We’re all used to it by now, but I’d just like to reflect on how insanely power-packed lithium ion batteries are, and everything that’s afforded us. I’m trying to think of a gadget, a hobby, or nearly anything in my house that’s not touched by the battery chemistry.
I’m looking at my portable wireless keyboard in front of me, with a LiPo pack inside. Oddly enough, I’m charging it with a LiPo-based power bank, simply because the cable to the nearest USB-C adapter is too short. A gaming console, cell phone, and a DSLR camera are all within arms reach and powered with lithium.
It’s not just consumer stuff either. I fly FPV quads and airplanes for fun when I can, and of course those are made entirely possible by the combination of smaller brushless DC motors and their drivers, and the high-power-density LiPo packs that power them. For field recharging, I have a huge self-made LiIon pack that can keep them all in the air all day. These days, LiPo and LiIon tech is the heart of hacker projects big and small. Heck, we even powered this year’s Hackaday Supercon badge with a LiPo that allowed it to run all weekend on a charge for many folks, where in the past swapping out AAs during the event was commonplace.
The application that still blows my mind is that we recently got a solar installation on our roof, which means a huge LiFePO battery in the basement. And while it’s one thing to power noisy little quads on the battery tech, it somehow seems another to power our entire house, for multiple hours per day, from a battery. Granted it’s not a couple of AAA cells in a little black plastic box, but it’s simply amazing to run a washing machine, the fridge, the stove, and even the heating off of what amounts to a battery pack.
Of course, I’m aware of the costs of producing the cells, both in terms of money and the environmental damage. It’s not a free lunch, and I’m looking forward to both cleaner and cheaper energy storage chemistries in the future. But for now, I’m still in awe of the many options that lithium-based battery chemistry has brought us. May your pillows remain non-spicy!
When I was a kid, I used to ask my father why airplanes (toy or otherwise) couldn’t use batteries, and he (he was a thermodynamics expert then working at NASA) explained that batteries didn’t have the necessary energy density and likely never would. He was a wise man so I took most of what he said as gospel. So you can imagine my surprise the first time I saw a battery-powered toy take flight. It was like seeing a unicorn. That’s how unreasonable lithium-ion batteries are.
I seem to remember a small, red plastic toy airplane with AA batteries…still needed a tether..early 1970s
In terms of batteries
https://phys.org/news/2026-03-proof-concept-quantum-battery-faster.html
Energy extraction?
https://phys.org/news/2026-03-blur-reverse-quantum.html
Sonny White kind of stuff real after all?
Talk about batteries:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/new-battery-technologies.30024/
“I seem to remember a small, red plastic toy airplane with AA batteries…still needed a tether..early 1970s”
Are you thinking of the VertiBird? https://www.fabtintoys.com/vertibird/
I never owned one myself, but I knew kids that did, and was always jealous.
Apparently, there a simulator out there: https://archive.org/details/vertisim
I imagine those AA batteries don’t last very long, but if daddy is a 1970s millionaire or a Russian oligarch that isn’t much of a problem
The usual “quantum does everything weird” 😁
About the toy tether, i think that’s more because cheap control/balancing electronics wasn’t there until smartphones.
Iirc: no, the tether was used also to get the power from the base with the batteries to the bird. In addition to control, of course.
Which addresses the power density issue, from a certain point of view at least.
And it’s not just the batteries!
Today it’s much easier to make the plane both lighter and more tougher. At the same time we have better ideas of aerodynamics and the tools to shape components accordingly.
So much improvement across all fields compound!
The guys that were trying to perfect steam powered aircraft would have been really impressed.
I “FP” fly a Pipistrel Velis Electro – it’s a cute little Slovenian light aircraft that can carry two people for close to an hour and it’s COMPLETELY electric, courtesy of a pair of liquid cooled lithiums to the tune of about 22 kWh, outputting close to 60 kW at full throttle for takeoff. It’s really quiet remarkable, and I’m keenly aware that the advances in power and energy density over the years, not to mention the Nd magnets are what have made anything like this even remotely possible.
Still, the plane is has serious issues with commercial practicality due to the short duration of flight and 3+ hour charge time, but there’s only room for improvement.
