New York City wants lithium-ion e-bike batteries to be stopped at the border when they don’t meet national safety standards after rash of deadly fires::After a series of deadly fires.
New York City wants lithium-ion e-bike batteries to be stopped at the border when they don’t meet national safety standards after rash of deadly fires::After a series of deadly fires.
We really need a better battery technology, one that doesn’t trivially become an incendiary device.
There has actually been a ton of progress with this over the last decade.
However, everything we have discovered so far either can’t hold as much energy, has really limited charge cycles, or is far too expensive to use at scale.
Ton of progress?
I would refer to that as “research ongoing but no progress yet”.
trivially it is only when not built or used properly.
We also have gas heating, electricity, cooking with boiling water etc. that all “trivially” become sources of severe injury and death and we manage. Because stuff is built and used according to standards most of the time.
Home gas & electric installations are a lot safer today than they once were. They’re actually a great example of how a dangerous power source can be made a lot safer through better choices and engineering.
The first gas ovens and heaters used coal gas, which is carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The monoxide meant that coal gas was highly poisonous to breathe; and both monoxide and hydrogen are odorless — so you might not know the oven was left on unlit and killing your family.
Modern natural gas is mostly methane, with an unpleasant scent added so we can detect leaks. Methane is unbreathable, but still a lot safer to have in your house than monoxide!
(To be clear, the monoxide was not a contaminant; it’s a fuel. Coal gas burns into carbon dioxide and water, just like methane.)
So here, we got a better gas technology: in fact, we got a whole different gas; a fundamentally safer-for-humans one — and on top of that, added an extra safety mechanism in the form of an odorizer, making the gas stinky instead of odorless.
Same goes for electricity. Modern home electrical outlets are grounded, greatly reducing the chance of a dangerous shock due to a wiring problem or a defective appliance. And modern circuit breakers are much more reliable than the fuses they replaced; and they don’t break, so the homeowner doesn’t have an incentive to defeat the safety device the way folks often did with fuses.
And modern kitchen & bathroom outlets have GFCIs, so an appliance shorting out through water (or your body) will break the circuit.
So here, we’ve gotten better electrical technology too: grounded outlets, circuit breakers, and GFCIs all make electricity much safer than when it was first installed in homes.
To put it morbidly: Coal-gas ovens and ungrounded electrical appliances were both once common means of suicide. Their modern replacements are safe enough that they don’t work for that anymore. Same goes for cars, by the way. Modern gasoline cars don’t put out enough monoxide to kill a person rapidly by inhaling the exhaust.
So yeah, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say we need a better battery technology, ideally one that doesn’t do this sort of thing.
Modern electric wiring is grounded and has a proper safety switch if and only if the installation is done correctly. In the same wake your gas pipes in the house are safe if and only if installed correctly and burning appliances like a water heater are only safe if and only if regularly inspected and maintained.
The same is true for Lithium Ion batterys. The technology is not inherently unsafe, in the same way that house installations arent inherently safe. It is merely that the shitty ones and their chargers are not produced following the existing standards on how they need to be designed and maintained and for house installations there is inspectors and other means to enforce standards.
The city forbidding the import of these is the same as them having inspectors to make sure buildings are built according to code.
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Indeed we certainly need a better technology, or to enforce better regulations, but currently those batteries are the only alternative to gas. So we try and learn from our mistakes, as usual…