Batteries become a technology of global importance, and not just to help avert dangerous climate change. Companies are racing to find better ways to store electricity and so provide us with cheaper energy when and where we want it.
Better batteries would enable the democratisation of electricity
That’s changing, though, and we’re beginning to use the spoils of the information revolution to spark a similar revolution in energy. Supercomputers are one such tool, making it possible to crunch through many combinations of elements in different proportions and optimise properties such as energy density and charging time. One such system is the Electrolyte Genome, a program designed by researchers at Argonne in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California that sifts through thousands of potential battery chemistries to find promising candidates. On the back of that, Argonne researchers recently built a prototype Original Toshiba PA3534U-1BRS Battery that uses magnesium ions instead of lithium to carry and store charge. Magnesium ions have two positive charges compared with lithium’s one, doubling their capacity to store energy.
Good batteries are like needles in the haystack of all possible materials
Corporations and governments are pouring billions of dollars into improving existing battery technologies – with some success. But if we are to continue to compute and communicate with more freedom, while liberating ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels, conventional thinking needs an overhaul. We’re going to need a better battery. Demand for electricity varies through day and night and through different seasons. Currently, the energy needed to meet peaks in demand is stored in the form of natural gas and coal. These fossil stores sit around in back-up power plants that ramp up when demand is high.
Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and wave just compound this unpredictability: changes in local cloud cover, wind speed and the like produce irregular peaks and troughs that do not necessarily correspond with spikes in demand. Of all the ways to store energy, lithium-ion batteries are one of the most expensive. Yet, with some coaxing, grid storage is already happening using this technology. California signed a bill into law in 2014 that requires its energy companies to bring 1.3 gigawatts of storage to the grid by 2022 – about the same as the output of a large natural gas power station, and sufficient to cover about 1/40th of the state’s average power needs at any one moment. Its purpose is to capture renewable energy at off-peak times, then feed it back into the grid when demand is high.
Lithium-ion batteries are so important to the company that it has taken manufacturing into its own hands, building a “Gigafactory” just outside Reno, Nevada. By 2020, the company plans to produce as many lithium-ion batteries annually as the entire world produced in 2013 – enough for a fleet of 500,000 electric cars – and with a 30 per cent reduction in production cost per Acer um08a31 battery.
We are now at the edge of a new energy revolution, as a growing global population demands ever more energy, the next generation of better batteries can’t come soon enough.
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