Expert Opinion with Dr. Goodenough - The Future of Battery Storage (Expert Audience)

[Music] I'm John Goodenough at the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin you well I haven't filed a marker that much but a good technology will always find the market eventually well that acid batteries will may continue to start your vehicles they do recycle so that's important most of the lead gets recycled as far as the cadmium nickel or the metal hydride nickel battery is concerned those are good but remember they both those batteries operate on aqueous electrolytes and if you have an aqueous electrolyte you cannot have a stable shelf-life if the battery gives you more than one and a half volts so you're restricted with a rechargeable battery with a long shelf life do you want to have bolts with a with an aqueous electrolyte so those batteries will not make it to large scale have battery technologies however the zinc air battery may make it for stationary storage because it can have a big capacity to make up for the small voltage but I think it may have a hard time to compete with other things that come down the pike you the problem with the lithium-ion battery is that it uses a flammable liquid electrolyte now it has I would say three principal disadvantages not only is it flammable but when you try to plate a lithium or a sodium ion a note they form dendrites and the dendrites can grow across that electrolyte to give you an internal short-circuit with incendiary consequences and the third thing is the window of the electrolyte that is the voltage that you can have and still have them long cycle life is limited the people in hydro-quebec have taken and made an li 4 TI 5 o 12 anode and a lithium iron phosphate hollaby in structure for the cathode to make a a battery of long cycle life 10,000 cycles or more to back up the grid in a wind farm in northern Quebec and I think they're working very hard to market that particular battery for that purpose but as far as an electric vehicle is concerned you will not get the volumetric energy density that you need and you you can use it for hybrid cars but not for an all-electric power but well even with the with the smartphones and so on you're frustrated because you can't charge too fast it uses a carbon anode and when you charge too fast you plate lithium on the surface of the carbon and then it grows dendrites and you have a safety problem not only that but when you use the lithium cobalt or nickel cobalt a node if you overcharge you evolve oxygen and so that's a problem too so therefore when Tesla makes a cut a battery for a car with seven thousand cells he has to manage those seven thousand cells and the management system is as expensive as the battery itself and it doesn't have the cycle life and so after two years you got to pay another twenty eight thousand dollars to get a new battery but maybe the people who like to show off with the Tesla are very happy to pay an extra twenty thousand eight thousand we developed the materials and intellectual property we are a university we're not a battery company once we develop the intellectual property we have to wait for somebody daring enough to want it with license the intellectual property and make whatever products they want but a young lady came to me from porto portugal by the name of maria elena Braga she brought a glass that there's an extraordinary glass because people don't use solid electrolytes normally because they don't have the ionic or the cation conductivity it is needed to get proper rates well the glass she brought to me has a an ionic conductivity that is about an order and a half better than the best you can do so far and he saw electrolytes and it is enough it's almost equal to the liquid second point is that it also contains electric dipoles which most electrolytes don't have and so she came to me as a physicist interested in the dielectric constant because of the electric dipoles and I had just figured out how to plate metallic lithium or metallic sodium as an anode dendrite free and so I told her I believe you've shown me that it can be dry just to prove it let's make a symmetric cell lithium lithium glass lithium push the lithium back and forth and see what happens and of course indeed you could play dendrite free lithium from the glass and the resistance or impedance to plating and stripping of the lithium was very small and so we've shown in many different selves that you can plate dendrite free lithium from a solid electrolyte that has an account on conductivity almost as good it's the liquid electrolyte and therefore I believe that shows we've solved the anode side of the problem cathode side it's a little more tricky but we've developed two different ways to solve the cathode problem the first was that if we complete that dendrite 3 on the anode perhaps we can do the same thing on the cathode and we can take the lithium from the anode and plated on the cathode and then do that reversibly without having to use an insertion or an intercalated compound which has a finite salt solution range well of course people say but Professor you must be having a symmetric cell you can't get any voltage I said I'm sorry but we've demonstrated we get 3 volts and we don't make a symmetric cell we make an asymmetric cell but it's true we are only able to plate to a certain thickness while we still retain a hammer of Junction which is giving the potential that we need and so this couldn't be a simpler way to make every charge of a battery or you just played back and forth and it would be safe the important point is we can give you safety we give you a low cost we can give you a high voltage weave and we we've demonstrated what with one of our batteries 15000 cycles which is normally people are struggling with 500 all right so we can give you the long cycle life we can give a good voltage better than 3 volts if use another thing but the capacity may not be quite so high so we've yet to see and the battery company's other ones will make products according to what is the particular industry they want to serve you I think that the batteries we do you can make them either they're not lithium-ion batteries anymore they're lithium batteries or sodium batteries her glass actually transports sodium as well or better than the lithium all right so we can plate sodium and we can plate sodium from one side to the other and so on so there will be both lithium and sodium batteries on the market and it's important because the sodium availability is ubiquitous as long as you're near a sea and the lithium is not necessarily in friendly countries and you may be back like you are with the oils and having to do gunboat diplomacy is harder to be sure you have to have access to the lithium you

Channel: CleanTX

Views: 42,132

Rating: 4.798995 out of 5

Keywords: Battery Storage, John Goodenough, University of Texas at Austin

Id: kR8CESrigEg

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/notrab]

He's out of touch. Sure the Li batteries he invented only lasted 2 years at the time. I hope not to be so out of touch at his age. So many people just stop trying to learn when they get old.

[u/JBStroodle]

Has he not had the internet for last 10 years?

[u/M3FanOZ]

There was plenty of real world data on Tesla battery longevity available in 2017.

[u/AmpEater]

How could you have such a specific figure on hand, "$28,000", and not have any data regarding longevity?

The mind boggles

And of course the claim that the battery management system is as expensive as the battery is nonsense. In a model S each battery module has a small PCB, and then you've got a master. I'd be surprised if the BMS cost even $100 at volume, with most of that being the TI chips and non-ground referenced communication.

[u/Cywebtalk]

How much did he get payed from the oil companies to talk like this?

[u/EaglesPDX]

So why is someone dredging up a two year old interview of an elderly, retired scientist and posting it on Reddit?

As for the jerks dissing the guy, without him, the li-on battery doesn't exist.

As for his comments on two years and $28k it's scientifically and economically correct based on full discharge and recharge. He's shortening the cycle to demonstrate a point.

Instead of two years, current expectations are fully used EV li-ion batteries will last about 8 years in normal use and be about $20k to replace.

[u/Mygixer]

These types of situations were an agency found an “expert” in a specific related subject (Li-ion batteries), but not an expert on the right specific subject (Tesla’s Li-ion battery system) tries to incorrectly advertise the two as the same thing is very misleading. Either intentionally or by ignorance. These situations are highly annoying to me as news agencies seem to be more worried about headlines and clicks than accuracy of facts.

This guy obviously doesn’t know about Tesla’s batteries and falsely applies generalizations about the type of Li-ion batteries he is used to to the ones in a Tesla. But his ignorance will be spread as fact to whatever audience the particular agency serves.

I miss the days of vetted journalism reporting verified facts instead of opinion journalism that reports whatever they think will sell that has taken over today.

[u/tashtibet]

let's have a duel him & Jeff Dahn of Tesla

[u/MikeMelga]

Tired of watching old farts resting on long time achievements, that just trash everything they haven't worked with.