I've often wondered where the Gartner Hype Cycle itself is on the Gartner Hype Cycle

“ The Trough of Disillusionment “ pretty much describes my life since 2009.

The problem with new battery tech is not what is possible, its what can be mass produced and had a long usuable lifespan. Most new battery tech fails at one or both of these checks. So when the press will glow about capacity or charge time and skip over those two points, then you know its bunk.

I didn't know I wanted a unicorn that does my taxes before I saw this video but now that is the only thing I want.

I have a PhD in chemistry and I have two friends with chemistry PhD’s who work on battery technology for major US R&D companies. One works to improve existing Li-ion and the other on solid state Li-ion. Both think the best improvement in energy density for batteries we can hope for in the next decade is about 10-20%. That’s not trivial but to have practical battery powered airplanes we need a minimum of 5-10x improvement and realistically about 15x.

CATL has 18,000 (yes eighteen thousand) engineers and technicians working in R&D alone. 250 of which hold doctorates.

Her analogising the “hype cycle” to her New Year’s resolutions is a perfect example of what I love about Sabines work

There is also the category of battery storage, which can be divided into three main categories: fixed storage, transportation storage, and personal device storage. Each of these categories can be further subdivided. 1. Fixed Storage: • Grid Storage • Home Energy Storage • Commercial and Industrial Storage • Utility-Scale Storage 2. Transportation Storage: • Electric Vehicles (EVs) • Hybrid Vehicles • Electric Bikes and Scooters • Marine Batteries • Aerospace Batteries 3. Personal Device Storage: • Smartphones • Laptops and Tablets • Wearables • Portable Chargers • Portable Medical Devices each catagory could demad a diffrent type of battery.

One battery feture that is generally overlooked is operational temperature range. Vehicles have a wide temperature range in which they must operate. Charging and dischargine need to be effective at extreme temperatures before they are practical for many things, including vehicles.

You missed the opportunity here to write in the thumbnail "Charge is coming"

Thing is, for all the naysaying over the years, lithium ion batteries have in fact improved significantly over the past 20 years. I remember when Nokia phones used to have 1000 to 1400 mAh stubby but thick Li-Ion batteries, but now we routinely see 4000 to 5000 mAh batteries in much slimmer (although bigger horizontally and vertically) phones. The two things that reverse the undeniable progress of batteries is much more power hungry workloads - phones these days do a LOT more than play Snake and take GSM quality calls, but people also use their phones for much MUCH longer periods of time. Nobody was glued to their phone for hours at a time in the 90s and early 00s. Battery technology improvements are hyped way too much in the near term, but people are totally oblivious to how much better things have gotten over a 10 or 20 year time span.

I'm in the "I believe it when I can buy it from a reputable vendor" camp. Fun fact: I'm currently watching this video on my PC that is powered by a prismatic LFP battery, charged by nuclear fusion power (solar panel).

In Canada electric power milk trucks achieved 25 MPH and delivered dairy products reliably. This practice began in the 1950s & ended in the 60s. The batteries slid in on rollers and were changed as needed. The oil boom arguably overwhelmed any desire to continue.

Gartner is not an IT company. It is a consultancy.

I'm sorry but cars that run on fusion was invented before 2015. I watched this documentary where you could power a car on a banana and a beer can utilizing a Mr. Fusion device. It was called "back to the future 2" if you're interested in learning more about science

The correlation (and related irony) between the hype cycle and Dunning-Kruger curves made me smile.

Why isn't there a pit of ignorance hidden on the path to disillusionment, before the boat of productivity sails without delay?

I can't wait 5-10 years for those sodium-lithium batteries. Then I can be charged with a salted battery... 👉😎👉

Great article. No spin, just straight up, concise, reporting on the lay of the land. That made it very easy to digest.

This tracks with my experiences. I remember when OLEDs were first announced and hyped, only for the excitement to die down. I kept pining for the tech to mature for a while after. A few years later small displays started coming out, and now large panels are becoming fairly affordable.

Sabine inspired me to make my own YT channel. Thank you! 💛

I read the 1:57 fusion peak 1 in Scientific American in the school physics lab in 1962ish. I'm a matured 3-Peaker!

I rarely see such well-explained and informative videos. Thumbs up!

