@dang, not only this heading is editorialized in a blatantly fanboyish manner, but there is absolutely no need to do so as CATL is literally the largest battery manufacturer and is supplier to almost everyone.
>> CATL is the largest battery manufacturing company, supplying battery for almost every high-end devices.<<
CATL's primary product is NCM and followed by LFP. Their NCM development is more or less stalled at NCM811 while other leaders NCMs like LG (NCMA), SKI (NMCA) have moved out further. Also BYD's LFPs are known to be superior to CATL's for higher C-rates, faster charging, and safety.
Definitely not limitless. Subsidies are only provided to get an industry to grow up. As they grow up and can increasingly fend for themselves, subsidies become progressively smaller.
There are a ton of other sectors where subsidies don't help nearly as much as the govt hopes. Until the US sanctions hit, subsidies for the semiconductor industry only had very limited effect.
>There are a ton of other sectors where subsidies don't help nearly as much as the govt hopes. Until the US sanctions hit, subsidies for the semiconductor industry only had very limited effect.
Probably some sectors are easier to grow if it only involves copying something that already exists, and outscaling/outpricing everyone else. Then this is (in most cases) is a purely money+organization problem.
But if it isn’t just copying/outscaling/outpricing issue, like replicating ASML’s EUV lithography, then yes, we have a problem.
70% of the profits are generated by older processes, not sub-14nm, and so are perfectly well serviceable using mature DUV litography which is much easier to "copy". But even there, subsidies did not yield much progress.
On the other hand, new energy vechicles are... well... new. There is no mature ecosystem to copy, a lot of things have to be newly developed. In this sector, subsidies have been massively successful.
The problem is mainly one of market pressure, not one of technical ability. Chinese semiconductor companies wanted the best suppliers, so they chose international suppliers rather than domestic suppliers. Domestic customers didn't buy from domestic chip designers. Domestic chip designers didn't manufacture with domestic fabs. Domestic fabs didn't use domestic equipment. As a result, domestic suppliers never got enough customers to practice and improve their processes, which is why they remained low-quality. It was a vicious circle which the Chinese govt tried to solve for years without much success. Then US sanctions came and all of a sudden, Chinese semiconductor companies had no choice but to work together with domestic suppliers: it was either shitty domestic suppliers or die. Nowadays you see domestic semiconductor equipment companies have something like 150-200% growth YoY, something which they previously could only have dreamt of. Domestic DUV litography was at 65+nm for a long time but now 24nm DUV litography (still good for ~60+% of market demand) is around the corner because they finally get enough practice.
People ascribe too much to this simplistic view of China only being able to copy or that copying is easy, and totally underestimate economic pressures.
>> Subsidies are only provided to get an industry to grow up.<<
Those subsidies only applied to domestic companies -- remember that the South Korean battery makers such as LG had about 50% of the Chinese market share and 9 out of top 10 local EV makers as customers until in 2015, the CCP more or less forced them out to protect BYD/CATL.
Because there is still the myth that Tesla has a secret sauce in their battery chemistry, and edge, and is not just using Pana, CATL and perhaps other vendor's cells?
The secret sauce isn't in the batteries themselves but the engineering of the entire drivetrain, the battery management system and so on.
Tesla is consistently in the top of EV drivetrain efficiency for their models, allowing them to go farther with less batteries, with the IONIQ being one of the few EVs that have been able to fight Tesla for the top spots.
> Tesla is consistently in the top of EV drivetrain efficiency for their models
From your link this doesn't seem to be true. The short range, non awd model 3 has great efficiency. Other model 3s are also good but clearly not anything particularly far ahead as there are a bunch of other models from other manufacturers with similar or better efficiency.
Looking at other Tesla models makes it clearer that they aren't anything particularly special. Even the model y, which is basically model 3 with minor body tweaks is basically middle of the road, model s and x are even worse.
Oh, so because of their high efficency they consistently cheat on their customers?
Their EPA ranges were found to be overstated across models, then there was that recent thing with falsified dashboard data.
I wouldn't say Tesla has advantages in any field, quite the opposite and mostly because of the Elon factor, which basically is just another synonym for NIH.
"Shenxing leverages the super electronic network cathode technology and fully nano-crystallized LFP cathode material to create a super-electronic network, which facilitates the extraction of lithium ions and the rapid response to charging signals."
Are these actual technical terms, or some sort of marketing speak?
Yes, different market segments. That one is aimed at the aviation industry where weight matters a lot and is worth a lot to customers.
LFP is technically a bit less energy dense than some other chemistries but it has cost as its big advantage which is why it is the go to choice for a lot of the mass produced mid range EVs. A cheap fast charging battery is going to be quite nice as it makes fast charging stops less disruptive. Which means the utility of EVs with smaller batteries increases. So what if you have to take a 10 minute break every few hundred miles? Not a big deal. You'd probably do that anyway if you value your health and sanity.
