Seems to be a lot of news on batteries around the electric vehicle, EV. And rightfully so. Anyone who knows anything about EVs will come to the conclusion that the first step is to build better batteries.
The gist is that the Achile’s heel of EVs are that batteries haven’t benefited from decades of research as much as the internal combustion engine, ICE has. However, compared to the power density they packed even a decade ago, EV batteries have jumped up exponentially. Now what?
Nanowires To The Rescue, are helping further the energy density in batteries by 10 times or more. According to a Stanford article, nanowires can boost energy efficiency in batteries by 10 fold what a more traditional lithium one can do. So where are we? Unfortunately, more money is being shoved into the development and perfection of the current crop of Li-io than on other promising technologies.
Ultimately, we don’t want to sound as if we don’t like traditional lithium technology. Lithium has been a welcome boon from our lighter laptops to EVs. However, we feel we shouldn’t get pigeon holed into the current few chemistry of lithium. It seems we need to develop lead based and other more traditional ones for EV that don’t require to be light weight, such as tractors and forklifts. Until ultracapacitors and nanowire batteries push the barriers current lithium is facing, it is the way to go.