Battery breakthroughs could lower costs and improve performance for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage--but commercializing these new technologies will be challenging.
Electric vehicles, hybrids, and renewable energy have at least one thing in common--if they're ever going to be more widely used, representing the majority of cars on the road or a large share of electricity supply, batteries need to get significantly better. Batteries will need to store more energy, deliver it faster and more reliably, and ultimately, cost far less. The specific ways batteries need to improve vary by the application, but in all these areas, researchers have been making significant headway.
Last week, MIT researchers led by Yang-Shao Horn , a professor of materials science and engineering and mechanical engineering, and Paula Hammond, a professor of chemical engineering, announced a new approach to high-power lithium-ion batteries, the type that's useful for hybrid vehicles or for stabilizing the electricity grid. High-power batteries accept and deliver charge rapidly. In hybrids, the goal is to supplement the gasoline engine, allowing it to run at its most efficient. The battery drives the car at low speeds for short distances and boosts acceleration, lowering demand on the engine. It also captures energy from braking that would otherwise be lost as heat. For the electricity grid, such batteries could buffer changes in supply and demand of electricity--something that's becoming more important as more variable sources of electricity are introduced, such as wind and solar power.
The MIT researchers demonstrated a new battery electrode, based on specially treated carbon nanotubes, that last for thousands of cycles without any loss in performance. Batteries made from these electrodes could deliver enough power to propel large delivery vans or garbage trucks, for example, without the batteries being too heavy to be practical. (The researchers need to increase the thickness of the electrodes for them to be practical in these applications.) Companies such as A123 Systems, based in Watertown, MA, have also developed very high-power lithium-ion batteries, and other academic groups and startups are developing carbon nanotube-based ultracapacitors, which store energy using a different mechanism than batteries that's particularly useful for high power and long life.
While the new electrodes could eventually be useful for hybrids, and for stabilizing the grid, they aren't particularly good for other applications such as all-electric vehicles. For electric vehicles, the total amount of energy that batteries store is more important than how fast that energy can be delivered, since it's the total amount that determines how far these cars can travel between charges. The MIT researchers who developed the new carbon nanotube electrodes are also developing a different type of battery to store large amounts of energy. Called a lithum-air battery, where one of a battery's two electrodes is replaced by an interface with the air, the technology has recently attracted large amounts of government funding and interest from companies such as IBM. In theory, such batteries could store three times as much energy as conventional lithium-ion batteries. But the design has a number of problems that make it hard to commercialize, among the vulnerability of its active materials to moisture (the lithium metal it uses can catch fire if it gets wet) and the batteries' tendency to stop working after being recharged just a few times.
A Pittsburgh company says its battery has the long life and cheap cost needed to be practical for energy storage.
A binding agent found in everything from ice cream to cosmetics could let lithium-ion cells hold much more energy.
Founder of A123 Systems starts a new company to commercialize the technology.
Oil products wont run out because they can make them these days. Labour costs are generally the difference...Yes okay china will supply the world with oil products at some point in future...i wonder how the rest of the world feels about that?
Energy will be made with renewables on a ever increasing basis as costs go up with the production of oil.
Once energy is generated with Fusion power it would still be another 50 years before every country has access to it.
Id be more inclined to say at 2050 at least 25% of the worlds power will come from renewables.
The problem you have is that tables have been drawn up, but every few years they need to redraw them with technology changes. So no real current table exists that can truly predict the future.
But back in the 1970's i think they extrapolated about 2030 for oil and other fuels to really go head to head.
By then there would be so little fuel as to make the price inaccessible to workers as wages go up yearly and the cost of fuel would go up weekly.
Back to batteries i believe that solving the lithium tree problem would go along way to resolving a lot of battery issues today. One thought i have is that when the battery gets hot...used... that the heat is making new paths for the problem. I dont fully understand the issue but im sure if you run the battery in the cold and found no problems with it youd answer that one.
