Comment by oconnore
3 months ago
It seems like the chemistry has some interesting trade-offs.
https://www.mitsubishicritical.com/resources/blog/the-runawa...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-better-nickel-manganese...
> NMC does have an increased fire and thermal runaway risk
> The USA has put regulations and restrictions in place to make sure certain sources of Cobalt and other minerals are not used in future supplies and designs. Estimates show that there will be a Cobalt shortage by 2028, which has been quickened by the increased use of Cobalt in electric vehicles and battery energy storage designs
> NMC has increased energy density with a cycle life span that is geared towards a reduced number of cycles per year.
> The full charge and discharge cycle of the LFP battery will only decay to 80% of the original after the number of full charge and discharge cycles is greater than 3500 times. … The charge-discharge cycle life of NMC battery is about 1000 times.
Yes, the lithium shortage was heavily predicted.
Now it's a cobalt shortage. Most of these "shortages" ignore what can happen when prices rise and/or are regulatory shortages rather than actual shortages.
When folks talk about cycle life being limited, the cobalt and other items may be re-usable after in a new battery production. A 6c is an insane charge rate. There may be cases where the cost / benefit works for something like this if they can deliver.
The common hiccup in many battery stories is just the lab theory -> production reality curve. It's one thing to have a solid state battery that charges in seconds on a lab bench doing 1 picowatthour and another to have 1 megawatthour of storage.
NMC batteries are already common in EVs. I’d bet that it’s the most common chemistry by far. Most Teslas have NMC batteries for example, with the shorter range ones more recently moving to LFP.
The trade-offs you list are real, but we already have data showing NMC batteries lasting many miles (1,000 cycles at 250 miles per cycle is a long way) and fire risks of EVs have already been shown to be many times less than ICE vehicles.