from Hacker News

Cheap zinc/manganese battery being developed commercially

by porsupah on 11/8/19, 2:00 PM with 34 comments

• by scottlocklin on 11/8/19, 4:17 PM

  Zinc/manganese has been around for decades; in fact, it's the standard issue disposable battery:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_battery

  "An alkaline battery (IEC code: L) is a type of primary battery which derives its energy from the reaction between zinc metal and manganese dioxide."

  The new permutation which allegedly ups the energy density and allows it to be safely recharged supposedly uses a different electrolyte with more manganese ions. The research has been funded in the West for decades, with some interesting new results in 2017. Of course, this is one of those "submarine" "news" articles which originated in someone's marketing department, so it's not entirely clear it's going to be a useful result or yet another pile of woo hoping to hit "human informational centipede" the way a lot of recent woo has.

• by nazgulnarsil on 11/8/19, 3:20 PM

  Reminder: if an article about breakthrough battery tech touts one of energy density, number of cycles, cost, discharge/charge rate, while conspicuously not mentioning the others there is a good reason for that...

• by nayuki on 11/8/19, 3:57 PM

  Oddly enough, non-rechargeable alkaline batteries already use zinc and manganese (dioxide) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_battery ).

  The article talks about solar energy storage, vehicle batteries, and comparisons with lithium ion. The article doesn't explicitly say they're developing a type of rechargeable battery, but that seems to be implied by context.

  Anyway, it would be nice to see lead-acid batteries phased out someday and reduce the usage of lead in human activities.

• by rkangel on 11/8/19, 3:48 PM

  $1m is a tiny amount to bring a battery to manufacture. That number is about what it costs to set up production to have a LiPo battery in a specific shape for your electronics.

  If they had said $100m then I'd believe that there was finally going to be a serious competitor to the status quo on batteries.

• by mafm on 11/8/19, 3:33 PM

  It seems like there's some competition in this space after an initial breakthrough in 2016.

  https://newatlas.com/rechargeable-zinc-manganese-battery-pnn...

  http://enerpoly.com/technology/

• by Tade0 on 11/8/19, 6:27 PM

  If anyone's interested here's an actual company selling a real Zinc-air product:

  https://eosenergystorage.com/about-eos/

  Two largest downsides of this technology are:

  1. Round-trip efficiency of 75%.

  2. Low power density.

  Cost and cycle life are great though - should be great for grid storage.

• by JoeAltmaier on 11/8/19, 8:48 PM

  Energy density per $ is not the metric for new transportation storage. Its kWh/pound that's critical. They don't mention it?

• by privateSFacct on 11/8/19, 4:49 PM

  Battery breakthrough announcements from marketing departments with not a SINGLE commercial sale should be banned from HN.

• by woodandsteel on 11/9/19, 12:23 AM

  For many years now at least once a week there has been an announcement of a breakthrough new battery technology that is going to revolutionize energy storage. But in spite of all these purported breakthroughs, we are still stuck with li-ion (though it has been improving steadily).

  I think it would be nice if there was a site that tracked all these announcements, that is had a listing of all of them and how each has done in the following years.

• by baybal2 on 11/8/19, 7:36 PM

  I can not imagine them reaching that cost even in China. That $10 per kWh is basically the material cost.

  On other hand, you can already source lithium batteries of cheaper varieties at below $100 per kWh in large wholesale quantities in China

• by b34r on 11/8/19, 3:22 PM

  Even if they don’t last as long as li-ion batteries the environmental/health friendly aspects of this technology might be useful.

  But yeah, curious to see how it shakes out in practical application.

• by KaiserPro on 11/8/19, 7:07 PM

  what is the round trip efficiency of this "breakthrough"?

  whats the energy density?

  finally lifespan?

• by rbx on 11/8/19, 3:36 PM

  Zinc is very important in the diet and its deficiency is very common. Our food is already becoming scarce in zinc, potentially needing supplements from mined minerals. But these are not projected to last very long either [1]. This doesn't make me very excited for using it for batteries at all.

  [1] https://www.iatp.org/documents/scarcity-of-micronutrients-in...