This is the latest I have found a a potential next gen battery:
This Battery Breakthrough Could Change Everything | Backchannel
Steven Levy: You’ve been investing in clean technology as long as anyone. Are you saying that after all of these years, you’ve found your black swan with this new Ionic battery technology?
Bill Joy: Yeah, that’s fair. I think this is a black swan.
What’s the simplest way to describe what’s different about this approach to batteries?
In a normal battery, you have some ingredients, like lithium or alkaline, and a separator, like a piece of cloth that you put between them. Then you pour in a liquid so that the ions can move around. Bad things happen with liquids. Films form, things go into [the] solution and run around and react with each other—you have safety issues like the battery catching fire. To be solid instead of liquid is something people have been striving for for 100 years. But in this battery, you have no liquid. You have just a plastic, a polymer, that replaces the liquid, so it’s solid. It’s a pretty big difference from a chemistry standpoint. It also turns out that this polymer just happens to be essentially a fire ......ant material. So when you build
batteries with this polymer, you don’t have a safety problem.
Besides safety, what are the other advantages?
Right now the most desirable battery materials are ones we can’t use. For example, there are very desirable materials for lithium
batteries that would give them more capacity, but they’re not safe in a liquid. Basically, all of a sudden maybe a half dozen things that people have been trying to do with lithium batteries that weren’t possible are possible. You can make better lithium batteries.
You’re also saying this is going to be cheaper?
That’s another side effect of the fact that it’s not a liquid. We’ve had alkaline batteries since they were invented by Union Carbide about 1960. They use zinc and manganese dioxide. It’s always been cheap; it’s always been safe. The ingredients are abundant. It’s pretty high power, although it’s a little heavy. The only thing it hasn’t been is rechargeable. You could get 20 or 30 cycles and the thing would short out, and that’s just not going to do it for a phone or a car or most rechargeable applications. Everyone kind of gave up. To power mobile devices like camcorders, [the industry] went to lithium chemistry—to get rechargeable batteries, they gave up safety and cost, and that’s where we are now. But with the polymer, all of a sudden, the alkalines become rechargeable. Mechanisms that prevented the rechargeability don’t occur, because there’s no liquid anymore.
How did you get connected with Ionic?
About a dozen years ago, David Wells and I at Kleiner Perkins made the list of 25 potential breakthroughs we thought would make a difference. Rather than waiting for people to show up with these innovations, we took our thesis and went looking. I’ll give you an example of one we
didn’t find. We looked at water desalination, because fresh water’s a problem in lots of parts of the world, and decided that the only economic breakthrough would be something that was thermally driven. And so we went looking for a breakthrough in thermally driven water desalination and didn’t find one. In the case of batteries, we said, “We want something’s that’s a solid instead of a liquid inside the battery,” because that improvement would unlock innovation. But it wasn’t until about 2010 that we really found this entrepreneur.
That would be Michael Zimmerman, the founder of Ionic Materials. How come he figured it out when no one else could?
He was the expert on a certain class of polymers. He also had this kind of black book of things he could do with the polymer, how he could modify it and affect its other properties. Not many other people knew about it. He invented a new ionic conduction mechanism, in the same way that someone invented a way of making materials into semiconductors. That was a new kind of material that was rationally constructed. It did not exist in nature. Now we have a word for it: semiconductor. But I don’t have a word for this new breakthrough, a solid that conducts ions at room temperature. Maybe it should be called an ional. This is a scientific breakthrough that should receive awards.
If I’m Elon Musk and I’m looking at this, am I going to be switching to alkaline batteries or am I going to be using this to improve my lithium batteries?
You’re going to start by improving your lithium batteries, because that’s already your manufacturing process. But in the long run, advanced alkaline—the chemistry used in the ones you buy in the drug store [that have been] made rechargeable—has a chance of upending the reign of lithium ion batteries, because the materials are cheaper. You can potentially make alkaline batteries with aluminum. We’ve made some. We don’t have as many cycles as we need yet, but, you know, we’re working on it. We think that ultimately things like aluminum-alkaline batteries will meet the performance of lithium, but with abundant materials and way cheaper. And it’s also recyclable.
This Battery Breakthrough Could Change Everything | Backchannel
This only part of the article.
My wedding ring is a ruby.
