformative-power-systems#:~:text=The average coal-fired power,States operates near 33% efficiency" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov&#x2F;fecm&#x2F;transformative-power-systems#:~:...</a>.