[wolfekeeper]

Well the weather does has correlations, particularly seasonal and spatial. End of February to the beginning of March, I was watching it there was very little wind power over pretty much the whole of the Northern Hemisphere:

https://www.electricitymap.org/map

It's RARE but it DOES happen.

That's why NOBODY is, or should be suggesting we 100% rely on just wind with no backup or storage or generation diversity. Notably solar was doing pretty well. The more different sources of power you have the better. Not even nuclear is completely reliable, as Texas recently found out, and France found out a few years ago, when a large fraction of their nuclear fleet was taken out of service for 'checks'.

[Bored chemist]

there was very little wind power over pretty much the whole of the Northern Hemisphere

Just as well we have a spare hemisphere then.
But, yes you are right. Only the determinedly stupid would consider a system with only one form of supply.

[hamdani yusuf]

A massless battery, eh? Made of nothing, and strong enough to support something - wow. Never mind footling applications like transport, the entire world of civil engineering is your oyster!

Let me make it simpler so a 5yo can understand.
Imagine a normal battery car.
Take out its battery.
Take out its chassis.
Put the new strong battery shaped as the chassis.
Reassemble the car.

Can anyone help me make it even simpler so a 1yo can understand?

[Bored chemist]

Batteries for cars are traditionally made largely  of lead.
If you made the chassis of a car from lead, it would fall apart under its own weight.

[hamdani yusuf]

You might try putting a windmill in the middle of the Atlantic but you'd need an awful lot of concrete and steel just to reach the surface.

You might try floating solar panels.

[hamdani yusuf]

Batteries for cars are traditionally made largely  of lead.
If you made the chassis of a car from lead, it would fall apart under its own weight.

No commercial BEV now use lead as its main ingredient.
The strength comes from combination of battery shells and how they are packed together to form a battery unit.

[hamdani yusuf]

Those came out when I searched for massless battery on youtube.  It seems like many of us need to update our knowledge to catch up with latest progress of science and technology.

[alancalverd]

Like the French- from whom we buy electricity

Principally nuclear, and remarkably little. There are 5 such links to our nearest neighbors.The trade is actually two-way (and predates the EU!). We can buy up to 3 GW nuclear surplus in summer, and sell up to 3 GW  of gas backup power in winter, but nobody is interested in selling more. Right now, the trade is effectively zero, with 61% of UK power being gas, 20% nuclear, 8% biomass, 5% coal and less than 0.03% being imported. Tonight's wind is supplying less than 1% of current demand, all over western Europe, and I don't think the sun is shining.     

[alancalverd]

Massless batteries therefore seem to be a case of "ignoring the weight of the elephant".

So you want to use the battery case as the primary structural element of the car. Great, but that means you have to scrap the entire car every 3 years when the battery starts to fade. And the chassis has to be very stiff because battery plates don't like being bent or bumped. So we end up with a much greater weight of plastic in order to pretend that it doesn't exist. Then there's the intriguing problem of plate area: all the plates in series must have the same area to avoid hot spots at maximum load, which means all the structural elements must have the same cross section, which further increases the mass of the weightless battery because none can be thinner than the thickest!

[alancalverd]

You might try putting a windmill in the middle of the Atlantic but you'd need an awful lot of concrete and steel just to reach the surface.

You might try floating solar panels.

I "floated" that idea about 50 years ago, using a raft of solar panels to electrolyse sea water. You pump the oxygen back  into the water so the fish grow faster, and pipe the hydrogen to the shore where it becomes your primary fuel.

Alas, the ocean is not a static puddle of distilled water. Whatever horizontal surface you float on the sea will quickly get covered in salt spray and interesting biological stuff,  and the wind and waves are not kind to transparent glass or plastic. 

[alancalverd]

So ~6 kWh? You think six lousy kilowatt hours predominately taken over many hours in the early mornings is going to blow up the grid? LOL

When you have installed your 35,000,000 kerbside charging points you will need to generate and deliver 35,000,000 times 6 kWh over, say, 8 hours. Roughly 30 GW, or 65% of current grid nominal capacity.

You might also consider the effect of temperature on actual battery capacity. Quotes from a Tesla enthusiast:

Cold (anything below 7°c) outside temperatures will lower your car’s efficiency by anywhere from 10-40%, not only does the car need to keep the cabin warmer (obvious) but the #1 priority of your Tesla computer system is to keep your battery safe & long lasting so it needs to keep itself temperature controlled!
High (anything above 26°c) outside temperature, just like in cold conditions but in reverse, however, the efficiency drop is generally much lower, closer to 5-15% reduction of range. 

