News

As rechargeable batteries proliferate in everything from cars to smartphones, recycling is becoming a critical issue. Now a team of researchers at the University of South Florida has found a way to use naturally occurring fungi to extract cobalt and lithium from waste batteries. The scientists presented their work at […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some interesting comments Tesla CTO JB Straubel made regarding vehicle-to-grid technology and using old EV batteries for stationary energy storage (for homes or the grid). There was a tidbit in there that I wanted to further highlight on its own, since it’s […]

In a new report for clients, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) forecasts that there will be 29 GWh of used EV batteries available in 2025. This far exceeds the size of the current stationary storage market. Of this, almost a third will get a second life as stationary storage (10 […]

A team led by celebrated battery boffin Professor Jeff Dahn at Dalhousie University has demonstrated that a common electrolyte additive is detrimental for Li-ion cells at high voltages, and suggest some alternatives. Dahn and his team discuss their latest work in two papers: “Enabling linear alkyl carbonate electrolytes for high […]

As is often the case with Tesla, the mainstream press has missed the true significance of the company’s latest product. Tesla’s announcement of its new P100D battery pack option focused on the quicker 0-60 time, so that’s what most media outlets wrote about. Everyone other than acceleration junkies greeted it […]

Zinc-air batteries are widely used in devices like hearing aids for their good performance-to-price ratio. The tricky part is of course to make them rechargeable. This is one of two technologies that ZAF Energy Systems has been working on for the last couple of years. [Note that CleanTechnica published an […]

Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the US Army Research Lab (ARL) are collaborating on a new type of lithium-ion battery that uses a high concentration of salt in an aqueous electrolyte. They hope to develop a battery that offers greater energy density and better safety than current […]

The MIT spinoff company SolidEnergy Systems is claiming that it can double the battery life of regular lithium-ion batteries and reduce battery sizes though the use of its new lithium-metal technology. More specifically, the company is claiming that its battery technology allows for energy densities of 400 Wh/kg. The technology […]

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new way to improve the performance of lithium-rich cathode materials by creating oxygen vacancies at the material’s surface. In “Gas-solid interfacial modification of oxygen activity in layered oxide cathodes for lithium-ion batteries,” published in Nature Communications, Minghao Zhang and colleagues explain the […]

The unprecedented demand for the upcoming Model 3 presents major opportunities not only for Tesla, but for its partners. Panasonic, which will be the exclusive supplier of batteries for Model 3, expects its annual sales of automotive batteries to more than double in three years. Kenji Tamura, the head of […]

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich in Switzerland have developed a simple procedure that they say can enhance the performance of Li-ion batteries by improving the design of the electrodes without changing the underlying chemistry. In “Magnetically aligned graphite electrodes for high rate performance Li-ion batteries,” published […]

Powin Energy, a maker of stationary storage systems, has been awarded a patent for its Battery Pack Operating System (bp-OS). The bp-OS uses an algorithm to actively and passively balance batteries down to the cell level, and also offers a picture of battery health through real-time monitoring, state-of-charge management and […]