If Li-ion can be put in cars, armor-plated and cooled, for $100/KWh, I don't get why anyone thinks that something with lower power/energy density requirements (like the EOS zinc battery) can't support an adequately buffered grid at a substantially lower cost. IMHO, Duke building a 20 GWh storage facility with some renewable offtake agreements is a far more effective use of their massive endowment and engineering prowess.

This may trickle down to the average John Doe in terms of "light-weighting [and] innovative chassis structures". The traditional mass-market companies are all pushing to market on their existing chassis (the E-Hummer for crying out loud!) but at some point the economics of a lighter car will be overwhelming.

So does it exceed "neat o-ring swelling" in a good way or a bad way?

There's a lot of press and hype around nuclear these days, but all this is vaporware. The molten salt reactors are plausible but there is no vast body of long term data about the materials of the containment vessels. The competing tech is coming up with a decent grid scale battery to buffer ridiculously cheap renewables and make them dispatchable. I'd say the latter is by far the lighter technical lift. Relatively complex Li-ion is headed under$100/KWh since sufficient demand appeared. Zinc batteries should beat that handily.

Ramping up sustainable jet fuel seems to be the lighter technical lift than cryo-tanks and altered jet engines. That can get you to carbon neutral. NOX abatement can also be enhanced since you have more control of the feedstocks than you do with petroleum refining. I would guess jet manufacturers and their customers would far prefer the former than the latter. Capital is cowardly and 'drop-in replacement' is a comforting phrase.

I imagine the panels are heavier but if the mean time between failure is high enough, this is flirting with viability for some PV farms.

Engineer-Poet, I think we are talking about different things here. Can I presume from your "I TOLD YOU SO" line that you felt the that the NEM agreements would come to tears since the economics were bound to go sideways at some point? I certainly concur. I also see these NEM programs (essentially an offtake guarantee) as a small example of the greatest challenge to a renewable-friendly grid being the current structure of local operators and their place as issuers of (really really close to) safe assets. I can't see it happening without the Fed buying all the existing bonds and even then , I don't see the local operators going away without a fight. The only certainty is that everyone will accuse everyone else of being a Socialist. So I stand by my assertion that in the grand scheme of the national green grid of tomorrow, the Solar Rollout 1.0 effectively did no more than lease roof space I also can't agree that batteries will be too expensive to perform adequate buffering for the grid though they may be so today. It's like Amory Lovins said back when "Fuel cells are expensive because they're all hand-made by PhDs". If Li-ion, with its heat management and density requirements can drop under $100/KWh at the pack level, I can't imagine zinc or flow batteries shouldn't beat that handily.

IMHO, the whole policy of ownership was a political stunt founded more in Libertarian derp than any kind of sound engineering or economics. What's really happening is that the utility is using someones roof to put up PV. If they just said this up front and paid rent, this debate would be moot. Instead, they created this Kabuki theater around a private chunk of infrastructure and hilarity ensures. One can make the case for outlying areas, but the demographic trend is to urbs and burbs. Utilities have to build for the worst, meaning they need to be able to back up all the "private" capacity. Also, given the option, most people would rather not own extra hardware. In many urban areas, it's thoroughly impractical. The consumer view of "electricity comes from the wall" is a preferred and workable illusion. A grid built on intermittent renewables is bound to have a large amount of storage to act as buffers. All the economies of scale (e.g. redundance, maintenance, upgrades) argue for the utilities to worry about banking and dispatching excess.

Certainly sounds like Quantumscape is not living up to the hype.

I'm stuck on the "80% of 45%" number. Is that all-in cost to deliver a m^3 to the buyer? Bloom's genius is having discovered how to use rust instead of platinum with the aid of good thermal management. I can see how they could use a CS plant that's already built to their advantage, but as renewables are so dirt cheap these days, it seems that soon the cost of extra electricity will be less than building a relatively complex CS plant.

Any word on the battery size and composition? Commuter planes are expected to get back in the air as quickly as possible.

I don't get it. Solar panels and wind turbines are not impervious surfaces, and you don't put them in major cities. As a New Mexico resident, let me say that we can easily accommodate the 50K sq km to generate 1TW on land fit to grow only the scrubbiest of scrub and vinegaroons.

Rather than bewail the terror of woke-ism, I'll go back to a paleo-con talking point: This is a wrong-headed demand side approach rather than a clearly superior supply side approach. To start I will assert that grid-storage is a far lighter technical lift than (e.g.) SMRs. An HVDC scaffold buffered with a ample storage, fueled by very cheap solar from the Southwest deserts and the Texas-to-North Dakota wind corridor (less appealingly known as "Tornado Alley"), and buried along the sides of the Interstates is IMHO the more obvious choice.

I see several articles but none mention power output. Has anyone seen anything?

If Moselle's projected cost that beats the incumbent "evaporation of Chilean lakes", this would bust open the geothermal/wastewater lithium resource. Of course, as a New Mexico resident, I would be remiss not to mention that this idea was stolen from Wile Coyote's attempt to bind steel pellets with a roadrunner and extract it using an Acme magnet.

This development looks to me like Musk playing Gates' game at Microsoft: "omnipresent, good enough, and cheaper for a reasonable time into the future": with the aqueous electrolyte 18650 cells upon which he has bet so heavily. It looks like the other auto-makers are looking at 2025 for solid-state batteries but if Tesla is in the market with something nearly as good but much cheaper, he can squeeze them out.

And here is the buried lede "hydrogen engines also have the potential to relay the fun of driving, including through sounds and vibrations, Toyota says." This is why electric motorcycle engines will never make it into Harleys. For certain classes of vehicle, NVH is a feature, not a bug.

I've been reading about the Prieto battery on this site for over a decade. It's great to see that they came through the 'entrepreneurial valley of death' and are on the verge of going commercial. The website doesn't give a Wh/kg energy density but says that the copper foam is 98% air and has an energy density of 650 Wh/l, so at 9kg/L, I guess a 65 kWh battery needs around 18 kg of copper.

I'm dubious about the commercial prospects. I suspect that a healthy chunk of NVH is considered a crucial feature, not a bug, to most motorcycle enthusiasts.

Cuberg 's website says their liquid electrolyte is "non-flammable", so that seems the be the buried lede. Usually liquid electrolytes the imply limits on fast-charging and the need for strong temperature control and fire-proofing,

A lightweight genset good enough for a pure electric-drive hybrid was a Holy Grail back in the day. Jaguar built a supercar using a pair of 35kW Bladon jets for the purpose, and I was fond of the MSU Wave Disc concept - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2009/10/wave-disc-engines.html . Since the engines only had to charge the battery ergo could spin at a single optimized speed, turbines suggested themselves. These days, this would seem like a 'plan B' bet against fast charging solid-state batteries. Without range anxiety, what's the market for a range extender? TBT, I'm a happy owner of a Honda Clarity PHEV.

They should market it in the US as the E(h?)-car.

I don't get the sudden deluge of hydrogen news is. It's very hard to conceive that cryogenic hydrogen is being considered for any kind of broad storage deployment. F'rinstance the relative benefit of cryogenic hydrogen vs metal hydrides was pretty well demonstrated between Ivy Mike and Castle Bravo in the early 50's.

Did anything become of the burnt chicken feathers? https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.highlight/abstract/9002/report/F

When did liquefying and storing hydrogen become cheap and lightweight?