6 Comments

Great article! I noticed you're focusing on gravimetric energy density here. What do you think the importance of volumetric energy density is? Enovix has an interesting lithium silicon battery with great volumetric energy density (~900 Wh/L) but so-so gravimetric energy density (~290 Wh/kg). Those batteries also have great charge times and decent cycle life - but without better gravimetric energy density, can those batteries work in EVs?

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Excellent piece. Kind of curious as to where green hydrogen would fit in comparison (as a store of energy). Much less efficient, I assume?

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Super illuminating and clear post, thank you!

Do you have a sense for how mature each of these technologies is? “These are in every phone, whereas these ones are still in the lab”

And, correlatedly, of the tech risk of each technology? “We still don’t know if we’ll be able to make these not burst into flames yet..”

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Good post. It would be interesting to differentiate between currently achievable energy densities and max theoretical energy densities on the first chart.

On the second chart, I think you should also include iron-sodium redox flow, like ESS.

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> So we should expect energy densities measured in the lab to be underestimates, but also expect energy densities to decline somewhat as batteries are manufactured at scale and the design is tweaked.

Sorry, is this backwards?

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whoops, yes, fixed.

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