Battery breakthrough!

Our addiction to fossil fuels is the biggest contributor to global warming, so if we are to halt this destruction of our livable climate, we need to find a way to break away from that addiction.  Our world's need for energy is continually increasing due to overpopulation and the worldwide rise in standard of living, so we need to find a way of increasing energy production and availability while decreasing the proportion of that energy coming from fossil fuel sources.

A big barrier in moving from fossil fuels to clean energy has been finding cheap and effective ways to store the electricity produced from clean energy sources.  Battery technology has just leaped forward with MIT's announcement of a breakthrough in semi-solid flow cell batteries.

Lead researcher Yet-Ming Chiang describes the battery architecture as "using two proven technologies [solid state lithium-ion batteries and liquid-flow batteries] and putting them together."  The result is a black sludge-like material that may be the solution to long-standing battery challenges.

Called 'Cambridge crude' because of its similar appearance to oil, the battery has many advantages over previous technologies:

1)  It's cheaper to make than solid state lithium-ion batteries that are currently in electric cars.

2)  It has 10 times the energy storage capacity of liquid-flow batteries, so a small battery can pack in a lot of energy.  This lessens the weight and size of the battery, which makes it much lighter and smaller than solid state lithium-ion batteries.

3)  Because of its small size, low cost, and fluidity, it's easy to quickly pump it in and out of a car like gasoline. With current lithium-ion powered electric cars, you have to wait for a solid state battery to recharge by plugging it in or pay a high price for a fully-charged spare battery.

These features could mean that the semi-solid flow cell battery is the key to finally making electric cars competitive with gas-powered cars.

Besides personal transportation, this technology can be scaled to a large size for a low cost, so that wind and solar plants can use it to store intermittent energy sources for later use (i.e. when it's not sunny or not windy, the power plant can tap into the stored energy).

The research team's goal is by September 2013 to have a "fully-functioning, reduced-scale prototype system ready to be engineered for production as a replacement for existing electric-car batteries."  MIT has partnered with a new company, 24M, to make this happen.  They've already raised $16 million and have also won funding from the Department of Defense's ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy), the energy equivalent of the agency that funded the creation of the internet...so let's hope for another rousing success as big as the internet, eh?