GroovyGeek

Rapid Transition to Grid Enabled Vehicles Not Possible or Desirable

I fully share everyone's suspicion of most things nano as pure and unadulterated hype. I work for a large hi-tech company and circa 2003 I jokingly declared in a review meeting that from now on the fairly mundane material I was working on should be referred to as "biologically inspired nano-structured insulator" and spent a few minutes justifying the proposal. The humor was lost on the audience who was seriously invested in nano-hype. What about this:

amprius.com/
www.nature.com/nnano/j...

The "nano" piece here is almost an after-thought and merely a means of enabling the silicon to absorb the tremendous volume expansion upon lithiation. The closest analogy I can come up with is a field of grass. You can run a heavy object over it, it will bend, but a short while later it will be as if nothing ever happened. True, this one is also looks to be mostly a lab concept at this time, but it does have a better feel to it than most other nano-hype.

P.S. For some reason SA will not accept my comment, advance apologies if this shows up 10 times on the thread. Trying one last time :-)

Rapid Transition to Grid Enabled Vehicles Not Possible or Desirable

A comment and a question about EVs and batteries in general:

1) The primary supplier of rare earths is .... China. If the US thinks it is precariously dependent on oil from the Middle East, wait till it becomes dependent on China for both deficit financing and critical commodities.

2) There are plausibly sounding technologies under development to increase storage capacity of Li electrodes by multiples of 2-4, not 10-15%. They all rely in one form or another on "nano-structured" silicon. Any opinion on them?