Meanwhile, Tump fired the entire national science board
post
Meanwhile the US has a president who doesn't understand how magnets work.
But at what cost?
Revolutionary new battery idea that will overtake lithium ion huh? Throw it on the pile
For grid-storage they may very well be...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_redox_flow_battery
is e.g. in place in Sacramaneto, CA with a storage of 2 GWh and a maximum power of 200 MW.
For grid-storage durability and ovrerall cost efficiency are more important than energy density so I expect redox flow batteries to overtake lithium ion based batteries there.
I've seen this article every two weeks for the last 15 years.
Ehh I follow the battery news well enough to know it's different this time.
The way you can tell is that it isn't coming from the MIT press release department.
Honestly, it's a good time for batteries and solar panels.
I think we're just going to let out current infrastructure rot out from under us and while house generators run on gas.
I mean, we could modernize our infrastructure, but we can barely keep bridges standing and I'm not sure if utilities are communism or not. I suspect that they are.
The lithium iron phosphate is already pretty impressive, just a bit pricey.
The actual story buried at the end of a Sino #1 article-
In the United States, companies like Oregon-based ESS Tech Inc. are already deploying iron flow systems for tech giants like Google.
However, some of these existing designs could struggle with “dendrites” — tiny, needle-like crystals that can short-circuit the battery. The Chinese team believes they have leapfrogged these hurdles by using an alkaline-based chemistry and their new molecular “shield.”
Sounds heavy
Ooohhhh revolutionary battery article #15592508
I'm sure this one won't be bullshit and will come into production tomorrow, right?
This is just a shallow, cynical, anti-intellectual remark.
Sodium ion batteries are already hitting production.
Iron flow and vanadium redox batteries also already exist in the real world.
Grid and residential battery installations are happening at a rapidly accelerating pace.
Lithium ion battery prices have dropped something like 90% over the last 15 years.
Battery technology is improving at dramatic rate, both lithium ion and non lithium ion solutions.
the article literally links to how BYD is putting this stuff into production https://interestingengineering.com/energy/catl-ev-battery-7-minute-charge
You seem
...
Bitter
Weird how Americans have such poor reading comprehension. Oh wait, I guess it's your education system.
They seem to have tackled the issue of dendrite forming.
That would reduce maintenance on iron redox flow batteries sigificantly if true.
Spamoflage
I'm starting to see that China may have a large presence on lemmy. It would make sense with the .ml groups. You can see a lot of pro China stuff here plus lemmy is a generator against things like AI which benefits China.
If people who enjoy futuristic tech and hate AI slop are now on the side of China, sign my ass up
I think they are. I think tech forums are essentially places to convince people to hate tech. Hate progress. Meanwhile other countries embrace these new technologies and develop, build and iterate.
If you don't want to see so much China and Russia-glazing, just block yogthos and jackeroni, that should cut it down about 40%. I personally don't mind agendaposting because I can tell from the get-go who it's coming from. There are prolific anti-China agendaposters too, for example from an account named Scotty.
The title is misleading.
"Throughout this period, the system remained free of harmful by-products or sediment while achieving a 99.4 percent leak-proof efficiency. Even at high power outputs, it retained 78.5 percent of its energy efficiency, proving that the design is both reliable and durable."
99.4% leak proof against material transitioning within the membranes.
78.5% energy output efficiency.
And as others have said no useful metrics tbh.
The battery prototype demonstrated endurance, maintaining a stable structure and perfect reversibility over 6,000 cycles — equivalent to more than 16 years of daily operation — with zero loss in storage capacity.
WTF!? If this battery is just half as good as they claim, it could be a game changer for storing power for solar and wind!
The problem is that 6000 cycles in laboratory are not the same than 6000 cycles in real life scenarios.
It would be interesting to put that battery out in the field and to see how it perform in real life conditions (assuming that they are cheap enough to be produced in large volumes)
If they are really that good you are right, but there are always a lot of revolutionary advance in lab that never leave it.
Indeed: electric vehicle batteries are lasting even longer than estimated. All the constant breaks from use that the batteries get has been interestingly improving their durability (which makes me think that shutting off our phones for 1 whole day per week or even month could improve their lifespan, even for the 40-80% lithium-ion boundary keepers).
Just make hot swapping batteries normal again like it used to be.
There actually was a Chinese EV startup that had battery swap stations: drive up onto the system, and the battery is directly under your car; the swap takes <1 minute. I don't remember what it was called, though, nor if it ever made it.
Update: it's Nio.
Tom Scott did a video on it. In all honesty, there are a number of things about this system that I just don’t see working well in the long term, but it’s an interesting prototype nonetheless.
