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Tomorrow could be big

Tomorrow could see an announcement that changes the world.

If the promised announcement drops, we could see EVs and energy storage changed forever.

The elimination of fossil fuels could be sped up by an order of magnitude and many of the long-promised advances in electric flight could be delivered within months.

This could totally change the face of the planet as we know it.

So what is this ground-breaking announcement?

Well it's the promised independent third-party authentication of the claimst that were made at CES by Donut Labs in respect to their revolutionary solid state battery technology.

At CES earlier this year, Donut made so extremely bold promises about their batteries, including hithero unheard of energy densities of 400W/Kg. They also promised charging to 100 percent in just five minutes or so and a useful life of over 100,000 charge/discharge cycles.

These figures are so far ahead of the best lithium-ion and LFP batteries on the market right now that it would completely change the landscape of the electric-power industry.

They also promised that prices were roughly on-par with LFP batteries so, given the other benefits, the Donut batteries could become a viable way to store solar, wind and other unreliable renewables, effectively reducing our reliance on fosil fuels for electricity generation.

According to Donut, they've commissioned an independent company to test their batteries and verify the claims that they've made.

The company, VTT says that the results of its testing will be published here on Monday, European time.

If all the claims that were made turn out to be real, a new age of energy storage will be heralded in.

If it turns out that Donut were overstating their technology or that it's simply a load of BS then the skeptics will have been proven right and we can all go back to sleep.

However, it's my bet, as I've said before, that what we'll see are some results that do not exactly match the claims being made but, could be construed to meet some of those claims in isolation.

For instance, I suspect that this "battery" is actually a hybrid system consisting of a supercapacitor and/or very high-current capable cell, combined with a more conventional cell with lower current ratings but higher energy density.

In this case, super-cap and/or hi-current cell may be rechargable in five minutes and that energy would then be fed to the main (higher capacity) cell at a much lower rate such that it would be charged in tens of minutes to an hour.

This would enable "technical" compliance with the claims to be "fudged" whilst not actually delivering the promised benefits from a practical standpoint.

Yes,the supercap could handle a charging current of 250A and be fully charged in just a few short minutes but this would only provide enough energy to partially charge the main conventional cell and that internal process would take far longer.

The claimed 100,000 cycle life is almost certainly only applicable to the supercap and not the main cell it feeds.

Yes, I strongly suspect that this battery is built more on "weasel-words" than on breakthrough technology but we should know for sure tomorrow.

One caveat... I notice that they say the results won't be dropped all at once, but "published as a series", something that further suggests they want to deliver each aspect in isolation, where the weasel words will be true but the actual overall performance will fall well short for the reasons I've suggested above.

Let's reconvene tomorrow and discuss what drops!

Carpe Diem folks!

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