Stanford Researchers Invent Everlasting Battery Material

judgecorp writes "Researchers at Stanford University have invented a battery material that could allow batteries to go through 400,000 charging cycles instead of the 400 or so which today's Li-ion batteries can manage. Among the uses could be storing energy to even out the availability of renewable sources such as sun and wind." Adds a story at ExtremeTech, "The only problem is, a high-voltage cathode (-) requires a very low-voltage anode (+) — and the Stanford researchers haven’t found the right one yet; and so they haven’t actually made a battery with this new discovery."

Comments

"Renewable sources"

[sugarmotor]

Nice to hear the phrase "renewable sources" being used.

Summary is out by an order of magnitude

[Fluffeh]

From TFA:

Stanford, however, has developed a new battery electrode that can survive 40,000 charge/discharge cycles — enough for 30 years of use on the grid.

Re:Summary is out by an order of magnitude

[skids]

...and the original article plays it loose with the 400 charge/discharge cycles figure for Li-ion. They took the low-end of the range from Wikipedia's Li-ion article. Typical is more like 1000 for standard chemistries and higher for some of the more stable chemistries like li-FePO4.

Still, nice to see even more evidence that there's a menu of options for improving battery energy density, cycle life, and calendar life. Now if we could just make an educated guess and pick a suite of them to develop into large scale production instead of constantly dithering waiting for the next grad student to up the bar and never actually opening a factory.

Re:Summary is out by an order of magnitude

[wooferhound]

And it would also help if there was an actual battery in the first place
From TFA . . .
>> "The only problem is, a high-voltage cathode (-) requires a very low-voltage anode (+) — and the
>> Stanford researchers haven’t found the right one yet; and so they haven’t actually made a battery
>> with this new discovery."

Re:Summary is out by an order of magnitude

[garyebickford]

Well, in all fairness, that's a binary order of magnitude. :)

  - I know, that's weak. But this is slashdot.

Other orders of magnitude may be calculated using bases other than 10. The ancient Greeks ranked the nighttime brightness of celestial bodies by 6 levels in which each level was the fifth root of one hundred (about 2.512) as bright as the nearest weaker level of brightness, so that the brightest level is 5 orders of magnitude brighter than the weakest, which can also be stated as a factor of 100 times brighter.

- Order of Magnitude

And see, now you know how star magnitude is computed! :D

Re:Summary is out by an order of magnitude

[bemymonkey]

Standard batteries in use today (say in laptops or smartphones) typically don't last longer than 300-500, and that's with greater capacity loss than 20%... then again, people really beat their batteries into submission - charging a smartphone during GPS navigation while the sun shines on the damn thing, constantly charging to 100% and keeping it charged all day while the phone's on the desk, running it down to 0% regularly (usually other people than the constantly charged ones - the memory effect still lives in the minds of those old enough to remember batteries before Lithium Ion)...

Hell, the laptop battery I'm currently using has only got 104 cycles and is already down to 22.08/28.80Wh - ~76%. Recalibration might pull that back up to 24Wh or so, but still... This is my beater-battery, so it's constantly being charged and discharged in tiny increments, but it's still pretty gruesome.

Re:Summary is out by an order of magnitude

[TheRaven64]

No, in computer science, but my supervisor was Chinese and picked up a lot of Welsh idioms that he didn't always apply appropriately...

Re:Summary is out by an order of magnitude

[skids]

Except I made no claims as to "order of magnitude", that was you putting the GP's words in my mouth. I just said they played it loose with that figure, whereas the GP complained about the mismatch between the OP and the FA on the other figure.

just starting....

[harvey the nerd]

and the Stanford researchers haven’t found the right one yet; and so they haven’t actually made a battery with this new discovery
They have hypothesized an ideal, microscopic unit device that might be mass produced. They are just starting the applied research phase and may need some additional basic research

Re:just starting....

