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Batteries capable of being fully charged in five minutes have been produced in a factory for the first time, marking a significant step towards electric cars charging as fast as filling gasoline or diesel vehicles.
Electric vehicles are a vital part of the action to address the climate crisis, but running out of charge during a trip is a concern for drivers. The new lithium-ion batteries were developed by the Israeli company StoreDot and manufactured by Eve Energy in China on standard production lines.
StoreDot has already demonstrated its “extremely fast charging” battery in phones, drones and scooters and the 1,000 batteries it has now produced are to showcase its technology to automakers and other companies. Daimler, BP, Samsung and TDK have invested in StoreDot, which has raised $ 130 million to date and was named a Bloomberg New Energy Finance pioneer in 2020.
The batteries can be fully charged in five minutes, but this would require chargers of much more power than those used today. With the charging infrastructure available, StoreDot aims to deliver 100 miles of charge to a car battery in five minutes by 2025.
“The number one barrier to EV adoption is no longer cost, it’s range anxiety,” said Doron Myersdorf, CEO of StoreDot. “Either you are afraid of getting stuck on the road or you are going to have to sit in a charging station for two hours. But if the driver’s experience is exactly the same as feeding [a petrol car], all this anxiety goes away. “
“It was considered impossible to charge a lithium-ion battery for five minutes,” he said. “But we are not releasing a laboratory prototype, we are releasing engineering samples from a mass production line. This shows that it is feasible and commercially ready. “
Existing lithium ion batteries use graphite as an electrode, into which the lithium ions are introduced to store the charge. But when charged quickly, the ions become congested and can turn to metal and short-circuit the battery.
The StoreDot battery replaces graphite with semiconductor nanoparticles in which ions can pass more quickly and easily. These nanoparticles are currently based on germanium, which is soluble in water and easier to manipulate in manufacturing. But StoreDot’s plan is to use silicon, which is much cheaper, and it expects these prototypes later this year. Myersdorf said the cost would be the same as existing lithium-ion batteries.
“The bottleneck for extra fast charging is no longer the battery,” he said. Now the charging stations and the networks that supply them need to be updated, he said, which is why they are working with BP. “BP has 18,200 service stations and they understand that, within 10 years, all these stations will be obsolete, if they do not reuse them to charge them, batteries are the new oil.”
Dozens of companies around the world are developing fast-charging batteries, and Tesla, Enevate, and Sila Nanotechnologies work on silicon electrodes. Others look for different compounds, like Echion, which uses nanoparticles of niobium oxide.
Tesla boss Elon Musk tweeted Monday: “Battery cell production is the critical factor limiting the speed of a sustainable energy future. Very important problem. “
“I think those fast-charging batteries will be available to the mass market in three years,” said Professor Chao-Yang Wang of the Center for Battery and Power Storage Technology at Pennsylvania State University in the United States. “They will not be more expensive; in fact, they enable automakers to reduce the size of the built-in battery while eliminating range anxiety, dramatically reducing the cost of the vehicle’s battery. “
Wang’s group’s research is being carried out by EC Power, which he founded himself. Carefully increase the battery temperature to 60 ° C, which allows the lithium ions to move faster, but prevents damage to the battery usually caused by heat. Said this allowed for a full charge in 10 minutes.
Wang said that new research published in Nature Energy on Monday showed that this battery could be affordable and eliminate range anxiety. “Finally, we are achieving parity with gasoline vehicles in both cost and convenience. We have the technology for $ 25,000 electric cars that run like luxury sports cars, have a 10-minute recharge and are safer than those currently on the market. “
Wang noted that fast charging must also be repeatable at least 500 times without degrading the battery to give it a reasonable life, and that the EC battery can do it 2,500 times. Myersdorf said the StoreDot battery could be recharged 1,000 cycles while retaining 80% of the original capacity.
Anna Tomaszewska, from Imperial College London, UK, who reviewed fast-charging batteries in 2019, it was more cautious about the speed of its launch. “I think the technologies [like StoreDot’s] it could begin to enter the market in the next five years. However, since they will be more difficult and expensive to manufacture, we will likely initially only see them in niche markets that are highly performance-driven and not as price-sensitive as electric vehicles, ”he said.
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