4:29 Small but important correction: "sodium ion batteries" not "sodium lithium batteries". Important because a big advantage of them over lithium ion batteries is that they don't require lithium. Instead, just sodium, which is cheap, easy to mine ethically, and will last us a long time before the Earth runs out of it.

This hype cycle theory was fascinating. Thank you.

As far as I know Sodium-Ion is currently the only new battery you can actually buy as a normal person

great video ! thanks Tony Seba , famous economist and futurist , said that the problem with trying to create a new battery to replace lithium batteries is that it takes an average 9 years to go from development to retail use . and in 9 years lithium batteries come down in cost at an average of 16% per year and their energy density increases at an average of 4% a year . So whatever you develop today has to be better than lithium Batteries in 9 years time . From a risk investment point of view . This is a very difficult goal for new battery technology to achieve and it is the main reason why new battery technologies dont get to retail use stage .

Since you have recently mentioned how you cannot stand if you are 5 pixels off center, I just wanted to mention that sometimes the stereo balance shift one side or the other. For example at 0:48 to 0:52. There are lots of places in older videos where this occurs. Mixing your videos to mono would solve this. I am not complaining, just informing :)

Sabine, in germany there is the geladen podcast anything about batteries and with the scientific background from the Polis Excellenzcluster.

We haven't seen any INCREDIBLE breakthroughs in batteries, but you have to admit. They're gotten incrementally better generation by generation. My phone still lasts one day, but it does so much more. If my Nokia 3210 had the battery of my current phone, it would last a month for sure. .... Playing with ChatGPT... Using a 4000 mAh modern smartphone battery in a Nokia 3210, you could expect approximately 32.7 hours of talk time and 1890 hours (or about 78.75 days) of standby time.

This principle applies to public companies and share prices. Most of the money is made during the initial hype and if they can either replicate it or produce several events that produce more initial hype the people in-the-know can cash in at that stage. If the company survives through to the production cycle it’ll be a long and slow but steady growth company. Managers of money funds are well-aware of course.

😄 ''that's like looking for a Unicorn that also do your taxes''

"Unicorn doing you're tax returns"... Funny as... ! 🤣

Well, they also have to be safe. You pack a high enough energy density into a small space and you have the potential for it to explode.

Gotta say, your delivery / commentary is as entertaining as it is informative. Great job

We so need new battery technology. My pack of four AA cells seems incapable of powering my house.

No matter what kind of battery technology will come, fact is, they are reality and they will shape our future in a way we will can not foresee. It is the convergence of many technologies, like EVs, or simply energy storages, but also batteries for coming autonomous robots etc... All that will boost the demand for batteries in unforeseeable dimension. Yes it is that big. The more important is that we are not dependant on Chinese batteries only.

"sounds good, I hope it does" and "I'm sure you won't regret it" were a good kitchen cutter tv commercial moments for Sabine😊

Just to correct you the biggest technology now is Lithium Iron Phosphate (LIFePO4 or LFP) not Lithium Ion. For the first time in Europe LFP is now cheaper, cleaner & has a longer cycle life than lead acid which has been King in various formats for over a Century.

I've been watching battery technology for decades. I stopped reading about up-and-coming technologies because they almost never reach productivity. I'm currently experimenting with Sodium cells and I plan on building a 10-20kWh pack in the next year or so.

Thank you for the video.

Sabine is one of my favorite youtubers. It's so rare to find a realist scientist nowadays.

The number of technologies listed on the graph is staggering, it's comforting to see the industry making real efforts on this

Do you remember those old beer commercials featuring "the most interesting man in the world?" Dr. Hossenfelder is "the most interesting woman in the world!" I LOVE Dr. Hossenfelder's videos!!

Sabine now needs to make a video about the validity of the Hype cycle and the nature of its curve as validated using data....

The biggest hurdle isn't being 'better than lipo', it is the fact that anything with more energy dense storage and delivery than lipo also tends to be highly explosive. Because energy in small space is explosive...

Interesting analysis. You have called Na batteries peak-hype. But Geely uses them in cars right now. * CATL is the largest battery manufacturer. * Geely is the #3 manufacturer of EVs in China. * Comparable with LFPs in energy density, but 25% lower cost. Major players are both manufacturing and using the product. CATL has demonstrated the ability to ramp quickly and supply many different manufacturers. I would say this is in phase 4 based on your definitions.

