Is “pristine ceramic” that much harder to create than e.g. “pristine silicon”? Cilicon chips seem relatively cheap these days.
I don't know how much harder it is to make ceramics pristine. I am inferring that it is the thing in the article that wasn't already part of making batteries so the 'new' bit. And after seeing many, many breakthroughs where the 'new' bit was doable in small scales at great expense in a laboratory, but impossible to do at scale in an automated process, I've watched those breakthroughs go from 'world changing' to 'laboratory curiosity.'
So when Nature Materials publishes the paper on the process to repeatedly make tons of pristine ceramic material, then I will be excited for the new batteries that my devices will surely get in an upgrade.
> And after seeing many, many breakthroughs where the 'new' bit was doable in small scales at great expense in a laboratory, but impossible to do at scale in an automated process,
Can you elaborate on that, maybe give a few examples? I always thought that inventions were mainly judged by their merit (efficiency), I guess I was blind to the "scaling" (i.e. "actual industry") variable, and just assumed that there must be some way to automate and streamline almost everything, as long as the demand is there (as Elon Musk has recently been showing, with batteries/electric cars and rockets).
So think of that large($100mm) factory as a research process , that can often fail.
Example: commercializing biotech often fails because it's not possible to control contamination and genetic evolution of the bacteria you grow in huge processes .
I ... assumed that there must be some way to automate and streamline almost everything, as long as the demand is there.
I have experienced many things over my life where this assumption was invalid. The most common reason I have seen that this assumption breaks down is that "demand" is expressly tied to "price." And more specifically when the price goes up, demand goes down (in the economic sense, the number of people willing to pay that price for a widget) and at some price the demand goes to zero. Thus "not possible" which is not literally true, it is only actually true.
Do a search on "Battery breakthrough" (Google Scholar will give you better results but the web search works too) and pick any one where the improvement is >= 50% improvement in any axis (cost, charging, capacity, weight, what ever). This works best for articles that are 5 or more years old (you have to allow some time for them to come up with a way to do it), and then try to find that breakthrough used in any battery today. Sometimes you will find a 'why we couldn't do it' article but mostly it will just not be there. Even though batteries that were 50% better on any axis would seem to have a market right? And then read through to find the 'hard bit' in the break through and go back to Google Scholar and see if you can find papers related to that bit. You will find "the rest of the story" as it is sometimes said where some thing prevents wider adoption than laboratory curiosity.
Here is a simpler technology, silicon anodes (announced in 2010) reviewed in 2018 [1], maybe hitting the market if they can go to production [2]. This is a simpler process and as it has matured its impact has gone down to 10 - 15%.
[1] https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.nanoen.2016.07.023
[2] [BMW] plans to incorporate Sila Nano batteries into vehicles by 2023 to boost energy capacity by 10 to 15 percent. --https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/16/sila-nanotechnologies-rai...
I knew this, but reading it again in this context makes many business decisions very clear.
Yeah. You can get this very clear in your mind by considering a few examples. Here's one.
How much demand is there for legal, genuine, clean $2 bills that are legal currency and have no meaningful restrictions (won't get you in trouble, nothing special about it)?
Barring anything I can think of, just your personal demand for such bills should be at least a billion of them... at the price point of $1.99 each. (For a profit of 1 billion * $0.01 = $10 million USD. There are some logistics involved, according to Google a U.S. dollar bill weighs about a gram, so a billion grams weigh in at around 1102 tons. So that is approximately $9074 per ton. But for $10 million you'll figure the logistics out.)
And now compare your personal demand for them at $2.00. That's probably about 0 in number. Why would you want even one of them, they're less useful than the $2 in other currency you bought it for.
So just your personal demand for a legal $2 bill is either a billion of them or 0 of them, depending on whether we're talking about the price point of $2.00 or $1.99.
Demand is at a given price point.
Why would batteries be different? If I find some way to make a battery better, 50% more efficient and/or 50% lighter, why can't I just dump $1-10bn into research/production and then dominate the market (likely worth 10-100x more)? Is there a fundamental technological reason (for some technologies/inventions at least), or is it just a matter of economics/management (too risky)?
I'm guessing this comment reads fairly unclear (my thoughts aren't particularly clear on this matter either), but hopefully it gets some of my point across.
Edit: petra gives a good example below - scaling of biological processes often fails; which makes sense because biology - we don't understand how life works, and it changes/evolves/moves by itself! But it seems that non-biological processes should be manageable, at least at this scale (i.e. not quantum/high-energy processes).
Yes and no, I understand your point. If I can restate it for you, your point is this "Anything that is invented can be improved with a variable amount of effort."
And I don't disagree with that point at all. Where we part ways is that I also believe that there are inventions that cannot be improved enough to actually be worth producing. They are "dead ends" in the parlance when the amount of effort needed to produce the thing (even with the improved process) is insufficient to make that thing worth doing.
My interest in batteries and battery chemistry comes from my interest in mobile robotics (from roomba sized to battlebot sized). So I've been following the market pretty closely since 1986 or so when I joined the Homebrew Robotics Club in the Bay Area. I have watched many battery "breakthroughs" go no where. And it isn't because the people didn't want them to go no where, they lost a lot of money that way[1].
I will grant you that these companies "improved" what they had done in the lab, but they never improved enough to actually be able to sell batteries and keep the company going. Which is what I am defining as "not possible."
If you would like to explore this topic further there is even a book on it [3]. Salient comment from that article "While countless breakthroughs have been announced over the last decade, time and again these advances failed to translate into commercial batteries."
[1] For instance, only 36 battery startups received more than $500,000 in funding since 2000, and of these only two returned more money than was invested into them --https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/consumer-electronics/po...
[2] Company: Aquion Energy
Select VC investors: Bill Gates, CapX Partners, Constellation Technology Ventures
Total disclosed funding: $196.6M
Company CEO, Scott Pearson, commented: “Creating a new electrochemistry and an associated battery platform at commercial scale is extremely complex, time-consuming, and very capital intensive. Despite our best efforts to fund the company and continue to fuel our growth, the Company has been unable to raise the growth capital needed to continue operating as a going concern.” -- https://www.cbinsights.com/research/biggest-startup-failures...
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534866/why-we-dont-have-b...
I'm reading a book about rockets right now ("Ignition"). It actually contains many funny stories about inventions and dead ends; how some substance seemed very promising, but then it turned out it corrodes steel very slowly; or how they abandoned a better fuel for a slightly worse one that was more practical (e.g. wouldn't freeze in the winter). I guess in general, we only hear/see the success stories, i.e. technology that is better, and could be put into production and scaled. As a software developer I might be a bit blind to that ;)
Scaling a solution to the travelling salesman problem would solve many other problems. The demand is definitely there. But many people believe it cannot be done.