Tesla did that as well about 10 years ago. They opted to not do it anymore if I recall correctly because they couldn’t control how the batteries were being maintained or what age of battery you would get.
Gogoro a moped/scooter company in Taiwan has these. Little stations all over the country where you can swap your battery out, it was pretty amazing.
Just make hot swapping batteries normal again like it used to be.
In your ideal scenario would you own multiple batteries and keep them at your house, or are you looking for a subscription service where you would just buy the car (batteryless?) and then go to a rental station to have one put in, swapping batteries when they need a charge?
When was hot-swapping batteries normal? What was the backup power source? I'd only ever seen normally swappable batteries where the phone would need to power off and back on.
I’ve never owned a flip phone that I couldn’t plug in and swap the battery with a new one without it turning off. If that wasn’t normal with your phones I’m not sure why, maybe different circuitry?
Regardless making devices easy to repair, and thus open and maintainable was what I was getting at.
Breaks from use makes perfect sense though, it allows the electrolyte to diffuse evenly. During charge /discharge cycles there's always more or less active electrolyte being consumed/produced at the anodes and cathodes, resting means it can equalize.
Fascinating, I didn't know that that's the reason... Would you happen to have any data on how long this diffusion process takes?
I mostly just applying my undergrad chemistry classes here to make an educated guess, nothing official...
Reactions are limited by the quantity of reagents and the mixing rate. As reagents are consumed (or produced), fresh reagent must move towards (or away) from the active anode and cathode for the reaction to continue.
In flooded liquid electrolyte batteries (like lead acid), mixing is very high and it's surface area that affects charge/discharge performance. In absorbed mat chemistries like most modern lithium ions, surface area is very high but electrolyte is "trapped" next to its immediate cathode/anode and cannot easily migrate throughout the matrix.
In lead acids this sort of diffusion is extremely fast. In packed lithium ions it is definitely slower. When diffusion is too slow, the lithium ions will form dendrites (little spikes) where a gradient of ions exist because they are being deposited onto the electrode faster than the electrolyte can move ions. Thats usually what kills batteries over time and why ultra fast charge/discharge cycles are terrible for them.
Dang, your education paid off! I recently disabled fast-charging on my phone (ironically before reading any of this), so am I doing good, dad?
I've seen some incredible innovations in batteries performing really well in cold temperatures. So the idea of these becoming battle tested seems more feasible today than it did even a couple years ago.
It really depends on the charge/discharge conditions that the particular test is using. You can do testing in the lab that is way harsher than typical usage or you can make it easier. In terms of this cycle testing for Li-ion I would say that typically the lab testing would be harsher than real world primarily because lab testing is done between 0% and 100% depth of discharge constantly where most people are charging their batteries much before then and only cycling them at high rates periodically.
For a press release bragging about a new advancement especially for a product that doesn't even exist yet, I would guarantee they're using the 'easier' test.
It really depends on the charge/discharge conditions that the particular test is using.
True.
You can do testing in the lab that is way harsher than typical usage or you can make it easier. In terms of this cycle testing for Li-ion I would say that typically the lab testing would be harsher than real world primarily because lab testing is done between 0% and 100% depth of discharge constantly where most people are charging their batteries much before then and only cycling them at high rates periodically.
You are right, but we should see what they want to demostrate in the lab test: that the tech works or to have a way to make a sensational announcement based on some data ?
If you put that battery on the market, the 6000 cycles still stand or they are only a lab result ?
Aside the harsh or easy charge/discharge cycles, what other condition they tested ? A battery on a bench has different problems than a battery on a car on the road.
That said, if the tech works really has announced, it would be great.
There's always a catch, details matter.
Some chemistries can only work if heated up to a certain temperature.
Some cannot supply high currents.
Some perform badly at lower temperatures.
Some are expensive to produce.
Some have a very low energy density per weight or volume.
Some are hard to create consistently and require a lot of balancing.
Some cannot be scaled up easily.
Some are prone to aging regardless of cycles.
Some even require manual maintenance.
It's hard to make a cell that does everything right. Cycle life is only one out of a huge list of parameters.
Those are not the metrics that are important for storing wind and solar. Cost per MWh is the important one.
It is great to see, and isn't an unreasonable jump from lifepo4. They already do 4-6k charge cycles with something like 20% degradation. This is a bigger deal for electronics and vehicles as it would make battery replacements unnecessary.
But cycle life is a central parameter for the cost of a battery, the longer it lasts the more rarely you have to replace it. In the longer term, a battery that lasts twice as long can be practically half as expensive.
Assuming the manufacturing costs (materials + utilities + other fees + labor + profit extraction) for the two types of batteries are equal, yes.