Li-Ion batteries were invented in 1970, first produced 1991 and are quiet common today. NiMH batteries were invented 1962, first produced 1982 and also still in use. NiCD batteries were invented 1899, first produced 1910 and you can still buy them. If I see predictions of short battery development times and constantly renewing energies, I only feel like smiling.

I want a Unicorn that can do taxes tooooo, so glad I'd put my coffee down! Very funny Sabine. TFS, GB :)

All that hype! Battery price per kWh in dollars has only dropped from $1,220 (in 2010) to $132 (in 2021). Only a 89 percent drop in price per kWh... I think Sabine is saying people are just getting excited when we haven't really seen much change yet! It would only be the equivalent of gas dropping price from $4 per gallon of gas to 44 cents per gallon. P.S. And prices have continued to drop since 2021 … just the table I looked for reference ended on that date. Again these are not projected changes this is a gradual change that has already happened. Some years a whopping 20% drop some years only a 6% drop but for more than a decade the price has been dropping every year. AFAIK no sign of the trend slowing.

The thing about battery tech is that it's actually delivering. From 2014 to 2024, lithium-ion battery prices have plummeted from $700 per kWh of storage capacity to below $100. That is in part because production dramatically grew in scale, and in part because former hype technologies trickled into the designs and production processes over time. That includes the dramatic reduction of required rare earth minerals, like replacing cobalt with common materials and reducing the amount of lithium required. While other hyped battery technologies have not yet overtaken lithium-based ones, they are closely following suit. If lithium supply ever becomes a significant problem due to costs/strategic supplier risks/environmental taxation, then we can shift to other chemistries without losing much progress. Just in 2020, grid battery storage was practically 0. Now it is about to overtake the generation capacity of pumped hydro this year in the US (growing from 16 to 30 GW, compared to 23 GW of pumped hydro), and next year globally. And it is on a trajectory where it will install the total amount of existing pumped hydro capacity *every year* soon. At the same time, the need for grid battery storage is actually decreasing because home battery storages are becoming ubiquitious as well. In ever more regions, solar panels plus home battery are becoming the default for new homes.

there's still a thing called planned obsolescence. nobody wants to sell things that don't need to be replaced constantly. even if a new tech makes it to the market, it's still not going to be something significantly better than what we already have.

This is why I don't ever watch videos about new battery technology. Except for yours of course :)

"Batteries are a mixed bag" Pun intended?

Your discussion of the Gartner Hype Cycle reminded me of the "bathtub curve". A new hot tech becomes the rage of the journals, then there is a rapid decline in published articles. The curve remains flat for some years, then starts rising again. Getting classified causes the decline & low, flat curve. Then when the tech is dropped as unworkable, or it succeeds so much that "they" want to start bragging about it, that's when you get resurgence in published articles. Some folks look for the onset of the bathtub curve as a mechanism for focussing one's time & attention.

In response to “We’re all supposed to drive electric”. I bought a second hand Tesla to reduce my oil dependency but I actually love it. It’s quiet, fast, doesn’t smell, vibrates less, and although charging takes longer, it is usually at a nice place instead of a smelly petrol station. I hope I never have to switch back to a combustion engine ever again.

1:29 lol It sounds like my “I hired another new employee” cycle. However, my cycle ends with a cataclysmic downturn into the last phase called “Sinking into a pit of perpetual gloom” 😅

Forget fusion. Battery and quantum computer development have 10 times more degrees of freedom !

I’m an engineer working on battery projects for a utility, and I can tell you with certainty that no single battery chemistry on the horizon appears to be the ultimate solution to all problems utilities are tackling. Broadly, the major use cases of utilities are bulk grid stability, energy-time shifting, and backup power. Each of these use cases requires different parameters of efficiency, charge/discharge rates, energy capacity, and energy density. For example, a battery responding to grid voltage or frequency fluctuations requires very fast, high C rate response, while energy-time shifting operates on a daily schedule or market rates and has less extreme operation requirements than frequency response. Cost-benefit of different projects will land on different parameters needed, but at the end of the day Lithium-ion based chemistries are still the best option in most cases, and weight is a minor issue for stationary grid applications (concrete pads are strong). The biggest issue with Lithium is battery cost and cost for fire/deflagration protection, which are required despite that being rare event. My hope is for a high efficiency, high capacity, high energy density battery that doesn’t off-gas upon failure and so it can bypass some of the heavy fire department requirements that we’re seeing.