Usually on family road trips you don't get to decide when you're going to stop for a bio break. So with an EV you end up stopping twice (or more). With an ICE there is usually a gas station at the first stop.
Nice for expensive sports cars where cost doesn't matter. But everything else competes on cost, not weight. These high density batteries are going to be very premium priced for quite some time to come. Plenty of customers willing to pay that premium. High volume production of that things is likely some time away.
Catl also produces some sodium ion batteries. They have even less density than LFP but contain no lithium or other valuable materials. For mass production, cost is king. And with faster charging speeds, range becomes less important.
I thought lithium wasn't especially valuable, especially compared to the other things that go into a battery. I'd buy that sodium is cheaper though, with the amount of sodium salts that are knocking around the economy.
I'd like to know why aircraft have batteries at all... When you have three huge jet engines, there should be no need for batteries on an aircraft where every kilogram saved is worth tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the plane.
I found the concept of Grice's Maxims the other day, and it feels very relevant. Everyone is getting triggered because this fails the maxim of relation.
>Grice's four maxims of conversation, called the Gricean maxims—quantity, quality, relation, and manner.
>Be relevant — i.e., one should ensure that all the information they provide is relevant to the current exchange; therefore omitting any irrelevant information.
There seems to be no indication of the power demands of charging at this rate. I don't have the figures to do the maths but I suspect a normal household supply could not support this. Anyone?
I'm not an engineer but I attempted to do some napkin math in my comment in a previous topic about this CATL battery. I'll copy/paste:
Assuming 400km worth of charge needs maybe 60 kw/h of energy, to deliver that amount of energy in 10 minutes would require at least 360kw charger. Charging just a few cars simultaneously will require megawatts of power.
I wonder what are the implications in terms of city infrastructure or investment costs to building charging stations for that.
V3 Superchargers are 250 kW per car with 1MW power cabinets.
The issue at the moment is that grids in a lot of places in the world can't keep up with the connection requests, and this is indeed mainly due to not being able to upgrade transmission capacity fast enough.
One of the boring ways to upgrade the grid is to raise the transmission limits set to prevent overheating in the summer when it's cold in the winter.
Reminds me of "the duck curve" where the worry was that gas plants couldn't ramp output fast enough. There were many exciting high tech solutions but one solution was just to ask the gas plants if they could ramp faster. Turns out they could, they'd just not needed to before.
Seems to be a recurring pattern: you can hyperventilate about how something is hard or impossible or you can ask some engineers if they can improve things. If you get really desperate you can pay people for coming up with solutions and create a market. Of course that all assumes you actually want to solve the problem.
edit: recent third example. Grid connection queues in England had zombie projects in them because you got fined if you left the queue. They had an amnesty and a bunch off them dropped out moving up dates for real projects.
Yup, this is because most things that are engineered have tolerances in them. But pushing the envelope will only get you so far, at some point you're going to run up against hard physical limits (in this case with grid transmission capacity).
The National Grid connection queue is still a huge bottleneck for renewable and battery developers. The amnesty helped but at the end of the day, the overhead lines, substations and transformers need to be upgraded.
At least in the UK there's quite some visibility into the queue and required and ongoing works. Here in Europe it's like a black box.
However, a household supply could supply substantially more with smarter software. Specifically, currently we rate power supplies with a decent safety margin for worst-case conditions.
However, your '100 amp' power supply can probably supply 200 amps on a freezing cold day (which helps keep cables cool). It can probably supply more than rated if your neighbours aren't using much (since your and your neighbours power connections may share cables).
If you or your neighbours have rooftop solar, thats power going the other direction, which cancels out some power use - allowing you to charge even faster.
If software could take these factors into account, we could get a lot more power to where it needs to be. Currently rules don't allow such things though.
Probably not, but does it matter? When parking at home, your car usually is a few hours at rest anyway. This is interesting for charging at a service station.
They say 4C and a Model 3 battery pack is apparently 60kWh so that would be 240kW. That's ignoring inefficiency though, so we're talking significant fractions of a megawatt to charge one car.
250 to 350kW chargers are already in common use. And batteries that charge this fast too. What's news here is that they've done it on an LFP battery which is the cheaper kind of lithium chemistry.
Lipo chemistries used in hobby applications are often rated at 5C charging for example versus 4C here.
To get a good comparison in a car we need a manufacturer to actually do the development work and release a car that can be tested in real world conditions. There are the temperature limitations the press release already mentions and also limits to avoid range loss from fast charging over the life of the car.