No? Even if the new battery is 3x more expensive to build, and has 50 % of the capacity of a Li-ion battery, it can still have an advantage in large scale storage if it lasts for 10x as many cycles without degrading. At the end of the day, it's a combination of parameters that determine which is the best for a given application, and high resistance to degradation can outweigh other parameters in many scenarios.
If all of the claims from Chinese tech companies and research was half as good as they claim we would all learn Mandarin by now.
That is exactly right, and simplified Chinese is actually extremely popular to learn here now. (Denmark)
And no wonder, they have become leaders of several key (future) technologies.
Have you heard of a man named Elon Musk? He's the king of over promising. US company's put out just as much garbage "look we solved X" as China dude.
IF is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there.
And yes IF it is as you said HALF that good, in either direction— the article mentioned ~80% under heavy loads. And that alone would be a game changer.
Energy storage is the “oil” of the future.
IF — we shall see. But I’m hopeful
Less talking about miracle batteries, more making miracle batteries 😡
They are being made, CATL is already making solid state batteries that break with traditional Lithium batteries on both price and safety. Mass production is expected by 2027.
Your comment is both ignorant and misleading.
Solid state too? I know they started mass producing sodium-ion which is a huge deal but hadn't heard abt solid state lithium.
Well maybe only semi, but real solid state is in preparation to be mass produced already 2027.
Your comment is both ignorant and misleading.
"Less talking. More X," is a cliche that doesn't imply that there is zero "X."
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding their comment and then attributing your mistake to them as if it's their mistake.
Batteries is probably one of thew most researched technologies ATM. So asking for more research and less talking when the progress of actual research is publicized is just moronic idiotic, and everything else describing ignorance.
The comment is satire. You get reports about amazing batteries about every month, yet most pretty much all of them never went into production. It has been like that for years, since I was a teenager at the very least. And what has happened since then was pretty much refinements to Li-Ion and the commercialization LiFePO.
The timeline from research to "in my products" feels like a decade.
It has been like that since Volta started making stacks of different metal plates and making dead frogs dance. It might surprise you to learn that making subatomic particles dance to our whim at a pace we determine isn't very easy. We try all kinds of neat ideas to make them do this, and some of them even work. The fact that people like you see all the times we try and it doesn't work as an indicator that we aren't trying very hard rather than researchers trying very hard and not always being as successful as we'd like is more an indictment of you than it is of them.
Also, unlike when I started watching advances in batteries, you can find the history of rechargeable batteries with just a few minutes of web searching. If you had put in even that little bit of effort, you would know that advances in rechargeable batteries neither started nor ended with lithium.
You called their comment "ignorant and misleading." Do you actually stand behind those words?
So asking for more research and less talking when the progress of actual research is publicized is just moronic idiotic, and everything else describing ignorance.
They didn't ask for "more research." They were asking for more of these cheap and effective batteries to be available for them to purchase.
Less talk and more delivery is the same as increasing investments in research and production even more than they already are. To deliver even better batteries even faster requires more research. I was using the logical conclusion of what was said.
So yes I absolutely 100% stand by my original comment, because there is absolutely a lot more than talking, when it's the area that is probably seeing some of the heaviest research for more than 2 decades now. And there absolutely is delivering too.
Of course we all want even better and cheaper batteries, it's a braindead comment to make. I also wish there were more pink unicorns.
My unicorn is invisible and pink.
I absolutely 100% stand by my original comment
Great, so I guess you'll talk specifically about why it was both "ignorant" and "misleading".
Of course we all want even better and cheaper batteries, it’s a braindead comment to make.
Whoops. It seems you failed to say anything about why the comment was "ignorant" or "misleading". Even if you accept it's "braindead", and I don't, that only means it's not using brain power, like the author is just on autopilot, and doesn't mean "ignorant."
Of course, it would have been an impossible endeavor to prove your point, because their comment was neither ignorant nor misleading.
Anyways, I'm done here. I'll be reporting you for violating Rule 3 and blocking you.
LESS TALKING MORE MAKING
Why is there never a single relevant metric mentioned? Here its only cycles and efficiency (which I assume is capacity).
This article is just blogspam reporting of an SCMP article, which also doesn't link to the paper, which is here: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.202506734
But the full text is not available there. You might be able to find it elsewhere.
First published: 01 April 2026
Now, is that cause for worry or am I silly?
I don't think China does April Fools' Day.
Synergistic Design of High Steric Hindrance and Negatively Charged Anolyte Enables 6000-Cycle Stability for Alkaline All-Iron Flow Batteries - 1 April 2026 https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.202506734
Aqueous iron-based redox flow batteries for large-scale energy storage - July 2025 https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/12/7/nwaf218/8154509?login=false
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