Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them better
economist.com
economist.com
Battery production is now measured in multiple twh of capacity per year. That goes into vehicles of all types with any number and size of wheels, grid storage solutions, and domestic storage. People use them all over the world now. Including some developing economies.
There are many quality attributes you can look at with batteries: cost per kwh, weight per kwh, volume per kwh, charge/discharge rates, longevity in charge cycles, operating temperatures, robustness, chance of flammability (near zero with some cell types), etc. Better is a meaningless qualification unless you express it in those.
And what is best and what is optimal are two things. There's a reason LFP is dominating rather than NMC. It's good enough and a lot cheaper even though it has slightly less energy. For the same reason sodium ion is being put into some cars. It doesn't have the energy density. But it's cheap, operates in arctic and desert temperatures, and they last pretty long.
When it comes to new battery chemistries, it takes time to go from a lab breakthrough to mass production. Sodium ion is now being mass produced. A few years ago there was only low volume production. And before that, the technology was stuck in various stages of the R&D pipeline at various companies. From a lab prototype in a university to an actual proof of concept might take several years. And from there to production many years longer.
With solid state, there are about at least half a dozen technology companies that are moving from test samples to low volume production in the next years. Mostly the technology is proven and validated at this point. But it might still take until at least the end of the decade before we see any mass production. Building big factories costs billions and is super risky. Companies don't do that unless they are certain something will work.
Solid state will have to compete on quality and price. High density solid state in cheap cars is not likely to be a thing for cost reasons. But they might be popular with drone and sports car manufacturers. The press is unfortunately a bit sensationalist on this front and it creates unrealistic expectations.
That's absolutely fine and understandable. But then, why do we keep hearing the word "breakthrough" ? I hate this word with all my heart.
Batteries are still not ubiquitous. EVs are still expensive.
The "breaktrough" that would be worth mentioning will be when people can buy an EV and never, ever, ever manage to build a scenario where there is _any_ range anxiety.
Or when everyone has a battery in their garage, that's as inconsequential to buy as a fridge, and can store enough energy for them to go through the winter with 2 months of sunshine.
I know we're far away from that. Fair enough. Godspeed to you if you're working on that, in the lab or in the factory. You or your grandkids will get there.
Just, write the _breakthrough_ article then, please.
When exactly though? When the price of the "new" breakthrough technology that's been around for decades at that point drops from $101 per kwH to $100 per kwH?
I totally get your frustration but it seems kinda arbitrary to say a new technology isn't a breakthrough until it's ubiquitous.
In production. On shelves. That the average consumer can buy.
Do you remember the time where hardly anyone had a mobile phone, and one year later everyone got one for christmas ? I was there. That's a breakthrough.
Then internet in your home. Two or three years from "none has it" to "of course I have it, here's my ICQ number".
Or the day the polio vaccine was announced.
Or when when a rocket booster landed on itself.
"Before / After" moment. They exist. They don't happen overnight - great. You may have "overcame one of the many hurdles on the path to reaching a credible plan that may lead to a before/after."
Write that ! It's not a "breakthrough", though.
Or, is "breakthrough" the word for "tiny incremental change", and there is another word that I should expect to read when something consequential happens ?
Then, write your "breakthrough" article when they get to mass production. (Ok, you can write the article when they demo it as the consumer show six months before availability, if you really can't help. They won't ship it in six months, they will ship in a year, maybe that's fine.
I'm a software engineer, I'm not going to lecture anyone about optimistic release dates.)
Write another one when they find a way to make it affordable to the average consumer.
I m asking : don't write it when it's a proof of concept in the lab, or when you just started the workforce that's going to contemplate thinking about thinking of a plan to build a pilot plant for the alpha version of the prototype. I'm sick and tired of those.
Same thing if your "breakthrough" is in curing cancer or making fusion. Please stop using this word. It does not mean what you think it does.
Anyway, catchy click bait news lines sell. And breakthroughs are worth reporting on by themselves. Anyway, the economist didn't do a great job here doing their job. They are all over the place mixing things that are basically on the market (sodium ion) or nearly on the market (solid state) with various scientific progress from research labs.
As for the rest of your comment, I don't think accurate information is your problem.
And hey, can't blame labs for playing the game, but it does produce a lot of noise with little signal for the average reader.
It is worth saying that vehicles sporting next-gen solid state batteries are available right now.
Ever since the Goodenough solid state battery announcements years ago, I’ve been anticipating the benefits. According to his team’s research, they had the following attributes:
- Higher energy density than the best liquid electrolyte lithium cells.
- Non flammable.
- Much better resistance to cold temperatures.
