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There has been an enormous amount work on battery technology for the last 30 years. Probably 99% of it leads to dead ends.

Standard rule of battery development, if everything goes right it takes ten years to market. And another ten to get market share. In the late 90's early 2000's there was paper after paper published on lithium iron phosphate batteries and dick all nothing for sale until ~2010. And ten years later market share is growing slowly.



Are there any main reasons for this?

I'd assume conservative and long-design time downstream users mean there isn't a volume market for new battery tech.


I'm assuming twofold; engineering for scale and marketing.

Once you've sort of proven something in research you need to develop processes for manufacturing at scale. Those processes are often radically different than the one used during initial development. 10X rule applies. Take ten times the resources to bring something into production than to just design it. And worse with batteries you're dealing with primary materials. You may have needs for material inputs that simply do not exist at scale. No one makes material X in 100 metric ton quantities. The only source is a post doc making 100 gram batches. Sometimes the batches are bad for reasons unknown.


Edison tried for many, many years to improve batteries for electric cars. This has been going a lot longer than 30 years.




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