6 years of University to squiggle a line and call it the "Hype Cycle". You can't make this crap up. This must have been a slow science day.

Condensed battery 🔋 seems interesting

Here's a question for you, Sabine: I've heard that electric cars aren't as good for the environment as the manufacturers would like us to believe because their carbon footprint is huge by the time they get out the factory door. And by the time they negate this footprint by running for a number of years, the battery has to be replaced and so the footprint becomes huge again. Is this actually true or is it all counter-hype from oil companies (or whoever else might gain from the demise of electric vehicles)?

It looks like solid state batteries will likely still use cobalt. Cobalt is a serious hazard in current Li-ion fires. It's not clear whether solid state batteries will present fire or toxin risks. Proponents of a technology will always ignore or downplay hazard risks and other downsides.

Nearly forgot: at the end of this July/beginning of August BYD and CATL are halving the prices for their batteries.

Polish company from Rzeszów "The Batteries" is already manufacturing solid state lithium-ion batteries(low rate production), with 2x energy density of standard lithium-ion batteries, and those batteries can recharge 10000 times, recharge time is also few times faster than standard lithium-ion batteries.

Very true, thank you for the tax paying🦄. In german we also have this mammal, "eierlegende Wollmilchsau", but biology didn´t gift us with such a pet. I´m afraid, physics won´t benefit us with a perfect battery with an energy density of fossil fuels either. Most people I talk to, have big illusions about the battery developement, the arguement often goes: "No one could imagine some decades before that happened, that we reach the moon, but anyway we came to there, so why shouldn´t we get to such batteries soon." Most people don´t understand, how science works.

The only time I felt that an announcement, hype, and actual release that lived up to the prommise was the development of SSD drives.

I have also been following new battery tech keenly for four years until recently when i realised they are just not coming out. I had stopped watching/reading new batter tech breakthru news. Thanks this persepective. I will now keep in mind the hype cycle when reading these things.

I just want the power grid in my area to be reliable, and the power company has no incentive to improve things. Unfortunately, there's no competition, and legislation has made even solar work in their favor, so maybe batteries will be the way! 😅

My recommendation is that you finally do a segment that couples renewable (solar, wind, geo) with stationary land-based batteries. If our governments/corrupt rich people finally work towards the good of the people we could solve the energy crisis with technology that is available today. Rich people like nuclear because the cost of entry gives them monopolies. Solar + local batteries lower the cost of entry and create distributed fault tolerant power networks. However, that is more difficult to monetize and monopolize. Treating mobile batteries and stationary as one subject is silly.

doc sabine forgot we also need easy recyclability. 🎉

I've been enjoying the lithium rechargeable AA batteries lately. Quite a bit of an upfront cost but now I can reliably use them in modern electronics again. Having the benefits of lithium ion with the ease of replacing of AA batteries is awesome.

I am here before the bots lol.

These last couple of years it seems there has been fewer and fewer "battery breakthroughs", that and other technology "gamechangers". I think it's not so much because of hype cycles, but rather the fear of getting the Thunderfoot treatment.

Thanks! I was deeply in the disillusion trough regarding the deluge of "transformative" developments in battery tech. Hopefully we will see production soon. We need it! 🙂

"my journey through New Years Resolutions" Very funny. I LOLed.

Okay, now I watched this till the end. You didn't go over the proven battery technologies that are already being scaled up that are already moving into production and hitting the market soon.. recent leaps in proven technology that's ready to scale up has increased dramatically. Already on the market as of this year, You didn't talk about lithium iron phosphate batteries catl is making or byd's blade batteries. Both of these are already going into vehicles and are substantially better than previous batteries. Wrong title video based on what's actually in the video. Your videos should have been titled understanding hype curves of new technology products. You didn't give any details about the new batteries that are proven and moving into production

Sabine: "The hype cycle is not just a word" Me: No, it's two

I have subscribed to a lot of sites, but one of those that I actually watch routinely is Sabine. There is always something interesting, presented in balance. And, some day I probably will sign up for Brilliant because it looks great. But, I'm old and I already have a bunch of subscriptions that I use only partially. Anyway, thanks Sabine!!

