Jan

10

IBM Says It Now Has a Working Lithium Air Battery

January 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

Physicist Winfried Wilcke working at IBM’s Almaden laboratories, based in San Jose, California in a report by Duncan Graham-Rowe in NewScientist allows that IBM’s Battery 500 project to find an air battery solution for electric vehicles (EVs), has found a starting solution. The assertion now is IBM believes it has solved a fundamental problem that [...]

Dec

30

The Case For Better and Cheaper Batteries

December 30, 2011 | 1 Comment

Nothing is more persuasive than consumer expectations for determining planning and investment.  To help with that Pike Research conducted a web-based survey of 1,051 U.S. consumers in the fall of 2011 using a nationally representative and demographically balanced sample to consumer demand, preferences, and price sensitivity for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and electric vehicle charging [...]

Nov

25

40,000 Battery Charging Cycles

November 25, 2011 | 4 Comments

Those lithium-ion batteries we’ve come to appreciate in cell phones and other small portable electronics don’t last as long as one would like – the full charge shrinks a little with each recharge. Stanford researchers have developed part of a new dream battery with a new electrode that employs crystalline nanoparticles of a copper compound.  [...]

Nov

16

Halfway to the Ultimate Lithium Battery

November 16, 2011 | 1 Comment

Northwestern University engineers show in the journal Advanced Energy Materials they have developed technology that could hugely improve lithium batteries.  The new anode technology suggests a cellphone battery might recharge in 15 minutes and last ten times longer. The scientists combined two chemical engineering approaches to address two major battery limitations — energy capacity and [...]

Oct

10

A Battery For The Grid

October 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Aquion Energy in Pittsburgh uses the simple chemistry of water-based electrolyte and abundant materials such as sodium and manganese for a grid scale battery that is expected to cost $300 for a kilowatt-hour of storage capacity, less than a third of what it would cost to use lithium-ion batteries.  Third-party tests have shown that Aquion’s [...]

Sep

13

Algae To Make Better Batteries

September 13, 2011 | 1 Comment

Think alginate, that you may have met quite intimately if you’ve had dental impressions made – the gooey, but not sticky substance that was in the tray which formed to match your teeth.  Alginate or more accurately the sodium alginate, the sodium salt of alginic acid, is derived from Macrocystis pyrifera algae, which is also [...]

Sep

12

Research Factory – a New Kind of School for Building Batteries

September 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) plan to cut the cost to manufacture batteries and power trains of electric vehicles in half by 2018 through closing the gaps in the innovation chain. To get there KIT scientists are developing concrete, close-to-industry solutions for energy the storage and power trains and combine them on [...]

Jun

7

The Inside Track On Lithium

June 7, 2011 | 1 Comment

Robert J. Moriarty’s 321Energy published George Mack’s talk with Daniela Desormeaux about the lithium trade. For our purposes, the question is can lithium supplies fully provision a fast growing market at prices that makes the batteries cost effective and competitive.  The answers are compelling. Daniela Desormeaux is an economist and an expert in industrial chemicals [...]

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