It’s pretty commonly accepted that our current lithium ion battery technology is a huge limiting factor in a number of technological areas from electric vehicles to phones, computers, and beyond. With so many massive corporations and governments that have such a large incentive to improve the technology, why are we still stuck with lithium ion?
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Batteries are getting so energy dense that tiny defects can cause them to quite literally explode. Lithium is an insanely reactive element. That reactivity is where the energy is stored, essentially. On our path to newer and better batteries, we must be excessively careful to make appropriate standards for production and packaging before they can become consumer viable.
There’s also a big focus on volume right now. Lithium batteries don’t scale up so well. To power a city grid using a source like solar that is not constant, we need to store insane amounts of energy during the day to use at night. You can’t store that in lithium batteries and be cost-effective and safe. Some places literally use an elevated lake or pond to store gravitational potential energy. That’s a battery that can scale up very well. So a lot of research is going into that sort of thing which might be taking away from the speed at which new advancements in consumer tech are reached.
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