[garyebickford]

When I worked in a research lab, another methodology used was to use this year's funding to pay for the research for which funding had not been requested yet, to assure that the results of THAT were likely to be confirmed. Then, once they were pretty confident that the research would pan out, they could apply for the grant to do the research. This way they always had successful research, and a continuous stream of grants. The continuously successful labs all worked this way to my knowledge. If they applied for a grant to do 'X', you could be 90% sure that they had already proved that 'X' would work, and probably had already been done. This might have been less true for 'pure' research as opposed to applied research.

Of course at the big Uni's the Uni took 50% to 60% off the top to cover operational expenses, so every grant application had to include a justification for double the amount of money actually needed (since the grants rarely paid for operational expenses), hidden in the cost structure.

And you thought corporations and government agencies were the only ones doing shenanigans. Ask anyone who is likely to know at Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc.

Re:Impossible!

[sadness203]

Obvious troll, but still. Not every country rely on coal/gas to generate its electricity.
And better battery technology might help to store energies produced by other means, like solar or wind.

Nothing special

[BlueParrot]

This is nothing new. Many battery technologies can last for decades. It's only the Cobalt based lithium ones that have the abysmal 2-3 year shelf-life.

Ni-Iron batteries have demonstrated more than 50 year life, with no noticeable degradation following deep discharge.
LiFePO has demonstrated less than 20% capacity loss over 15 years and many thousands of cycles.
Ni-Hydrogen has been in service without maintenance on satellites for many many years. The batteries on the Hubble went 19 years without servicing.
Lead-Acid requires a bit of servicing and maintenance, but they can also last more than a decade when properly cared for.

Now when it comes to energy storage to deal with renewables the problem is the shear amount of energy storage needed as well as energy lost to inefficiency. The technology exists, but the cost would be prohibitive.

Re:Nothing special

[Jartan]

Now when it comes to energy storage to deal with renewables the problem is the shear amount of energy storage needed as well as energy lost to inefficiency. The technology exists, but the cost would be prohibitive.

RTFA and all that. The interesting thing about this is the electrolyte is supposedly cheap as hell. Thus the idea is making some long lasting batteries the size of a house on the cheap.

Re:Nothing special

[Tomato42]

Battery charge and discharge has efficiency in the order of 60%. That's pathetic in electricity land. Pumped storage (making use of huge lakes) has efficiency in the area of 90%. Wasting the space for warehouses to store batteries is, err, let me say, "not smart".

Re:Nothing special

[skids]

There are three ways to rate battery life: "calendar life" (actual age deterioration), "shelf life" (how long it retains a charge), and "cycle life" (number of cycles of some depth that may be processed). While there are some chemistries with very high cycle life, this is higher than anything in production, save of course for ultra-capacitors. So yes, it is new.

Re:Nothing special

[Anonymous Coward]

Pumped storage (making use of huge lakes) has efficiency in the area of 90%

Bull Fucking Shit. The full load efficiency of a large electric motor isn't often over 92-95% on its own--a lot of that is lost in frictional losses to windage and bearings, you see, not forgetting losses through conductors and eddy currents. In other words: you're already dangerously close to your 90% threshold right in the motor. Then you have the frictional losses of a turbine to pump the water up, and friction head losses due to the plumbing itself.

Then once you get the water up to a lake: if it's an open body of water, you're going to have evaporation. That reduces the net efficiency all the same. Ok. Now that it's in the lake, we gotta do the reverse. More losses to friction in the plumbing and generator turbine, and to the generator itself, and then to any power conversion necessary down the line.

Even if you went to heroic efforts in turbine mechanics and used hydrogen cooled motors and generators to reduce loss to air friction, I'd bet net efficiency over 70% would be very, very difficult to achieve, even in the best and most optimistic scenario involving an open body of water.

Not to say that's a bad thing, but whether or not that would be useful is entirely dependent on the needs of the grid and the type of power supply on that grid. If you've got a nuclear station that needs to run at 90%+ 100% of the time (or whatever the case may be), hydro storage might make a lot of sense; use the surplus to store energy during the low demand times.

Re:Nothing special

[canajin56]

You have that backwards. Batteries (at least high end lithium ion batteries) have an efficiency of about 90%, and pumped storage is about 70%. Good job.