Yoshino has solid-state batteries on the market (Available on Amazon) right now. Caveat: some have said it is not a true solid-state battery rather it is a semi-solid state battery. I don't know what the correct answer is but even if it is semi-solid state it is still progress. Trying to find out more now.

I understand the biggest problem with raising the energy (and power?) density is SAFETY. We promise super dense batteries, then realize that a fully charged battery is an explosive.

women have to be 10 times better than men, but that is easy. THANK YOU !

Spectacular new energy storage in batteries? I'll believe it when I see it.

I kind of chuckled on your first response, because I knew what was coming and that you were going to be eating your own words after hearing the climax. When you start out thinking, "man this is meh at best" and then by the end of the song you are like "hell yeah, this is some good stuff!," that is how you know you are listening to a great band. I did the same thing with Eulogy by Tool the first time when I was a teenager. Of course my taste in music was undeveloped at the time and I just thought a song had to be "hard" in order to be good music and they come in with all these "click and dink" noises and I was like wtf is this crap. Then they ripped with the guitars and I was like "holy sh!t, did that just happen?" Goosebumps.

What's interesting is the high percentage of people who are convinced that we need some kind of near-miraculous battery breakthrough to make electric vehicles viable. Total BS and part of the massive disinformation that I call the FUDGates attendant to electric vehicles. We have 6 year old vehicles, which we haven't really babied at all with relentless supercharging and suboptimal storing of the cars in a high State of charge in the battery when we first got the vehicle. Despite all this, we regard them as the best cars we ever owned or driven, and can't imagine going back to stinky fossil fuel vehicles. They are great trip vehicles, and it's amazing how many people we talk to are astonished to hear that most of the negatives about the transition to electric vehicles are mostly disinformation.

If you are not in the financial market space right now, you are making a huge mistake. I understand that it could be due to ignorance, but if you want to make your money work for you... prevent inflation

The requirements for batteries depend on the application. A car battery, for example, must have as low weight to capacity as possible and output 25-50kW. But a battery for storing solar or wind power has no restriction on weight and only needs to be as cheap as possible. A household battery, for example, would be fine if it could be placed in or near a small-medium size house, store around 100kWh and output around 10-15kW (although more is better), as long as it is cheap (

"Like looking for a Unicorn that can also do your taxes" - I love this channel, Way to go Sabine, please don't stop informing and entertaining us.

Google 'battery storage capacity' and you see that in many countries it doubles every year or every two years. Part is new technology, part is scaling. Battery farms are becoming huge.

I wonder how many of Sabine's subscribers live in 3D printed houses, drive cars with airless tyres and have used a flying taxi in the last year? If we really want people to move en-masse to EV's then we need sodium batteries where the charging either comes from induction plates in the road, or extremely fast charging so that you don't need a crazy amount of chargers to service all vehicles or even fast replaceable batteries that the driver can physically swap out. I know about the NIO robot battery swap technology and that with Sodium batteries would be great. Why Sodium I hear you ask.....cheap, plentiful, not geo-politically sensitive as any country could produce sodium batteries so no state controlled cartels, no new mining or deforestation to get sodium and most importantly sodium batteries won't spontaneously combust or go from zero to inescapable blowtorch in seconds. If however you firmly believe that all the weird weather now is directly attributable to CO2 and only Humans are responsible and you want to fix the problem........then we should already be trying to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale and scaling up eFuel production to replace petrol consumption. Yes, scrubbing CO2 will be very expensive.....how expensive is it to scrap all the ICE cars and replace them with EV's?.......the fact that green lobby's don't want to do scrubbing tells me that either CO2 isn't the real issue or CO2 is the issue but the green lobby doesn't want to address the issue if it doesn't result in everybody losing their ICE cars. Only about half of the worlds ICE vehicles can be realistically taken off the road as there are many places like Africa, South America, a big chunk of Asia and Australasia where the economics and logistics of distances involved will not be suitable for supporting any current EV technology. I wish Just Stop Oil all the luck in the World protesting with human roadblocks in Nigeria and China and Columbia etc.

