The creator of the first lithium-ion battery has just released a new battery cell that could mark the next stage of battery development, offering a huge boost for the electric car industry and beyond.
The solid-state cells that John Goodenough and his team have developed use glass electrolytes instead of liquid electrolytes like the lithium-ion batteries currently use. This means they are incombustible, overcoming one serious problem with other lithium-ion batteries: the so-called dendrites that appear when a battery is being charged too quickly, causing a short circuit and killing the battery.
And that's just the start. According to the researchers, their battery has at least three times the energy density of other lithium-ion batteries, it has a longer life cycle (a minimum of 1,200 charge-discharge cycles), and it charges more quickly - in minutes instead of hours. On top of all of this, the low-cost battery-yes, it's cheap-can work in both subzero temperatures (-20 degrees Celsius) and major heat (60 degrees Celsius).
The implications of such an invention are numerous for all devices and systems that use rechargeable batteries. Yet the most important ones seem to be linked to the electric car industry.
For now, electric car adoption is slow; not just because of often prohibitively high prices, but also because of the time it takes to recharge a vehicle. Plus, there is the problem with the dendrites, which automatically means you need to buy a new battery-and a new battery still doesn't come cheap, even though prices have been falling steadily.
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One additional benefit of the new glass batteries is that they don't necessarily use lithium: glass electrolytes also work with sodium, which is much more widely available than lithium and can be extracted from seawater. The researcher who began the whole glass electrolyte project and later teamed up with Goodenough and other University of Texas scientists to advance it, Maria Helena Braga, also notes that sodium is cheaper than lithium, thus bringing the price of the final product even lower.
It may sound too good to be true, and lithium miners would certainly hope it is, but Goodenough and Braga are working on several patents, and their battery could hit the market some time in the future. Related: Did The Banks Just Give U.S. Shale A Carte Blanche?
Meanwhile, another company is also working on a safer lithium-ion battery. American Lithium Energy is working on a technology dubbed Safe Core, which, according to a media report, is not much to look at, but does not explode. The company is keeping its cards close to its chest. What's public is that Soft Core was developed as part of American Lithium's work for the U.S. military, which needed reliable batteries to power electric vehicles without the danger of having them explode due to a short circuit or explode when the vehicle crashes.
There's an obvious trend for cheaper, more reliable, and longer-life batteries-there is no other way to make electric cars and energy storage systems mainstream. Future developments would certainly be interesting to watch, as more inventions are likely on the way.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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Comments
If the new battery is as good as they claim, it will change the world. You could use wind and solar power to generate most electricity, because battery storage could power the grid during the night. Existing lithium batteries are still on the high cost side to do that. And concentrated lithium is rare, compared to sodium. A viable sodium battery would change everything.
Keep your fingers crossed because as it now stands, once oil production begins to decline (peak oil) we will be in serious trouble without something affordable to take up the slack rather quickly. A better, cheaper battery could do that.
I am still not sure about usefulness for grid storage compared to other stationary storage technologies but as far as vehicles there's no doubt about it - if it's as good as it claims then I can see it replacing most of the existing fleet of vehicles within a generation from introduction and I would not have said so until now as previous "breakthroughs" in the field were just not good-enough ;-) for such an outcome. Expect the valuation of liquid hydrocarbon reserves to drop by at least half. Will cause major disruption to the energy resource dependent countries of the World. We're talking ISIS-level disruption since their entire raison d'être nowadays is to pump stuff out of the ground.
I haven't heard of to many burning electric vehicles as a firefighter but a lot of liquid carbohydrate fuelled vehicles burn.
Salt is available everywhere compared to lithium.
Why work against each other in a desperate time.