Skip to Content

New Arpa-e Projects Could Cut Battery Costs

The latest projects to receive funding might make electric vehicles more affordable.
April 30, 2010

The U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy has announced a new round of funded projects, including several companies or researchers we’ve written about before. Among them are Sion Power and ReVolt, which are developing very high capacity batteries, which could make electric vehicles much more practical and affordable (follow the links for our stories about them). Arpa-e is a new agency started to fund high risk research with potentially large payoffs, something like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

A couple of intriguing projects are connected to A123 Systems, a well-known U.S.-based battery company that we’ve covered. One finds a way around the fact that the materials that store the most energy often can’t deliver that energy quickly, making them unuseable in electric vehicles. It involves using a semi-solid electrode that makes extracting power easier, something like what ReVolt is doing. The concept is similar to a fuel cell in some ways, with the key difference being that it’s rechargeable. You can store energy in the battery by plugging into any outlet, so you don’t have to hunt down a hydrogen fueling station. If successful, it could lead to batteries that are a fraction (approximately 1/5th to /10th) of the cost of today’s batteries for electric vehicles.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.