Correction: Ars Technica points out that they aren’t batteries, rather capacitors which hold much less charge and aren’t feasible for use in transportation on grid-scale electricity storage. Ignore the rest of this story. Sorry.
A Japanese firm called Eamex has announced (Japanese translation via Google) that they have developed a new Li-Ion battery that is capable of withstanding 10,000 cycles and 10,000W/kg power. A huge achivement – considering most laptop batteries today can only hold up for 300 cycles, even the high-end batteries in the Apple MacBooks are only 1,000 cycles. Could this be the technology to finally lay to rest the issues of battery life in cars?
While I’m always skeptical of people touting new battery improvements due to the very high lead time between development, sampling, manufacturability and entrance to the market, these batteries could dramatically change the EV/E-REV world, as well as the power storage/back-up world.
The battery cycle life is a dramatic improvement. At 10,000 cycles, a plug-in vehicle could recharge twice a day for over 13 years. The battery not only eliminates the worry about having to replace it during the 10 year warranty. This also allows people not to worry about taking advantage of Vehicle-to-Grid technologies without excess wear on their battery; V2G during the summer months could take a tiny bit out of the battery at peak times and recharge it later.
The second improvement is the 10,000W/kg specific power. This is far and above what most Li-Ion batteries can provide today. Combined with the increased cycle life, you can build EVs and E-REVs with smaller battery packs; closer to the actual amount of energy that would be needed instead of having a limit on the depth of discharge like the Volt. This effectively reduces the cost of the battery by requiring less kWh of storage – batteries that might be $500/kWh to provide a 16kWh battery can be downsized to 10kWh and still provide the exact same performance in a smaller package (100kg instead of 160kg pack weight) while delivering more power than the engine will need. Hybrids will stand to gain from this as well, since a 2kWh battery could easily power the car entirely (200kW, or 266 HP) for a few miles.
From a grid-backup standpoint, the batteries could finally make practical and affordable to capturing cheap energy and selling it at peak demand times. The high cycle life will keep maintenance and replacement costs down, which is necessary when the difference between daytime and night time prices is only 10-15c/kWh.
There are still many questions left to ask – how does the power output of the battery vary with the depth of discharge, how is the charge and discharge and cycle life affected by temperature. They expect to start producing this battery at the end of the year, but who knows in what quantities and if it will live up to the performance above.
via Electronista
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