Chinese battery-manufacturing behemoth CATL has announced their most powerful battery to date — one which they believe will be capable of powering electric aircraft by meeting both energy needs and safety standards.
There is a race on to develop better, even perfect, batteries for storing energy. Wind power needs them. Solar needs them. EVs need them. And soon our homes and businesses will be powered by on-site batteries year round. And on this, there is good news to share.
Construction of a huge electric car battery factory that has attracted tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer cash and been hailed as a flagship project of Boris Johnson’s levelling up policy has been put on “life support” to cut spending, leaked internal documents suggest.
Work on Britishvolt’s 95-hectare site near Blyth in Northumberland has been severely limited until February to minimise spending as it focuses on unlocking its next round of funding and critical power supply infrastructure, the documents suggest.
The Chinese owner of the UK’s only large-scale battery factory has revealed plans for a big expansion that will put the plant in Sunderland among the biggest electric vehicle facilities in Europe.
A materials company in Alameda, California, has spent the last decade working to boost the energy stored in lithium-ion batteries, an advance that could enable smaller gadgets and electric vehicles with far greater range.
Sila has developed silicon-based particles that can replace the graphite in anodes and hold more of the lithium ions that carry the current in a battery.
Volkswagen Group and China's Gotion High-Tech will partner on a battery cell factory at the automaker’s combustion engine plant in Salzgitter, Germany.
Salzgitter's production will include cell laboratories, a pilot line for cell production and a pilot plant for battery recycling.
For seven months, lithium-metal darling QuantumScape has enjoyed an often-fanatical following as the front-runner in the attempt to commercialize next-generation electric vehicle batteries. Now, though, its arch enemy, Denver-based Solid Power, has unexpectedly emerged with a big, $130 million investment led by Ford and BMW on the promise of an industrial-size scaleup of its technology next year.
Redox flow batteries are perfect for storing large quantities of renewable energy, but they have always been too expensive for the mass market. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT have now completely redesigned the heart of a redox flow battery — the stack — and have brought about a massive reduction in material usage and costs. Their efforts have earned them the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize.
Lithium-ion batteries are nowhere close to easing their dominion in the rechargeable battery market. However, development is speeding up on a competing chemistry for larger-scale applications—i.e. not EVs or consumer electronics—the sodium-ion battery.
We’ve talked before about how the Jack and Jill retail investor types gravitate towards easy-to-understand stories. Jack watching Saturday morning cartoons in his underwear sees a Tesla commercial, followed by an iRobot commercial, and tells Jill they ought to invest some of their self-directed 401K into battery stocks. Jack logs into his brokerage account, plugs in the bog-standard Google search “biggest battery stocks to invest in,” and he’s cooking with gas.