Looking forward to this aspect of the future (anyway)
Pretty sure the power plant of an aircraft is far and away the most complex, expensive and arguably the most mission critical in terms of reliability requirements, not to mention cost of maint, etc.
I fly gliders exclusively which has none of that. The highest performing glider allll made of modern composite and slick as heck is about as expensive as an average single engine aircraft and infinitely cheaper to fly, maintain and use. And not that long ago decent average glider total costs was about $15k, maybe $20. And it’s very easy on the airframe.
And with gliders at least there’s no worries about a hour of flight time. That’s actually quite fun.
I foresee that in the future the cost of electric sport aircraft will drop so low that even for light puddle jumper commercial operations it may even be economically viable to have three aircraft for the current cost of one and since daylight flights are definitely a thing, solar powered ground recharging is a really possible probably, since supply and demand times are better matched up compared to domestic homes
Airliners can vent JP to get lighter.
Battery driven craft are as heavy landing as taking off.
just put a hole in the pilots seat and show him a scary error message to reduce weight
😂
Use a parachute to drop the discharged battery, or have a detachable booster that can land autonomously (or br remote) immediately after takeoff.
The e-Pipestrel is incredible! I’ve seen an Everything Electric show about it! Really sad that the Eviation Alice is basically mothballed though!
https://youtu.be/YdfYXlUK6is
The ideal application for short range electric airplane would be to drop off skydivers. But even for a small skydive club dropping off only one skydiver at a time makes it impractical.
The battery charge time can be remedied with swappable batteries. I’m not sure whether you’d need 2, 3 or 4 battery packs to accommodate for enough charge time, but the batteries would be used heavily (The quickest trip to 3.5km (10k ft) and back) and as many trips as daylight allows. As a result, you will wear out the battery packs relatively quickly, so having to buy multiple up front is then only a relatively small inconvenience.
Cost of the airplane, fuel and maintenance is a huge factor for skydive clubs. And yet this is very rare. If it were practical and economic, then skydive clubs would flock to this like flies on shit.
Another application can be to tow gliders. No passenger seat needed, but I guess you need a lot of motor power to tow another plane. Electric is also very rare here as far as I know.
I think the ideal solution for skydiving would be a spherical airship with an internal helium bladder and a deflation compressor to allow the helium volume to be tuned so that the craft would be weightless during electric fan powered ascent to 10-15k feet with as many skydivers as it was designed to carry, then reduced during rapid but controlled descent after they had jumped and fallen a safe distance from the craft. 6 fans, three vertical and three horizontally oriented and used as needed to counter wind drift and maintain ideal position relative to the drop zone.
A tethered hot air baloon and a winch would also do it. Maybe add a small balloon halfway the winch line to hold it up a bit, so there is no chance ever of a skydiver hitting the winch line on the way down.
Do note that the sky is closed for skydivers when there is too much wind (or other bad weather). It’s pretty much a blue skies sport. Not even skydiving when it’s cloudy,
Your second balloon, to hold the tether aside, idea is hilarious. The second segment of the tether would not magically BOTH hold the jump balloon, and keep it waay off to the side of the ground line. The best you could hope for is a diagonal orientation, which could be accomplished without the intermediate balloon.
Additionally Given Low-level clouds typically sit below 6,500 feet, mid-level clouds between 6,500 and 23,000 feet, and high-level clouds above 15,000 feet, you would only be allowed, by FAA regulations, to operate your tethered balloon on nearly cloudless days as tethered balloons are prohibited from operation within 500 feet of cloud bottoms.
I disagree with the “blue sky activity” comment. Cloudy day jumping is quite common as long as its not raining. And as to wind, drop zones generally only hold when windspeed at ground level exceeds 25mph. In most inland, low-ground elevation locations, wind speeds exceeding 25 mph occur less than 1% to 5% of the time.
Without the vertical lift fans I described, you would also have to dramatically increase the gas envelope to get a reasonable lift time, and unless you include the gas compression system I mentioned you will be throwing HUGE energy trying to get the balloon back down in a reasonable time to be competitive with airplane based skydiving operations.
… a trebuchet?
Modern problems require ancient solutions.