Yes, on a cold day (like most British mornings) the battery spends 10 - 40% of its power trying to keep itself and you warm, so you will need something closer to 8 - 10 kWh of charge to travel that magic 15 miles (assuming you want to come back as well). That doesn't leave much power in the grid for trivial things like trains, refrigeration or hospital lighting, but it might just be manageable if we switch off all the street lights.

[hamdani yusuf]

I "floated" that idea about 50 years ago, using a raft of solar panels to electrolyse sea water. You pump the oxygen back  into the water so the fish grow faster, and pipe the hydrogen to the shore where it becomes your primary fuel.

Alas, the ocean is not a static puddle of distilled water. Whatever horizontal surface you float on the sea will quickly get covered in salt spray and interesting biological stuff,  and the wind and waves are not kind to transparent glass or plastic.

Why should we go through a middleman, instead of directly use the electric energy or storing it into battery?
You can use drones to automatically make the cleaning as frequent as needed.

[hamdani yusuf]

Massless batteries therefore seem to be a case of "ignoring the weight of the elephant".

So you want to use the battery case as the primary structural element of the car. Great, but that means you have to scrap the entire car every 3 years when the battery starts to fade. And the chassis has to be very stiff because battery plates don't like being bent or bumped. So we end up with a much greater weight of plastic in order to pretend that it doesn't exist. Then there's the intriguing problem of plate area: all the plates in series must have the same area to avoid hot spots at maximum load, which means all the structural elements must have the same cross section, which further increases the mass of the weightless battery because none can be thinner than the thickest!

You don't seem to follow the most update battery technology. It can be made to last more than 10 years. Let's not underestimated the ability of AI designers. They can often help us think out of the box.

[wolfekeeper]

FWIW it's not in production yet, and for all I know may never be, but my understanding of the state-of-the-art in lithium ion battery technology is that Tesla's batteries in their labs have built-in cell heaters and can do a ten-minute charge from empty to full several thousand times without any significant loss of capacity. 😎

Apparently, high temperature was long thought to be the enemy of lithium batteries, but it turned out that heating the batteries up immediately before fast charging greatly reduces damage. If that works in the real world as well as it does in the lab, the next version battery packs are going to be really something.

[Bored chemist]

No commercial BEV now use lead as its main ingredient.

No car uses a chassis made of lithium either.

[alancalverd]

I would worry about integrating batteries into the chassis because if I hit a pothole or a gatepost (yes, it happens) I'd distort the plates, either creating an immediate short circuit and fire, or a hotspot that catches fire the next time I accelerate.

I would love to have an electric car. No use for work, but when I retire I could go to the shops or tear around the local countryside with mindboggling acceleration. I have offroad parking with 100 amp mains accessible, and as soon as Tesla become as reliable as Skoda, I'll be in the queue. But if the hoi polloi get them, someone will need to build an awful lot of windmills, a magic storage system, and lots of 13A sockets at the roadside. Or maybe a few more fossil-fuelled power stations.

The electric car is a theoretical partial solution to the problem of urban air quality - the other 50% being due to buses and trucks. But it is a long way from being a practical form of personal transport for all because we don't have a magic electricity tree, or even an inkling of how to make one.

[alancalverd]

Why should we go through a middleman, instead of directly use the electric energy or storing it into battery?

Because over 70% of energy use is not electrical, and a fair bit of electrical energy is used for heating, where hydrogen would be more efficient. Plus hydrogen storage is very cheap and simple.

[hamdani yusuf]

FWIW it's not in production yet, and for all I know may never be, but my understanding of the state-of-the-art in lithium ion battery technology is that Tesla's batteries in their labs have built-in cell heaters and can do a ten-minute charge from empty to full several thousand times without any significant loss of capacity. 😎

Apparently, high temperature was long thought to be the enemy of lithium batteries, but it turned out that heating the batteries up immediately before fast charging greatly reduces damage. If that works in the real world as well as it does in the lab, the next version battery packs are going to be really something.

Maybe not yet. Sandy Munro has researched Tesla's tabless battery pack and revealed the potential for structural energy storage.
Here is another research on it.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/09/21/tesla-battery-day-here-is-everything-i-think-will-be-announced/

[hamdani yusuf]

No commercial BEV now use lead as its main ingredient.

No car uses a chassis made of lithium either.

Lithium is not even the majority of currently existing battery packs. And there is no restrictions that future batteries must contain Lithium either. 

[hamdani yusuf]

I would worry about integrating batteries into the chassis because if I hit a pothole or a gatepost (yes, it happens) I'd distort the plates, either creating an immediate short circuit and fire, or a hotspot that catches fire the next time I accelerate.

Why do you think that those can't happen with currently existing battery, with dead mass chassis?
There is a demonstration video showing the safety of new model battery being safely cut into pieces using scissors while fully charged.