The 94-year-old creator of the lithium-ion battery has invented another breakthrough storage device that is capturing the attention of industry heavyweights.
“John Goodenough, inventor of the lithium battery, has developed the first all solid-state battery cells,” Alphabet Inc CEO Eric Schmidt said on Twitter yesterday.
Goodenough’s claim that his new battery cells have three times as much energy density as today’s lithium-ion batteries is “promising,” Schmidt said.
A new and more powerful generation of batteries might be made entirely from glass, according to the conclusions of Goodenough and his team of researchers published by Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry.
They store and transmit energy at temperatures lower than traditional lithium-ion packs and can be made using globally abundant supplies of sodium, the research showed.
The research could result in “a safe, low-cost all solid-state cell with a huge capacity giving a large energy density and a long cycle life suitable for powering an all-electric road vehicle or for storing electric power from wind or solar energy,” the researchers wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Energy storage is seen as the missing link in the world’s transition to a zero-carbon economy, as batteries can fill power gaps from intermittent solar and wind energy.
Companies including Tesla Inc and Volkswagen AG have set their sights on lithium-ion to usher in a new generation of plug-in electric vehicles.
The research conducted by Goodenough and his team, who worked from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as at the University of Porto in Portugal, was driven by the “urgent” need to reduce fossil fuel consumption and combat climate change, the journal cited them as saying.
The researchers are working on several patents and are seeking to work with battery makers “to develop and test their new materials in electric vehicles and energy storage devices,” the University of Texas said in a statement.
Goodenough began focusing on storage technologies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s as a potential way of resolving the persistent oil crisis of the era, according to a 2015 profile published by Quartz magazine.
He developed key parts of today’s lithium-ion batteries in 1980.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
POTENTIAL demand: Tesla’s chance of reclaiming its leadership in EVs seems uncertain, but breakthrough in full self-driving could help boost sales, an analyst said Chinese auto giant BYD Co (比亞迪) is poised to surpass Tesla Inc as the world’s biggest electric vehicle (EV) company in annual sales. The two groups are expected to soon publish their final figures for this year, and based on sales data so far this year, there is almost no chance the US company led by CEO Elon Musk would retain its leadership position. As of the end of last month, BYD, which also produces hybrid vehicles, had sold 2.07 million EVs. Tesla, for its part, had sold 1.22 million by the end of September. Tesla’s September figures included a one-time boost in
RSS