Since about 2010, a critical mass of national leaders, policy professionals, scientists, entrepreneurs, thinkers and writers have all but demanded a transformation of the humble lithium-ion cell. Only batteries that can store a lot more energy for a lower price, they have said, will allow for affordable electric cars, cheaper and more widely available electricity, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. In the process, a lot of gazillionaires will be created.
Dyson may be more famous for vacuum cleaners, hand dryers, and bladeless fans, but the British electronics giant is spreading its wings with the news that it’s investing $15 million in Michigan-based solid-state battery company Sakti3. Existing investors General Motors, Khosla Ventures, Beringea, and Itochu are also participating, taking the full value of the round to $20 million.
Almost every automaker interested in producing electric cars is betting on improvements to lithium-ion batteries to make the cars cheaper and extend their driving range.
Comme le veut le proverbe, l'argent ne pousse pas sur les arbres. Mais, dans l'univers israélien des nouvelles technologies, l'énergie, elle, y pousse bien ! La société d'énergie renouvelable Sologic s'en porte garante. Son eTree produit de l'électricité "verte" et remplit bien d'autres fonctions. C'est ce que nous a révélé lors d'une rencontre Michael Lasry, fondateur de Sologic.
Electric cars are quick and quiet, with a range more than long enough for most commutes. If you want a car with extremely fast acceleration, the Tesla Model S is hard to beat. And, of course, electric vehicles avoid the pollution associated with conventional cars, including emissions of carbon dioxide from burning gasoline. Yet they account for a tiny fraction of automotive sales, mainly because the batteries that propel them are expensive and need to be recharged frequently.
A new kind of lithium-ion battery could let portable electronics such as smartphones and smart watches last twice as long between charges.
The battery was developed by SolidEnergy, a company spun out of MIT in 2012. The secret to boosting energy storage lies in swapping the conventional electrode material—graphite—for a thin sheet of lithium-metal foil, which can store more lithium ions.
Lithium-air batteries, which could give electric cars the same range as gasoline ones, are a step closer to becoming practical. Researchers at Yale and MIT have found a way to alleviate two of the batteries’ biggest problems—their inefficiency and inability to be recharged many times.
The researchers developed a nanostructured membrane that reduces the energy needed to recharge the battery, making it more efficient. The advance also allowed an experimental version of the battery to be recharged 60 times without losing storage capacity— roughly double the number of times as previous versions of the battery. (Electric car batteries should last roughly 1,000 recharge cycles.)
Several new types of battery, each capable of cost-effectively storing the energy output from a wind or solar farm, are finally being hooked up to power grids. The so-called grid batteries could lower the cost of renewable energy by eliminating the intermittency problem that arises when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
On Wednesday, Aquion Energy, a Pittsburgh-based startup that makes one such battery, announced that the technology will allow a small electricity grid in Hawaii to run around the clock on solar power.
Many of the estimated 50 million lithium-ion laptop batteries discarded every year could provide electricity storage sufficient to light homes in poor countries, researchers at IBM say.
In work being aired this week at a conference in San Jose, researchers at IBM Research India in Bangalore found that at least 70 percent of all discarded batteries have enough life left to power an LED light at least four hours a day for a year.
A new kind of battery that stores energy from solar and wind power cheaply and cleanly has hit the market. It is by far the cheapest of a new generation of large, long-lived batteries that could make it possible to rely heavily on intermittent, renewable energy sources.
Aquion Energy, a company spun out of Carnegie Mellon University, recently delivered the first of its batteries to operators of small power grids, or “microgrids,” that can operate independently of the centralized grid.
