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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

> “It charges so fast it’s basically a super capacitor,” Nicol claimed. “It charges an iPhone coin cell in less than 10 seconds.”

> The new battery cells are claimed to deliver far more energy density than current lithium-ion batteries, without the cooling, heating or rare-earth problems they face.

> “So far there are no temperature problems. Twenty percent of a lithium-ion battery pack (in a vehicle) is to do with cooling them. There is a very high chance that we won’t need that cooling or heating at all,” Nicol claimed.

Am I off base by saying, this is potentially world changing if true?

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Potentially. But the trade off with Al-ion cells is lower energy density, and thus less battery life/range compared to Li-ion.

Would you accept half the battery life/range if it means you can recharge in 5 minutes instead of an hour? In phones, probably not. In cars and trucks, maybe, depending on the specific application. In stationary storage? Quite possibly!

Station storage is where it's at, these would firm up renewables quite nicely.

They will face two big challenges trying to make these for stationary storage:

1) Lifetime - Historically aluminum ion batteries struggle with cycle life. The aluminum ions are bigger than lithium ions so the batteries endure more strain during charge/discharge cycles. For grid-scale storage, you need to be able to last >10,000 cycles so they need to address this.

2) Scaling up the size of the batteries. Eventually they will need to move on from coin cells and start making larger battery cells. Many technologies struggle to keep their fast charge/discharge characteristics when they scale up in size. We'll see how they do with this.

Why does charging time matter for stationary storage?

There might be some reasonable compromises to be had. Say, for example, a car with 50% of its batteries in this new fast-charging tech, and 50% slower-charging Lithium Ion. The Li-Ion could act as a reservoir of power for longer trips, but most people would only ever use the Al-ion most of the time.

This kind of hybrid may be impractical because it still requires cooling equipment (and its added weight) for the Li-ion, I'm just spitballing here.

No, it's huge if its true. Also it means it's much more efficient because you're not losing all that energy to waste heat.

The discovery of coin cell batteries in iPhones WOULD be a big deal!

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