The solution could be adding a better heat disappation layer on the outside or inside...
Im totally guessing of course.
The article forgot an advance of import, the Arizona State spinoff co that claims to have overcome dendrite formation in their ionic liquid battery, with a claim of 11 times the energy density of the best lithium ion batteries. I saw it here on MIT Tech Review. The same story also reported the company has several liquids it's looking at, which can be mass produced at the same price as liquid soap detergent. The only metal the battery needed was zinc. Cost was projected at about the same cost as a car starting battery, except with more energy density that even DOE is targeting. The co was called Fluidic Liquids?
What about the Toyota RAV4 EV?
The best battery to this day is the Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery that was used in the 2002 Toyota RAV4 EV. It's 100% recyclable and with decade-old battery technology can get over 100 miles per charge. The RAV4 EVs still in operation today have over 100,000 miles of use and STILL get over 100 miles per charge! I say why don't we improve this battery instead of trying to reinvent the wheel? It would require Cobasys to stop hindering technology advancement and take that patent off the shelf and stop hiding it!
Re: What about the Toyota RAV4 EV?
Four more years and the fundamental NiMH patents will be expired.
burning fuels is not the answer
I read that we don't have to worry about running out of things to burn to create energy. This is a hot subject since we are confronting global warming and I know that some people think this is just a hiccup in nature and we have very little to do with it, but the glaciers and ice caps are melting and putting about two billion gallons of two cubic miles of fresh water into the oceans every week. GLaciers and ice caps are in sharp decline and they are a barometer of global warming and proof that we have affected our environment. If we assume biofuel takes over from fossil fuel we have to consider the cost in our soil capacity to grow something flamable, that requires the soil to be fertalized, with what? Most fertalizers come from petrolium industry, does it not? We need good soil to grow food with to meet soaring population growth, it does not make sense to try to keep burning fuel to create energy when solar energy efficiencies have passed 40% and expect to go to 66 percent efficient in a few years. THe cost of solar per watt is down from five dollars a few years ago to about one dollar now. Not to mention a billion combustion engines heating up the air, polluting it and using up oxygen.
. New battery technology is outracing our dependancy on oil but why are we trying to keep depending on oil and bio fuels when they are obsolete? They hurt us, they drive wars and pollution and global warming. There are a lot better things we can do with petroleum than burning it up into the atmosphere. It is a valuable resource. Invest in Sun, Wind and Electric transportation and we will stop seeing a dependancy on oil and spills and leaks into our oceans.
I can't see these nano-Lithium ion batteries with at least 5x capacity being available to Joe Blogs in his Laptop/iPad in the street before 2020 honestly.
Great to hear of these advances by the scientists of course, but industry sadly takes a very long time to get it to a mass production state.
Even then it'll be sold at such a price premium to begin with, that I doubt we'll be able to afford it until a further 4-5 years has past!
I remember 10 years ago hearing about a new fancy type of display that will be as cheap as chips, low powered and so easy to mass produce.
They called it OLEDs displays...
We're still waiting for cheap OLED TVs aren't we?
:-))
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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grosser
5 Comments
Enery roadmap
I wonder if someone has a nice roadmap correlating different energy sources (renewable and not) with storing and transporting energy around from today into 2050. I kind of think that solar will be ready to drive the energy needs of the world in 2020, freeing up hydrocarbon fuels for more noble ends (someone with some nice info please e-mail me at grandonia@gmail.com)
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Roy H
5 Comments
Re: Enery roadmap
We definitely need to get off fossil fuels. Solar and Wind although very appealing are intermittent and expensive. Our best answer is LFTRs.
Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors were invented in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They ran one for almost 5 years. LFTRs use cheap thorium, are inherently safe, do not produce long term radio-active waste and were abandoned because they are not suitable for making bombs. See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
and
http://energyfromthorium.com/
Although the principles are proven, there is still some research required for the best materials to have long 50 year plus life. This should be our highest priority to solve our energy and pollution problems.
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