A Canadian local airline, Harbour Air, has converted a Beaver floatplane to battery-electric drive. It has made many demonstration flights and is awaiting certification for commercial service.
https://harbourair.com/going-electric/?tab=eBeaver%2520Gallery
“we recently got a solar installation on our roof, which means a huge LiFePo battery in the basement”
That’s interesting, because I have a solar installation on my roof, but for me it somehow doesn’t mean I have a huge LiFePo battery in my basement…
There should be a huge LiFePo battery somewhere, either in your basement or on the grid, otherwise that solar power might be wasted. I was generating 1.3kW for about 4 hours today at the same time my house load was 270W. The other 4kWh got stored and will cook dinner.
Net metering, any of my excess production gets sold back to the company.
If it goes back on the grid there are other options than LiFePo batteries for storage.
Either way, I just found it amusing to suggest that rooftop solar automatically means you have a giant battery in your basement, I’d wager that far more people than not have solar without a personal battery.
We have 4kW of Solar PV, but no battery. The excess goes straight back to the grid and we get paid 13p/kWh for it. Actually, they assume we use 50%, so we just send the meter reading every quarter and then we get paid. This is in the UK.
It doesn’t and the converse is true. You can do a battery install and not use solar.
The cost and energy density of the battery packs for home use make me advise friends not to pay the $10,000++ to upgrade their their utility feed to 200 amps but instead run a battery and invertor off a 20 amp breaker in their 100 amp panel and downstream have a new 200 amp panel. It’s cheaper and they get battery backup in a power outage. Win/win.
It’s really outside the box that now you can have a smaller feeder breaker going into a circuit than its output panel. The only limit is the kilowatt hours of the battery and your average power demand over the use case of the battery /day.
Basement is not code acceptable in Canada. Indoors limited to 1kW. That puts a lot of the EcoFlow and other home backup units in contravention. The issue occurs if the battery deflagrates, vents and the flammable gases find ignition… BOOM… like a NG leak, your building envelop pops like a ballon… or the battery ignites like rocket fuel. This is why the garage is used. The doors can burst outward to release pressure, and there is a firewall to the occupied area to give you time to escape.
1 kWh storage is the limit. This is in the Canadian Electrical Code Rule 64-91. In the newer 2024 edition, this is raised to 20kWh per unit when installed under specific conditions. According to AI, NEC doesn’t have this limit, instead refers to UL9540A demonstrated fire propagation, room construction, ventilation, etc but seems to refer to individual assessements by AHJ.
Maybe this is an insurance issue if something bad happens to your own house due to a huge Lithium BESS in your basement?
A fire or explosion isn’t really a big risk with LiFePO4 batteries. They will release toxic fumes if you abuse them badly enough, so venting the enclosure outside would be a good idea.
I definitely wouldn’t want a flooded lead acid or regular lithium ion battery bank in my basement though.
The fact that my millimeter thin all-device slab that’s constantly connected to the collective online conciousness of humankind can run for a few days with gigahertz of CPU power, gigabytes of RAM, and hundreds of, even a thousand gigabytes of storage is insane.
And people still complain that they have to recharge every few days…..
We have what was just a few decades ago considered a supercomputer in our pockets powered by a little silver pouch that mostly doesn’t go pop, it’s literally science fiction in our hands.
Even Star Trek didn’t predict the utility of the smartphone.
I once had a Psion organzer. It ran 30+ active hours on two AA Ni-CD cells, and they were swapped for fresh ones in half a minute. I had to swap the batteries about once a month. Those modern phones have a horrible battery life.
I would still be using my Psion if it’s software was up to date and compatible with my Linux box and it had a decent contrast on it’s LCD. Color screen is nice when all other factors are neglected, but I’d much rather have a transflective monochrome LCD than a battery eating color LCD.
Another annoyance was the sliding keyboard on the Psion. It looked fancy, but it made the balance awkward to hold it in your hands and type on the keyboard with your thumbs. A simple folding clamshell is much better (and simpler, more durable and compact) in this regard.
oh yeah, the Psion 5mx was a marvel. I still have mine and take it out to fondle it occasionally. I mostly used it for offline reading articles downloaded from the web when I went to the bathroom at work circa 1999. (I was working in a skyscraper in San Diego and there was a floor that was gutted that nobody went to, but it had perfectly good bathrooms, and that was where I would go.)