Re:Nothing special

[FireFury03]

Then once you get the water up to a lake: if it's an open body of water, you're going to have evaporation. That reduces the net efficiency all the same.

A tiny amount of evaporation.. so tiny it isn't really worth caring about. Also, if you're going to start calculating such minor things, rain will improve your efficiency a tiny amount.

Even if you went to heroic efforts in turbine mechanics and used hydrogen cooled motors and generators to reduce loss to air friction, I'd bet net efficiency over 70% would be very, very difficult to achieve, even in the best and most optimistic scenario involving an open body of water.

Dinorwig Power Station averages 74-75% efficiency with open bodies of water. (No where near the 90% that the grand parent suggested, but still better than what you claim would be optimistic).

Not to say that's a bad thing, but whether or not that would be useful is entirely dependent on the needs of the grid and the type of power supply on that grid. If you've got a nuclear station that needs to run at 90%+ 100% of the time (or whatever the case may be), hydro storage might make a lot of sense; use the surplus to store energy during the low demand times.

It makes sense just to cope with demand peaks. The aforementioned Dinorwig power station can hit peak capacity in 6 seconds if they have presynchronised the generators (75 seconds if not). There aren't many "traditional" power stations that can do that (I suspect even gas turbines would struggle to hit the 6 second mark).

Re:I object to this

[Beardo the Bearded]

Everlasting should mean forever, not 400,000

I'm going to have to agree with the Pastor on this one. 400k isn't really "everlasting", it's got a finite limit to the lasting.

Revised article

[IceFoot]

Researchers at Stanford University have invented ONE HALF OF A BATTERY....

Re:Impossible!

[jamesh]

All that electricity they want to "store" comes from COAL so this sucks! Idiots! This is why all government funding to idiot-factories like MIT needs to be CUT IMMEDIATELY.

Precisely. Even if you rolled out enough solar and wind power generation capacity to run the whole world, it would still only work while the sun was shining and/or the wind was blowing... you'd still need coal or nuclear or some other fuel burning source to generate power during the times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

Unless you had some sort of everlasting battery to store the energy during the sunny or windy days to use during the dark still nights...

What?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>The only problem is, a high-voltage cathode (-) requires a very low-voltage anode (+)

I know technology has been moving fast, but have they repeated Kirchhoff's laws now?

Re:What?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

"Repealed", not "repeated". Sorry.

Re:Impossible! Really ? can you name 1 ?

[Crashmarik]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#List_of_countries_with_Source_of_Electricity_2008

Because this chart in the wiki doesn't have any that aren't getting power from coal, gas, or nuclear.

Re:I object to this

[wooferhound]

It's not the Heat
It's the Stupidity . . .

400,000 cycles is NOT "everlasting."

[EmagGeek]

Can we please try to use language accurately?

Re:400,000 cycles is NOT "everlasting."

[LongearedBat]

If you charge/discharge once per day, then it'll last for ~1000 years. From a practical standpoint, that's everlasting. It'll probably age to bits before the cycles run out, and it will probably be superceeded before it ages to bits.

Yeah, strictly speaking "everlasting" means "lasts forever". But nothing lasts forever, so it's an acceptable approximation.

Re:Wind and sun are renewable?

[garyebickford]

Hmm. I think that wind energy is in part derived as drag on the rotation of the Earth - the atmosphere is being dragged around the Earth along with the hard part of the planet, but since it is farther from the center or rotation it wants to move a bit slower (just as artificial satellites have slower rotation rates as their elevation increases). That explains why the net wind is from east to west. Of course a bunch of related effects related to sherical shape, coriolis force, thermal gradients in both elevation and latitude, etc. cause winds at different latitudes and elevations to go in different directions. So windmills are ever so slightly making the day longer.

Re:Impossible!

[garyebickford]

About 10 years ago I did an analysis of the economics and related topics on a hypothetical large-scale solar project in the northern Sahara. It wasn't specific to Libya but today Libya is a good potential platform. If you build a 100- or 200-square mile solar farm, putting the solar panels about 20 feet or more above the ground (higher is better due to better breeze), two of the beneficial side effects are cooling the space underneath, and (closely related) shade. If you think about it, in that area shade is a significant resource!

