What’s really going on with batteries? A recent panel discussion from Autoline (via Green Car Reports) asked three experts – one from one of the world’s biggest battery concerns, one from a promising startup, and one academic – and they see great things ahead. Host John McElroy starts out the way all mainstream media stories on EVs do… Read more »
Researchers around the world are working on supercapacitors (aka ultracaps), whose high power density makes them a perfect complement for lithium-ion batteries. Meanwhile, a couple of visionaries at Volvo have been thinking about ways to get around the high space requirements of batteries by storing energy in a car’s body panels. Image Courtesy of Volvo… Read more »
After years of operating in secrecy, battery startup Sakti3 has been much in the news lately, the subject of feature articles in Scientific American and Fortune (via Green Car Reports). The Ann Arbor company, founded in 2008 by Ann Marie Sastry, has developed a solid-state electrolyte, which could eliminate some of the drawbacks of liquid electrolytes, including… Read more »
The idea of battery swapping for EVs has been around for some time, but the reality has not been auspicious. Better Place bet on the concept and went bankrupt. Tesla successfully demonstrated a battery swap in 2013, but so far has not gotten around to opening any swap stations to the public. A team of… Read more »
Scientists around the world are testing new ways to look inside lithium-ion batteries to gain a better understanding of what happens during charging and discharging. A team of chemists and engineers at Ohio State University claims to be the first to use Neutron Depth Profiling (NDP) to track the flow of lithium ions into and… Read more »
Tesla’s Gigafactory will mark a milestone in American manufacturing – to put it in trendier language, it’s going to be a game-changer. This is already obvious to readers of the EV press, and it’s starting to sink in among the mainstream media. The investing pundits of the Motley Fool have parsed some of Tesla’s statements… Read more »
Along with its industry giant partner Alcoa, Israeli startup Phinergy says it has aluminum-air batteries for EVs in the can. More than 550 feet over the National Mall in Washington, DC, the single most significant piece of American aluminum triangulates a point between the White House, the US Capitol, and the Lincoln Memorial. It is… Read more »
Lithium-air batteries are widely expected to be the next big thing – more than 300 research papers have been published on the topic in the past 3 years. Li-air has the potential to deliver far more energy density than current lithium-ion technology. A new review in the ACS journal Chemical Reviews sums up the current… Read more »
Many researchers are interested in lithium-sulfur batteries, because they can offer up to four times the energy density of lithium-ion chemistries. However, current lithium-sulfur batteries have a much shorter lifespan. In a paper published this week in Nature Communications, a team from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) described a “hybrid” anode… Read more »
When the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) announced its Robust Affordable Next Generation EV-Storage (RANGE) program in February, it envisioned doling out $20 million in research funding to 8- 12 recipients with the goal of developing a better EV battery. Now the agency has announced the recipients of the awards, and both… Read more »