Natch, my 7.6″ Galaxy Fold2 runs 8-12 hours a day sometimes playing 2 concurrent video streams and downloading install ISO and it is rare for it to last the whole 12. I may be using it too heavily, who knows. Battery is still not enough.
Still waiting for the Google Glass, sad they had to put a camera on that and it got into bad press as a body cam.
Now that we have AI the devices are getting dumber than ever, will not be using. At least you can still un-install the AI over ADB still, but even that might go away.
I’m more impressed by lead acid batteries. Ultra cheap, ubiquitous, enough pulse current capabilities to start a car. And then you open them only to find dirty looking metal plates and what appears to be plain water. Also hundred plus years old.
Man it’s the future, why can’t we have lead acid batteries which are the size of those 2000 liter water tanks and you can just buy them for dirt cheap and plonk them in your shed (or even, outdoors) and just hook your inverter to it. Sure, the energy density is low but i thoughts that’s the benefit of aqueous cells and batteries. You can make them as large as you want, flood your pool if you feel like it. Just need to get the lead plates and you’re done
Though their cycle count leaves much to be desired…
A good lead-acid battery is good for over 1000 cycles. Unless you’re carelessly cheap you’d size a battery to support 10 days of use, worst-case. In practice, you’ll use up a few full cycle equivalents per month. A thousand cycles will last you 20+ years.
That seems rather excessively overkill for most situations, on our solar install the battery doesn’t even last the night without load shedding… At least on the longer nights in the past when I paid attention – more efficient electronics in the house since so maybe it can now. But still that is more than good enough to be useful for the task at hand here, which is simply to make the solar setup pay itself back quicker. Though more battery capacity is on the list.
Nice to have that monster if you can of course, but still 10 days is pretty excessive in most cases.
If your battery is lead-acid and you’re flattening it every night then of course you’re going to kill it in a year or two. If it’s LFP then it’s only that it isn’t big enough to support the load.
The ten days is so you can keep your fridge and freezer and furnace fan running and a few lights on through a long dark winter storm without worry. If you have alternate backup then you won’t need that kind of reserve.
depends on the battery: a good starter lead-acid battery is typically around 50 full cycles, since it is designed for short current pulses (highly porous lead, which tends to flake out of the plates when doing deep cycles, but has a huge active surface and so very low resistance), versus a stationary or traction type (“solar” or “fork lift battery”), which has more sturdy plates and can go several thousand full cycles, but would not be able to crank an engine like a starter battery of the same size does
Back when, I caught a couple of military surplus “Missile Silo” batteries: 2,000lb+ 16v many amps lead acid batteries. monstrous things. several days of power for ~3kw of computers. Half assed redneck wiring in a shed out in the woods: that was the system that produced the “fuseable snake” story.
I dunno how many amps a snake will conduct, but that one got more. A lot more. I heard the “pop” from in the house and found snake parts and a nasty fried chicken smell in the shed. He’d coiled around the joint bus bars for warmth.
When scrap lead prices got high I sold them off for half again what it had cost to buy them in 1999 in Utah and haul them to TN. decent investment indeed considering the years of service and goofy unwise experiments they enabled.
What a wild story, sad about the critter though
At 2000lb+ I’m assuming transport was a pain. Still 3kw for several days is the dream
I use lead-acid batteries at my off-grid cabin for times when the whole-cabin lithium ion battery shuts off power, allowing my logging systems and remote control systems to stay powered so I can make adjustments to perhaps get the whole-cabin battery working again (or turn on the generator)
I find it interesting that a car with a flat or dead lead acid battery can be jump started from a lithium ion power pack that fits in my pocket and costs 1/4 the replacement lid acid battery.
Cars and motorcycles are slowly transitioning to having a lithium battery in place of the lead acid for that 12-volt system. It costs less and smaller volume and less weight for the same crank current.
The Lithium can’t really jump start a car more than a handful of times before it kills the cells (depending of course on the situation). The good news is that most of the jump packs now have a capacitor bank that does the actual jump starting.
I find it incredibly odd that the capacitor isn’t even advertised. But if it fits in a pocket and legitimately delivers 1000A start current without killing itself its probably Capacito.