This solar installation then provides a large area where greenhouses can be built, shaded (between 70% and 95%) by the solar panels, and partly roofed so it's relatively cheaper to complete the enclosure. this not only provides power but also creates a huge plant-growing area. The result - Libya could become the produce capital of the Mediterranean. Some of the power could be used to provide desalinization, and the greenhouses would minimize water loss so the impact on the Mediterranean could be minimized. So Libya can export power AND food, and hire thousands of farm workers to work in long term, skilled jobs, without any need for migration so they will have a stake in improving where they live. This is a very synergistic approach so the total cost of the system does not have to be amortized purely with power sales. And it could be expanded across hundreds or thousands of square miles of rock and sand.

The analysis also showed that such a large installation would have a significant effect on the weather patterns, increasing local rainfall similarly to how a forest tends to increase rainfall, thereby to some extent ameliorating the present tendency of the Sahara to expand itself. It's a very complicated system, and I did not do the detailed computer analysis necessary to really prove this hypothesis out, but it's certainly one worth exploring.

Re:I object to this

[haruchai]

Only God can be a piece of shit and an asshole at the same time; any lesser being would have to be one or the other.

Re:Wind and sun are renewable?

[LordLimecat]

Wind is generated only in part by the earth's rotation. Some of it also comes from solar energy, which heats parts of the atmosphere, causing it to rise, which then causes a low pressure zone which causes inrushing air currents.

Re:Impossible! Really ? can you name 1 ?

[LordLimecat]

Bhutan also has 1/20th the energy consumption PER CAPITA and 1/500th the population. It is also has a land area 1/200th of the US.

In other words, thats great for Bhutan, good luck scaling it to 10,000 times the energy consumption over a 200x larger land mass.

Incidentally, this (warning, PDF) indicates that you are incorrect-- it seems to say that a very large portion of the energy produced comes from firewood / biomass. This seems to indicate that their annual energy consumption is around 23,000 MW, and their hydro generation capacity is around 1,000 MW. So that really doesnt paint a good picture for hoping to scale hydro up to the US.

Re:I object to this

[narcc]

there's little hope of human civilization lasting more than 10^20th years.

Thank goodness -- I was terrified that it would only be 10^15 years!

Re:I object to this

[StripedCow]

400k isn't really "everlasting"

400k ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:Impossible!

[CODiNE]

I saw a study once that showed all you have to do is keep the goats out of an area in Israel and in a year it's completely green.

Sounds like a good business plan.

1) Buy a huge piece of worthless land.
2) Build a fence around it.
3) Wait...
4) Sell it as farm land.

Re:I object to this

[TheRaven64]

At one charge cycle per day, that's 1,000 years. Not everlasting, but certainly lasting longer than anyone is likely to care - if we're still trying to use the same battery technology in 1,000 years then civilisation has probably collapsed completely at least once in the interim. Even if it's backed by a wind turbine and is doing ten discharge cycles a day it's 100 years.

The 400 cycles quoted for LiIon seems a bit low though. Newer ones are rated for 3,000.

Re:Wind and sun are renewable?

[TheRaven64]

Wind is renewed by the Sun pumping energy into it. The Sun is renewed by inserting a wormhole into its core and the pumping in hydrogen from a spare nebula somewhere.

Re:I object to this

[JasterBobaMereel]

Everlasting battery - apparently this means not everlasting (400,000 cycles) and not a battery (since they don't know how to actually build one yet)

I have a perpetual motion machine, except it's not a machine and isn't perpetually in motion ....

Re:I object to this

[tehcyder]

How about we define a reasonable target for everlasting for our technology, like maybe a human lifetime.

I see what you mean, anything that lasts until after I die is everlasting from my point of view. I asssume that is how climate change deniers justify their inaction.

Re:I object to this

[Rutulian]

Do you really think so? At 10-20 times the cost of a regular battery, your phone battery would be $400-$800, and you want to buy two of them? And how long do you keep a phone for anyway? Certainly not for life....

The technology is good for some things, for sure. I'm thinking hybrids/EVs and power plant stations.