Can you help parse the specific energy in terms of Wh/Kg? I feel like I’m doing something wrong since I keep arriving at numbers about an order of magnitude better than current lithium tech.
They claim a full size battery has a "possibility" to reach 800 Wh/L. I'll just use 800 for illustration. They don't report the specific gravity of a full battery, but for other lithium ion batteries a specific gravity of 2.5 - 3.0 might be reasonable.
800 / 2.5 would be 320 Wh/kg.
800 / 3.0 would be 267 Wh/kg.
Both numbers are quite good, as batteries go, but not an order of magnitude higher than what's available now.
An order of magnitude might be really hard and may be impossible to reach *1. Price, charging speed, and lifetime have more space. 5X charging speed is huge for EV.
pause the screen at 2:49- he's calculating the specific energy for a very specific chemistry, lithium cobalt oxide with a carbon anode. EVs don't even use that chemistry. It's more appropriate to use a more general formula.
Here's the most general possible one: only lithium. Each lithium atom gives up one electron, at some voltage. The standard electrode reference voltage of lithium is 3.04 volts. That works out to 26.8 amp-hours per mole, and 81.47 Wh/mole. A mole of lithium weighs 6.941 grams. The end result is 11.74 kWh/kg. That's the absolute, utter maximum energy density for a closed system battery (which is why li-air can exceed that figure).
I am continually surprised by how quickly capacity keeps increasing towards that. Battery capacity will easily double with tech quite similar to current, and 10x would not surprise me within my lifetime.
