Sci-Am, Reuters, etc: Lithium-ion batteries look good? Wait’ll the lithium metal ones arrive.
This post is, one must confess, motivated partly by self-interest. Recently I plunked down a fat piece of change to reserve a spot for an all-electric sedan that won’t even be in production for more than a year (hint: think Elon Musk), and hence am fascinated by batteries.
Here’s some news to share with anybody else infatuated by electrolytes, anodes, and exotic materials that are really hard to tame. Recently ARPA-E, the DOE’s version of the Pentagon’s DARPA program for far-out (and sometimes spooky) inventions, sponsored near DC a “summit meeting” on advanced energy systems including batteries. It discussed ones much better in principle than the lithium-ion jobs that are presently all the rage – and which were not so many years ago in the news for bursting into raging flames from the bottoms of laptops (that is the side where the lap is).
It seems that one DOE-spinoff company, called PolyPlus and right here in my hometown of Berkeley, has been claiming for some time to have figured out a way to jump beyond lithium-ion as the primary electrochemical workhorse of such things, to lithium metal. Such batteries are often called lithium-air and lithium-water and as practical devices have been largely hypothetical. Metallic lithium ordinarily sort-of explodes (violently dissolves) in water and doesn’t work so well in air either due to humidity. But the company says that with the right plastic-ceramic wrappings or something like that, one can harness the eagerness of that reaction to push electrons about without dangerous spikes in temperature because the metal stays dry. And its potential energy storage density is several times that of lithium-ion material. The company’s presentation at the DOE meeting got a splash of coverage.
Stories:
- Scientific American – David Biello: How National Security Depends on Better Lithium Batteries ; Good context; would have been better to explicitly say the working material is lithium metal, as opposed to standard lithium salts, aka lithium-ion compounds. Hat tip to NSF’s Science360 site, which brought out attn. to the news.
- Earth2TEch/Reuters: Katie Fehrenbecher : PolyPlus: Water Batteries Could Be Comin’ Soon ; “Awe-inspiring” energy densities, she writes. It’s still not as dense as a tank of gasoline, one suspects, but better’n today’s batteries by a mile. She focusses on marine batteries that could work merely by being dunked in sea water. After that come rechargables and, eventually, electric vehicle application.
I sure hope, if we ever get that zoomy four-door electric auto charging up in the garage, that car makers are already planning on ways to retrofit their electrics to handle better batteries, extending the cars’ ranges. Otherwise the advance of technology will make their lithium-ion battery packs look quaint, like the Stanley Steamers of the 21st century. One would hate to have to get rid of the whole car because one can’t slide in a better battery.
Hmmm. Wanta bet some company or a bunch of them in Korea and China and elsewhere are busy laying plans to build these things too?
Grist for the Mill:
PolyPlus website which includes a link to a lot of previous press clips; alpha-En Corp. Press Release (related to manufacture of lithium metal for future batteries).
Other ARPA-E Meeting Stories:
- MIT Technology Review – Kevin Bullis: Congress Backs Energy Agency ;
- CNET – ARPA-E researchers dig deep for energy innovation ; Photo w/caption.
- Earthtechling – Nino Marchetti: ARPA-E Summit Shows Cutting Edge Cleantech ;
- Reuters – Timothy Garner: US military to help develop energy storage device ;
- Reuters – Katie Fehrenbacker: Budget Cuts Loom Large at ARPA-E Summit ;
- C-Net – Martin LaMonica: ARPA-E a litmus test for energy R&D agenda ; Great, two-minded quote from one participant: “I’m a free-market guy but the reality is if you want to be serious in the energy science and technology space – which we’re still debating as a country – then you need research and development.” He’s talking about gov’t-sponsored research, and if the speaker had swapped his but for an and, it would make even more sense.
- Innovation News Daily – Jeremy Hsu: U.S. Security Depends on Energy Innovation;
Grist for the Mill: DOE ARPA-E Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
