https://archive.md/TQ8um
"There’s a revolution brewing in batteries for electric cars. Japanese car
maker Toyota said last year that it aims to release a car in 2027–28 that could
travel 1,000 kilometres and recharge in just 10 minutes, using a battery type
that swaps liquid components for solids. Chinese manufacturers have announced
budget cars for 2024 featuring batteries based not on the lithium that powers
today’s best electric vehicles (EVs), but on cheap sodium — one of the most
abundant elements in Earth’s crust. And a US laboratory has surprised the world
with a dream cell that runs in part on air and could pack enough energy to
power aeroplanes.
These and other announcements rely on alternative designs to the conventional
lithium-ion batteries that have dominated EVs for decades. Although lithium-ion
is hard to beat, researchers think that a range of options will soon fill
different niches of the market: some very cheap, others providing much more
power. “We’re going to see the market diversify,” says Gerbrand Ceder, a
materials scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The pursuit of better car batteries is fierce, in large part because the market
is skyrocketing. More than a dozen nations have declared that all new cars must
be electric by 2035 or earlier. The International Energy Agency forecasts that
the global stock of EVs on the road will rise from 16.5 million in 2021 to
nearly 350 million by 2030 (see go.nature.com/42mpkqy), and that demand for
energy from EV batteries will reach 14 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2050, which is
90 times more than in 2020.
Car batteries have a stiff list of requirements. They need to pack a lot of
energy into as little material and weight as possible so that cars can go
farther on a single charge. They need to provide enough power for acceleration,
recharge fast, have a long lifespan (the common standard is to withstand 1,000
full recharging cycles, which should last a consumer 10–20 years), work well
across wide temperature ranges and be safe and affordable. “It’s very hard to
optimize all these things at once,” says Linda Nazar, a battery researcher at
the University of Waterloo, Canada.
So researchers are pursuing a plethora of options, with different targets in
mind. The US Department of Energy’s (DoE’s) Battery500 programme, launched in
2017, is aiming for a cell energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh
kg–1), a 65% boost compared with today’s best products. The PROPEL-1K
programme, launched last year by the US Advanced Research Projects
Agency–Energy, is ambitiously aiming for a longer-term goal of 1,000 Wh kg–1.
As for cost, the DoE’s Vehicle Technologies Office is aiming to hit US$60 per
kilowatt hour by 2030, about half today’s prices, which it reckons will mean
that the price of electric cars will break even with the cost of those powered
by gas guzzling petrol engines (see ‘Powering up’).
It’s hard to pin down where things stand. Commercial announcements about
yet-to-be-released batteries or cars sometimes emphasize one metric over
others, and proprietary claims can be impossible to check until batteries have
been tested for years in real-world cars. But it’s clear that decades of work
on variants such as solid-state and sodium batteries are finally coming to
fruition, says Nazar. As for the far future, plenty of battery chemistries
remain tantalizing possibilities. “Now everyone has accepted battery
development is really important, everyone is tripping over themselves to do
it,” she says."
Via
Furture Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-tolerance-poland-sanitation-indonesia-restoration-dominican-republic/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
