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Comment by chimen | Hacker News Reader

Surprised how "dead" this industry is. I remember having Lithium-Ion batteries since I was in high school which was more than 20 years ago (and some Li-Po until then). Everything is leaps and bounds since then but not the batteries. Seems like a massive disconnect to me but I'm no chemist or researcher in this field.

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Energy density is ~8 times higher than in 2008 at 1/10th the price. That's more progress than we've made in single-core performance in the same timeframe.

Sources:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-apri...

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...

https://mlech26l.github.io/pages/2020/12/17/cpus.html

Did you mean 'more progress'?

Yes I did.

Any idea why utiliy-scale is so much more expensive than automotive?

Fire control, temperature control, chemical safety systems, daily 2-3C (half hour to 20 minute) charge and discharge rates, industrial grid scale high voltage grid forming inverters. And finally, the auto-makers got to the front of the queue for raw materials before prices spiked (and the ones that do both just take the profit).

Expect more consistent prices in Q3 2023 once the end of the lithium bubble works its way through the system.

That has to be an astroturfer that posted that comment.

Compare a power tool battery from any of the major brands from 20 years ago to the ones today. It's still lithium, but real performance is night and day.

It's definitely not "dead". As commented above me, there have been massive improvements.

20 years ago laptops had two hours of battery life. Today a MacBook has 20+ hours of battery life. Obviously many components have become more efficient, but battery improvements have also contributed to that large increase in battery capacity.

The iBook G3 had a 45Wh battery which is only slightly less than a M2 air, and barely under half of the maximum you can take on a plane. Battery development has led to smaller, lighter and cheaper batteries in laptops but not really to an increase in capacity.

Because Apple realised that a thin and small laptop sells better than a chunky one. Make a Mac Book the sane size as the iBook G3 and you could have a week's worth of battery.

But then you wouldn't be allowed to carry it on a plane. The limitation is not tecnological, is regulatory.

Many laptops now are 99.6 Watt hours.

The 100Wh battery limit means they have little incentive to further improve battery technology. Any increased storage capacity wouldn't be legal to fly with, so all it could do is make the laptop very slightly thinner or lighter.

Lots of fields have run into fundamental physical limits that pause progress. Rocketry is another. In the 1950s we pretty much figured out how to throw gas out the back as fast as possible, and so not much has happened since that improves rocket performance. We did finally figure out how to reuse a bit of the rocket affordably though so that has been nice.

similarly airplanes stopped getting faster because we hit the point where the atmosphere starts melting you to death, and not much can be done about that.

battery chemistry is hardly dead though, since 20 years ago there have been all kinds of improvements in different directions. Just no big leaps. But the little improvements add up.

> similarly airplanes stopped getting faster because we hit the point where the atmosphere starts melting you to death, and not much can be done about that.

While I agree with your point in general, have to nitpick here. Thermal protection is mostly solved problem by now (think Space Shuttles and other reentry vehicles). Commercial airplanes stopped getting faster because they hit a sweet spot between speed and fuel consumption. Military airplanes are stuck because hypersonic aerodynamics is very hard and different from subsonic/sonic/supersonic ones.

Rocketry progress stopped because world governments cut back funding dramatically in the 1960's, and private demand for rocket launches isn't much.

Aeroplanes stopped developing because the whole industry is now highly regulated. The barrier to getting a new type of plane/engine design to market is beyond what pretty much all startups are capable of. That's why we still fly some planes like cessna designed in the 1960's, back when regulation was more lax.

I don't think either rockets nor planes are anywhere near fundamental physical limits if we took away the 'human' limiting factors.

2000 li ion batteries are the same as modern li ion batteries the same way a Volkswagen golf 4 is the same as a golf 8, aka they're not

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