I've thought about the hype cycle for years. I've watched things like, virtual reality or 3d content hit peak hype cycle over and over and over--shoot, they even produced and sold 3d _capable_ television sets for awhile! Sometimes things never get to general acceptance because it turns out people don't want them because they make people nauseous. Everyone wants small powerful cheap batteries, though.

On Wikipedia, under ‘Solid State Batteries’, it says, ‘See, Next Year.’ 😂😂

I won‘t drive an EV as I don‘t even drive a conventional car now and don’t plan to buy any car in the future 😂

It IS all hype until it comes to market. There have been announcements of revolutionary battery technology and other tech for decades which fizzled out.

We have solid state batteries already shipping in consumer tech. So I think the assessment was even a bit overly conservative there, looks like mass production ramp is already happening with some vendors.

This is a pretty good overview and I especially liked the plot showing the expected time to market over expected relevance. It is fairly consistent with what is being guesstimated among us automotive engineers. Something really worth pointing out is things like dry coating. It sounds boring and the bettery you get in the end is no better than the old one. But the battery factory becomes smaller and will require a lot less electricity and heat. Which is a pretty big thing for the price of those cells and for the old EV issue of its emission luggage it starts with compared to traditional cars. Another one is sodium as active medium. Those chemistries are a lot less dependant on imports. But since they have unfavourable properties compared to lithium ion batteries we are going to see these in stationary storages and electronics first.

Yeah, I pretty much had one of those hype feelings a few years ago with those battery innovation promises ... nowadays its "when I stumble upon one in the store I may utter a tiny huzzah and buy that damn thing, but until then get lost". Maybe my tech affinity is a walking dead now with old age, but I still love my eSmart ^^

To some degree it seems like if you look for the patern to match your theory hard enough then you’ll create one to fit the theory. The general concept of hype, dillillusionment then productivity being a regualr patern for technology seems to make some sense but you could probably choose data points to map to a variety of graphs. The graphs will seemingly work as evidence to shift the idea from opinion to a more robust theory. If there was a more regular pattern to the “hype cycle” where you could look at the hype around a specific technology and take various data points to predict the trough of dissilusionment and productivity in a remotely practical way, then it would be much more useful. Some technology has a lot of hype then ends in dissilusionment with no discernible productivity (there could be other breakthroughs that result in the research taking a different direction). Some technology starts with dissulionment from the public either because of misscumunication in how its reported or due to it being of a counterintuitive technical nature. Some dissulionment is more broadly felt while some is more divisive. Some people tend to reject a technology from the start, whether it’s because they genuinely understand the problems of the research being done, their desire to seem knowledgable often leads them to reject things out of hand, it doesnt fit with their world view or something in between. If the research continues to be reported on then the number of people who get caught up in the hype, who sit on the fence or who will reject it outright, will change. rather than just mapping public opinion on one line it might be more useful if you could measure the range of opinions. EVs had and continue to have a lot of people who reject everything about the technology and others who continually accept anything that promotes it while there is a larger group in the middle whose optinions shift one way or the other. Those who reject EV’s outright would tend to express negative views about all battery tech reports and as EV’s have become popular those people have just shifted some of their naritives while remaining negaitive. “Solar freaking roads” was a good example that showed how many people blindly accepted anything that was solar and worked towards a supposed environmental positive. It’s the percentage of people in the middle whose opinions shift that represent the curve on the hype cycle.

I clicked on this because I just watched a video about potential battery sources. Sabine introduced me to the hype cycle and broke down the criteria for the perfect battery very well. Based on this and my other video; I think that a perfect battery may not be possible; but Lithium-tungsten batteries look quite attractive.

Hype (often involving battery tech) is exactly why I unsubbed and told YT to never recommend the Just Have a Think channel. Its all hype. After watching for a couple years I realized nohing ever came of any technology I saw there. Best channel ever if you want to waste time on useless over hyped tech. Sabine, on the other hand, does a great job of covering things that are or may actually become relevant. So no surprise to hear why she doesn't cover battery tech. Smart lady.