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Can Flow Batteries Finally Beat Lithium?
(spectrum.ieee.org)
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this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Technology
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I don’t get it. For the average consumer, EVs as they exist right now are fine. Charging is generally 20 mins every 2-3 hours and only on road trips. Charging an EV at home is a trivial technical challenge. I understand that there aren’t chargers on street corners, but vehicles are rarely parked more than 20 feet from some kind of electrical service.
The idea of shipping liquid fuel in trucks and dispensing it out of hoses at special fuel stores is just silly. Rolling out that kind of infrastructure is unnecessary, and hydrogen has already showed that it doesn’t work. We only did it with gasoline because there was no other way.
I can see liquid fuel being useful in certain applications, but for the typical consumer, BEVs are the way to go.
Then what about trucking? Lithium is not nearly as energy dense, weighs a lot, and does take a significant longer time to charge than a diesel to refuel. If you don't believe me, look up the eCascadia by Frightliner. They are probably the current best option if you wanted a heavy electric truck, but they only get to around 200 miles with a load (for reference, a standard turbo diesel one would go around 600-800 miles and only take 30 min to refuel).
Currently in trucking, I've found that everyone kinda laughs at the idea of electrification (except on medium duty, that wouldn't be too hard, just overly expensive). Current electric motors are fine, it's just that the energy storage is nowhere near what is needed for actual use.
Yes, for most basic ev consumers current lithium is fine from a usability perspective, but from a cost one this might provide a much more useful alternative (assuming the cost isn't insane).
There's got to be a significant amount of trucking going on that's within a 100 mile radius, no? You'd have to charge more often than you'd have to refuel, but that seems like a problem worth offsetting to get the potential benefits of electrification.
That's more medium duty, and yeah, that probably could be converted to electric fairly easily (albeit at a higher cost). I was mostly thinking about longer distance travel, where the main goal is the most amount of uptime and you can't afford to park and charge for 3-4 hrs every 200 miles. And that is usually the most expensive model, with most getting less milage and/or taking longer to charge.
spoiler
I think the answer for longer distances is trains, which can be electrified without needing to carry batteries. Trucks burning fuel should really only be a thing to reach populations that are too small and remote to have a train stop.
Not disagreeing, but I live in the US and even if that became a focus of the government, it would take a decade or two to actually get most of the rail necessary.
Pretty much everything you said was said about passenger cars 15 years ago. Can't fix every problem right away. as much as 85% of trucking is under 200 miles (by freight tonnage). This defeatist mentality of 'it won't work for this application, or this application, it'll never change' will always fail as technology and engineering improves.
The Tesla semi proved that fully loaded 450+ mi trucking is not only possible but better in every way, Pepsi is eager to incorporate them and Walmart too. Here's the trick, Walmart and other companies doesn't give a shit about charge times as long as it's manageable, if it ends up saving even a dollar per freight delivery, they will switch. If it never improved and legit took 4 hours per 200 miles, companies will set up relay trucking. Trucking itself will change if technology can't. It's always about money, charge times only bother the driver