Insanely power packed? What do you mean? compared to what?
There are for example only a few electric airplanes, and those are only for short hops. They can’t compete with the energy density of a tank of kerosene, and the fuel tank getting lighter along the way.
There is a trainer / demo airfield in scandinavia which uses electric airplanes for lessons, and they have special rules. For example a 20 minute “holding pattern” is not really an option for an electric airplane, and they get priority when they need to land. (Mentour Pilot did a video about this airfield, and the planes they use).
You’re complaining how poorly the bear dances instead of acknowledging the amazing fact that the bear dances at all. Lithium chemistry batteries have far higher energy density than older battery technologies like NiCad or rechargeable Alkaline. They made electric flight possible and actually practical for certain use cases. And new technologies are constantly being developed. We obviously won’t see electric airliners anytime soon, but light, efficient electric aircraft aren’t far off. It’s only the battery tech holding them back. Same can be said for electric cars, trucks, etc.
Also for electric bikes and scooters. Recently I looked a bit into electric scooters. I’m looking for the same performance as my old gasoline powered scooter. That is some 350 km between charges (And even that was a bore when I took a trip across Europe some 10 years ago) I’d need at least 200 km on a charge, and with some left over to allow for battery wear, cold weather and “battery anxiety”. But there are very few options. Electric scooters are similarly priced as gasoline powered ( EUR 1500 “low budget” EUR 2k to 3k for a “decent” one) but their range is very disappointing. Even with an extra battery (Very expensive) their range is too small. That basically put these scooters into the action radius I can do on my (mechanical) bicycle. That takes more time, but gives an opportunity to loose some weight. My goal would be for the “once a month” trips that are too far for a bicycle.
And the same for cars, but because those are way outside my price range, I have not looked into details. Apparently it’s usable for daily Home to work commuting, but don’t expect to take a holiday across Europe with it.
To compete seriously with gasoline, performance has to be improved with a factor of about 4 (for land vehicles) and price has to go down a lot still.
Also, batteries for “bicycles” and scooters are seriously overpriced compared with bare cells.
Battery packs for a bicycle are over EUR 800 per kWh, and for scooters they are still over EUR 500 / kWh
A short look shows I can get a LiFePO4 cell of 324Ah (Also 1kWh) for EUR 65. I can accept that 72V battery packs with a lot of cells cost a bit more, but a factor of 10x is ridiculous. It’s just another example of how consumers get milked for their money to the utmost limit that manufacturers can get away with. It’s called capitalism.
Not really – the performance for most real world users is already better than the fossil fuel car, as every morning the magic fuel fairy filled the EV up for you (assuming home charging, but the same also applies to the end of your shift at work with how many charge points are going into those carparks).
The price is also actually rather sane, at least here in Europe there are a huge range of EV now to match any can afford to buy a NEW car budget (which isn’t me), and the EV versions of these vehicles is usually not very much more expensive.
There are absolutely some users that manage to put on enough miles the EV available today are not very suitable, but as a rule for most people with at home/work charging the tech is already more convenient, cheaper to run etc than the petrol for practically every trip they make, and the charging infrastructure in most places and range of most models is getting good enough you can pick the rest stop you’d want to accommodate your puny biological weaknesses. Maybe at that rest stop you are forced to spend an extra few mins, but that is hardly a major downside if you are not doing those 10+ hour driving days often.
You’d probably get better results buying one with a dead pack and making your own pack out of EV 9r Hybrid Automobile cells. With farming and home power tools going electric I hope to do the same for a riding lawnmower soon. Could be a good business making an EV trailer and mowers that can do a whole day of commercial mowing.
The batteries are obscenely expensive except at scrap prices.
Not sure why you absolutely need to travel more than 200KM at a stretch, 90% of the rest of us need ro stop and hydrate or “de-hydrate” at regular intervals.
The energy density of Gasoline and Li-Ion are well known. Fact remains the recharging technology is becoming similarly ‘supercharged’.
Compared to other battery chemistries. Pretty obvious from the article, really.
Unless you’re advocating for internal combustion power for the authors gaming console, cell phone, and DSLR camera.
Don’t laugh, it exists, there were prototypes of internal combustion laptops and handhelds.
