Li-Ion Breakthrough Could be Huge

Posted: March 23rd, 2009 | Author: Steve | Filed under: Business, Cars, Technology | Tags: Business, Cars, linkedin, renewable energy, Technology | View Comments

Today, TriplePundit is reporting a potential major breakthrough in Lithium-Ion battery technology, which was published by “Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Gerbrand Ceder and graduate student Byoungwoo Kang”. The technology breakthrough, if true, would represent a huge benefit to electronics manufacturers, especially electronic vehicle producers.

According to the article:

“lithium ions can only pass through tunnels to the active electrode material when they’re perfectly positioned. In the absence of a few good traffic cops, it’s pandemonium. The solution, Ceder discovered, is to engineer the material with a so-called beltway system that guides the ions towards the tunnel entrances at an ideal angle.”

The most exciting part of Ceder’s paper is that, “because only slight modifications to li-ion manufacturing process are required, Professor Ceder is confident that the new battery material could be on the market within two or three years.”

This is very exciting stuff, because it will allow companies like Tesla Motors, Toyota and even Ford to build cars with longer range and longer battery life, both limiting factors in competing with traditional gas-powers cars.

Depending how much more efficient this technology allows lithium-ion batteries to be, it may also allow electronics to become smaller and produce less waste. It may also overcome another potential problem with lithium-ion technology, the scarcity of cobalt.

TriplePundit goes on to explain another very important benefit of this technology as applied to automobiles:

“Battery-powered vehicles…can work as mobile energy storage centers that smooth a potentially-bumpy renewable supply. Millions of these cars and trucks will eventually work in tandem with power companies through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, providing energy to the grid when demand is high, and recharging overnight when power generators have excess capacity, but nowhere to put it. Since electricity supply from renewable sources fluctuates by its very nature, PHEVs and EVs will make it easier to plug those power sources into the grid, heralding a era of clean energy.”

This is reiterating one of the central ideas in the Natural Capitalism philosophy. Vehicles become batteries which stabilize and distribute the electric power grid and enable emerging technologies like solar and wind power to become more viable, by allowing them to produce and store power that can not be utilized right away, thus removing one of the major stopping blocks to growth in the renewable energy field.

I view this of one example of how crucial technological innovations are to solving the climate change and other major challenges. By forcing us to innovate or die, past crisises, such as the two world wars. have produced technological breakthroughs that ensured hummanitiy’s survival, and I expect this crisis to be solved in a similar manner.

Thanks to TriplePundit: http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/the-liion-holy-grail.php