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

[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

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

[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).

Revised article

[IceFoot]

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

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.

400,000 cycles is NOT "everlasting."

[EmagGeek]

Can we please try to use language accurately?

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:I object to this

[StripedCow]

400k isn't really "everlasting"

400k ought to be enough for anybody.

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 ....