- A sodium option that should be much less expensive.
I’m not sure where the Goodenough battery tech is at right now, I’ll have to do some searching and see if it’s progressed…
ok maybe 28.
https://electrek.co/2025/10/08/toyota-aims-to-launch-worlds-...
they have tested this on the roads.
Larger volumes would require bigger factories. And without going through some low volume initial production, that would be very risky for them.
The big question is how it will compare in price and quality to cars from other manufacturers.
Is it weight/kWh or is kWh/weight more common?
Another question I have about buying a new electric car: if I buy a new BYD, for example, can I run it until it's done 150,000km? Like a gasoline car?
But that's a little hard to pin down, because with good charge cycles (e.g. not going all the way to 100% each charge), it should last longer.
An EV has less moving parts, so it isn't as likely to shake itself apart like a combustion engine car.
A new BYD, that's probably a different question about the manufacturer and if their build quality will hold up over time.
Just like AI is changing the world before our eyes, this may be just such a technology. Maybe I will come to resent them when they are omnipresent, but a person-transporting drone (EVTOL) flying on a solid state battery would be transformative in connecting people, and I cannot wait to see it happen. The EU has committed 500bn in inter-european railway investment by 2050. Maybe it will be entirely disrupted? Who knows.
I think we are going to see a lot of fragmentation in modes of transport where we have jets going from international airports for long range, small electric planes in small airports for that 50-300km distance low-frequency destinations. And rail only for high-frequency destinations.
In fact I imagine that electric vs jet planes math will get so crazy that it might kill some international hubs that are too far inland, companies will want people off jets into electric propeller planes as fast as possible.
Better batteries do not impact energy usage, only the means of energy delivery.
Why? If you have an existing rail network, trains are bound to be cheaper than planes and can get to more places (including convenient centrally-located stations in most major metro areas).
Plus, air travel is generally miserable unless you have a private / chartered plane. Crowds, long lines, security screenings, opaque and abusive pricing models, etc. This is not something we couldn't fix, but over the past 30 years, it's gotten a lot worse, not better; electric planes don't automatically change that. In contrast, rail travel in Europe is almost universally pleasant and hassle-free.
Laughs hollowly in German.
There is one other issue with flying: it often isn't legal - for good reason - to fly and land where you want to be. For a 300km trip flying to an airport is fine (if there is one close - they are not evenly scattered around), but at 50km you may as well drive the whole way instead of transfer at the airport - unless you live very close to the airport (which you won't because of noise)
Might not be an issue for long distance connection in sparsely populated countries like the United States, but I don't see it replacing trains in Europe until this is solved.
Rooftop helicopters were banned from Manhattan’s office buildings after a helicopter tipped over and decapitated waiting passengers, and then the blade fell to the street level where it killed another person.
For instance, I will never have any desire to risk the air traffic clusterfuck of hundreds of EVTOLs with different computers from different brands with different levels of maintenance trying to land/take-off in a Costco parking lot to grab a rotisserie chicken on their way home from work.
It isn't a technology problem. EVTOL only makes sense where helicopters currently make sense.
https://www.youtube.com/@mechanicalnightmare/videos
We already have fatal car crashes from people who neglect maintenance and don't get their car inspected. Now imagine instead of a 2D plane to cause a wreck, on a road where people are generally alert and paying attention for wrecks, they can fall out of the sky onto kids playing in yards, onto busy roads out of the sun, or just onto each other during the final approach/take-off.
Nope, air travel is only safe because we strictly regulate pilots and maintenance.
Generally though I agree with you. Plus it will always use WAY more power than a wheeled vehicle, and have much worse failures.
A collision is less likely in 3D than in 2D, and obviously the chicken would be delivered to you via drone rather than the inverse.
And sure you can contrive whatever clean-slate sci-fi setting you want to try and make it make sense, but we aren't going to be ripping up existing infrastructure for it. This isn't Popular Science cover art.
Collisions are more likely if there's hundreds going to/from the same place at the same time, and also they can just fail and fall out of the sky onto dwellings, roads and businesses in ways that cars can't.
Your vision will be killed politically the first time a child playing on their swing-set or shopping with their mother or driving down the road is killed by a poorly maintained EVTOL.
A megawatt. To hover.
That really opened my eyes to the reality: unless we have unlimited, clean and nearly free fusion power, flying cars are not going to be a thing.
In any reasonable setup, hovering would be a rare, rare operation (like 30-60 seconds during takeoff and landing), with most of the time spent in wing-borne forward flight – which'd be _wildly_ lower power usage, more like 200-250kW tops. About ~par with staying in continuous acceleration in an EV. More for sure, but not nearly as insane as what you're pointing to.
