New potassium-ion battery technology could soon replace lithium-ion

gamerk2 said:

Given all the money being thrown at R&D, that's not shocking. The issue has always been *production*; Lithiums been around forever so the production costs are far lower.

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Giroro said:

Every 6 months for literally my entire life there has been reports of a "revolutionary new battery technology". In 30+ years those stories have been true exactly twice: LiFePO4 and Li-ion. Everything else has been an innovation within that same basic family of chemistries. We get promised new batteries more often than we're told that a "first of it's kind device harvests water from the air" will magically suddenly be effective in places where the air has essentially no water.... using the same technology that essentially dates back to the Incan Empire. It's a classic cycle of yellow journalism.

But here's why acting like Potassium batteries are some miracle of science is particularly ridiculous: potassium batteries already existed. They were a stepping stone to lithium that never left the prototype stage, because it was discovered immediately that lithium did more or less the same thing as Potassium, except better in every way. It held more energy, was lighter, cheaper, easier to produce, and needed less materials.
Almost everybody has seen this with our own eyes in high school chemistry. The teacher drops sodium, potassium, and lithium in water, and we all see how much more energetically lithium reacts.
Of all the materials we could reasonably use in a battery even remotely similar to what we have, lithium has been proven to be the best, repeatedly, for decades. What we currently have is near the physical limits of what we think is theoretically possible for stable, rechargeable energy storage regardless of the chemistry used.
The next major innovation in electric storage is either going to be so radically different that it wouldn't be considered a battery in the way we currently define what a battery is... Or it's going to be barred from civilian use, as the chemistry would double as a high explosive.
So in other words, give up. it's never going to happen.

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Giroro said:

Every 6 months for literally my entire life there has been reports of a "revolutionary new battery technology". In 30+ years those stories have been true exactly twice: LiFePO4 and Li-ion. Everything else has been an innovation within that same basic family of chemistries. We get promised new batteries more often than we're told that a "first of it's kind device harvests water from the air" will magically suddenly be effective in places where the air has essentially no water.... using the same technology that essentially dates back to the Incan Empire. It's a classic cycle of yellow journalism.

But here's why acting like Potassium batteries are some miracle of science is particularly ridiculous: potassium batteries already existed. They were a stepping stone to lithium that never left the prototype stage, because it was discovered immediately that lithium did more or less the same thing as Potassium, except better in every way. It held more energy, was lighter, cheaper, easier to produce, and needed less materials.
Almost everybody has seen this with our own eyes in high school chemistry. The teacher drops sodium, potassium, and lithium in water, and we all see how much more energetically lithium reacts.
Of all the materials we could reasonably use in a battery even remotely similar to what we have, lithium has been proven to be the best, repeatedly, for decades. What we currently have is near the physical limits of what we think is theoretically possible for stable, rechargeable energy storage regardless of the chemistry used.
The next major innovation in electric storage is either going to be so radically different that it wouldn't be considered a battery in the way we currently define what a battery is... Or it's going to be barred from civilian use, as the chemistry would double as a high explosive.
So in other words, give up. it's never going to happen.

Click to expand...