The most important spec on any portable gadget—phone, tablet, laptop, watch—isn’t processor speed or a pixel-packed display. It’s how long you can use it before it becomes a blank brick in need of an outlet. And while the next big battery-life breakthrough may still be a few years away, recent advances are bringing us oh-so-close to giving our gear more of what it needs most of all: time.
Let’s acknowledge that, yes, there’s chatter of a new miracle battery every few years if not months, and nothing ever seems to come of it. That silence doesn’t always equate to failure, though, according to the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research’s Jeff Chamberlain.
“We hear about a new battery announcement every month, or every couple of weeks; the problem is solved, the next generation is here. And then years go by,” Chamberlain tells WIRED. And the problem isn’t always the battery itself, but how hard batteries are to manufacture, he says.
Help, however, really is coming. In some ways it’s already here.
Work With What You’ve Got
The basic lithium ion battery that we use today hasn’t changed dramatically since Sony first started selling them to consumers in 1991. Economies of scale and various tweaks along the way have helped improve efficiency about 10 percent a year, says Chamberlain, but that still makes lithium ion a relative tortoise in a world more accustomed to progress in Moore’s Law-style leaps. It’s no wonder we’re all hungry for a major breakthrough.
That could come one of two ways. The first is what produces all of those flashy headlines that never seem to amount to much: Figure out what what kind of chemistry comes after the tech we’ve been using for decades. That’s the moonshot, the flash fix that will make today’s batteries seem downright Neanderthalic. The more realistic goal though, at least in the near term? Make the most of what you’ve got. And what we’ve got is lithium ion.
It’s not impossible to imagine a lithium ion that doubles the performance of what we use today.
The most recent example of creative ways around lithium ion’s limitations came from a perhaps unlikely source: Apple’s new MacBook, announced earlier this month. The entry-level laptop features a unique battery design that uses “terraced” battery cells to stuff every available centimeter of a device with power. It doesn’t make batteries any more efficient or any safer, but it does give Apple the ability to squeeze as much juice into any device as is physically possible.
It’s an important development both because it doesn’t require lithium ion technology itself to advance to reap benefits, and because it can be applied to devices of any size and shape. The smaller the device—a phone, a watch—the more crucial it becomes to use all available space.
There are other ample opportunities in the lithium ion space. Because so much money is tied into the industry—annual sales are in the tens of billions—the work going on in most labs is understandably secretive. But Chamberlain points to potential in everything from a better coating process to experimenting with changes in the electrolyte, anode, cathode, and beyond. It’s not impossible to imagine a lithium ion that doubles the performance of what we use today.
And if you look further down the horizon, to the point where we’ve moved past lithium ion altogether? The possibilities are even more impressive.
A Solid Lead
There are plenty of cutting-edge battery types to choose from. Multivalents promise increased electrical current in the same density, while rechargeable flow batteries have much longer life spans than their lithium ion counterparts. Batteries with gelatinous electrolytes could generate higher voltage. But the next-generation tech that’s caught the most attention recently, thanks to a hefty investment by Dyson, is solid state.
Dyson, famous for its vacuums but producer of a wide array of products that would benefit from a longer-lasting, faster-recharging battery, recently pumped $15 million into a company called Sakti3, one of several labs looking into the potential of solid state electrolyte batteries. As the name suggests, these differ from traditional lithium ion batteries by using solid electrodes and electrolytes instead of liquid. The net result? A battery that can pack in more energy while also presenting less of a safety risk by doing away with the flammable liquid electrolytes used today.
The applications of solid state batteries are also myriad, according to Chamberlain. A cordless vacuum, sure, but you could also conceivable squeeze one into something as small as a smartphone or as big as a car.
Sakti3, like all private battery researchers, hasn’t provided much detail about its process, but does claim to have already generated twice the energy density of the most advanced lithium ion battery on the market today. The real question is whether they can produce that affordably and at scale; even with the Dyson infusion, the company’s commercialization timeline is still a matter of years, not months.
And that’s the catch. It’s likely—in fact, almost inevitable—that Sakti3 will fall into the same pattern that so many battery headline-grabbers have before. Quick burst of hope, just as quickly forgotten.
What that doesn’t mean, though, is that progress has disappeared with it. Work continues on solid state, and on myriad other research into new materials that could give us five times what we’re used to, both by Chamberlain’s team at the Argonne National Laboratory and in privately labs around the world. What battery research is lacking isn’t potential. It’s patience.
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