Not that I’m advocating it, but it’s been tried. Could be viable in certain situations, like backpacking/camping. Probably best as a hybrid where the generator recharges a Lithium. Of course Solar has become more efficient too since they experimented with fuel powered devices. Also see fuel cell devices.
I’m still in awe of the invention of the internal combustion engine. How far a few cups of special soup can get you with zero effort. And how fast you can recharge it, just by adding a few more cups of special soup.
Yes, that soup recharger runs at around 20 megawatts. If you could charge an electric car that fast you’d be waiting about 20 seconds to fully recharge.
What’s crazy is that you can make that soup from nothing more than fresh air and sunshine. Really: Solar cells power ambient CO2 capture, methane synthesis, and conversion to methanol or longer hydrocarbons. Sure, it’s capital intensive and not very efficient, but it’s FREE!
TCO is insane, due to the maintenance overhead.
Much like any large chemical plant, like an oil refinery.
Put the solar cells on a self regenerating factory and then use the stored biomass as fuel, amazing, full circle. Pack the factory into a small self unpacking ‘seed’ and make it activate when placed in a nutrient rich environment with enough moisture to kick off the reaction powering it. Some post-processing required.
Next you’ll tell me if I don’t sit in one place for hours a day making money to buy the fuel I could instead walk where I needed to go and grow the food I need and make the things I use with the time I spent ‘working’.
Aye! With a history going back to before 1800:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combustion_engine
And it’s still the technology in wide use and that others get compared by.
I really don’t like those stinking, noisy and polluting things, but for raw performance, battery technology still has a way to go to beat that.
There are electric racing cars that outperform any gas powered car on short trips (Except nitro maybe?) but they can’t store enough energy to compete on longer races.
Sometimes I wonder what the total damage of leaded fuel is. Not enough to kill you or shorten your life span to show in statistics, but just enough to shave a few points of everybody’s IQ. It may be a big factor in that we’re still allowing wars to happen. Although there is not much correlation between “IQ” and “common sense”
” … but just enough to shave a few points of everybody’s IQ. ” …
Now compare that to Facebook, and lets see which should be avoided first.
That’s a challenging call to make, but the leaded-fuel contamination demonstrably amplified violent tendencies and reduced IQ.
… you could argue the same about Facebook, but it’s far from equally proven. With more research, we might find that they have more equivalent effects, but it also might not.
Facebook has been surpassed long ago as the worst. Instagram and TikTok are far worse.
Leaded fuel is gross, and it can’t disappear soon enough. Trouble is that there’s not a lot of certified substitute fuels for all the existing engines out there. I think there’s only one company left IN THE WORLD that makes the lead additive. There’s also piston diesel aviation engines, but the mechanics are few and far between, repairs cost and arm and a leg, and there is no rebuilding them, just replacing them. And turboprops are not the answer for small GA planes, and certainly not from a CO2 standpoint.
Running a house from a battery is impressive, but an EV pulls a lot more power from its battery.
Is your jaw nearly reaching the floor over lipo battery tech? Check out the new Verge motorcycle and the solid state battery that powers it (Donuts anyone?) It reads like an April 1st article, but many of the articles have a different date! I hope it’s for real, even though it may put the last nil in the coffin of my favorite Internal Combustion engine, the Omega engine.
My Ducati Panigale still easily outperforms this thing in all practical aspects. At probably half of the weight.
I’ve read about Omega 1 engine, too, thinking “I wish there would be another Tucker Torpedo kind of car powered by one”.
I hope the sudden advertisements for Li batteries is in no way connected with the recent proof-of-concept University of Melbourne quantum battery that potentially can charge in seconds to nearly full – and the larger the battery the faster it charges.
Because if they scale that up and sell everywhere (and they will) that will null a LOT of technologies in one swoop.
Also, it will sure rearrange markets towards less reliance on rather too few lithium miners/refiners.
Yes, they’re great and all. But we should be more demanding, not satisfied and complacent.
Why do I have to charge my phone every day? I should be able to forget about it for a week or more, while maintaining current functionality.
As always, battery powered applications are a trade between power consumption, battery life, and usefulness.
We don’t see lithium ion-powered space heaters in the market, but why not with a better technology?