... and this is exactly where better batteries would help – being able to hold that power level for longer so you could actually go places in earnest without untenable mass.
There's a reason all the EVTOL startups show individual vehicles landing in pristine fields, and it's the same reason car advertisements show one car on a closed course instead of I-95 at 3pm on a Friday
Certainly there'd be density _at_ take-off and landing, but even that's manageable by having e.g. arrival/departure locations at multiple heights.
It also seems vanishingly unlikely (at this point) that we'd have EVTOL that's not fully autonomous, further reducing the odds of this - ~perfect and coordinated driving, as well as foreknowledge of what's happening between you and the arrival location drastically reduces traffic.
On top of that, small VTOL craft that can hover and would be at lower speeds closer in (esp. autonomously flown) would just need less mutual clearance compared to jets, which also have an altitude band they have to stay in, as well as no ability to slow to a crawl and coordinate finely.
Any aircraft you imagine will circle at landing and possibly loiter for minutes while waiting for their turn at using the airspace. (Edit0:See helicopters)
Building an open skyscraper for aircraft to land on will not save you since crafts will lockdown a large part of the building to land/depart safely. And it's not clear to me that it would be profitable.
Then many other problems about energy density and aircraft weight limiting the whole scope of who would possibly use those crafts.
Have a good one!
Edit1: I don't know for you, but my city doesn't have enough parking for cars. I'd be surprised if there were enough parking for EVTOL everywhere - you could very well need to loiter waiting for a spot to open, could need emergency landing if you run out of power, many many un-perfect things that make the card castle fall apart
You'll need to get your hands on Greenland first.
I've even seen ceramic batteries being tested on YouTube as long as 7 YEARS ago [0], but I still can't actually buy one.
I've been having this issue for years of everyone being so excited about things that I can't actually buy. I don't care! I would love to be excited too, but it's just tiring now.
I wish there were some kind of aggregator for exciting achievements that you can actually buy. I'm tired of all this premature hype!
It's definitely the case for me (and friends of mine), that between reasonably priced batteries, inverters,etc, doing good battery backup for the house (and peak demand shaving/etc, i use a lot of power and take advantage of time of use tariffs) is now less than half the price of a generator.
Most of my friends spent 35-45k on a generator.
I will have spent <20k on batteries + inverters. It would actually be even less, but i have 600amps of split phase for the house, and 150 amps of 480v 3 phase for the shop, so i need two different kinds of inverters.
It is all literally being installed right now.
I would actually go completely off grid, but i live in a historic area and have slate roofs so can't really do solar easily ;)
As for what changed - 12 months ago this setup would have been almost double the price, just because of the availability (or lack thereof) of the right kinds of products necessary to achieve it. I know because i priced it :)
Availability here isn't in terms of stock, but literally in terms of "variety and choice of product".
For example - the availability of UL certified low cost 48v batteries in various sizes has skyrocketed in the past year. Lots of states require UL certification, assuming you are doing this in a permitted/etc way) Additionally, a lot more outdoor batteries are now available (my setup is outdoors but mostly protected).
The availability of choices in higher kVA but still residential grade inverters has also skyrocketed, etc.
As for why the price was doubled - before i would have needed 2x the number of inverters, and you really couldn't get a good 480v inverter except with high volt batteries that are wildly less available and wildly more expensive. On top of that, the batteries you could use that were UL certified and outdoor rated or could easily be done in outdoor enclosures was much lower than it is now.
Honestly curious: why do you need a generator ? And more to the point, why do "most of you friends" need one (35-45k seems like a huge investment, so it would not be some vanity purchase, right ?)
Is that customary where you live, because the grid is unreliable ?
So, there are two issues:
1. The grid is now pretty unreliable. Georgia Power overall is a great company to work with (compared to say PG&E), but power quality has dropped out the past few years in some areas.
I've had plenty of equipment destroyed due to grid spikes and other weirdness that just didn't occur a few years ago. To give a concrete example: About 3 weeks ago, there were 4 days where literally every arc fault breaker in the house would trip randomly. Why? Because the incoming waveform became super noisy[1], and arc fault breakers are tricky beasts :).
They do notice and fix these things eventually, but the practical time to resolution is days, not hours.
2. We live in an area where the power lines are above ground and trees are aging out. They were planted over 150 years ago, and for a lot of these trees, the lifespan is 125-150 years. So we don't just get taken out by storms, but just nature :)
Georgia power puts new lines underground exclusively, and has moved a lot underground even around us, but our street is the last on the line of service that is both above ground and quite long. As a result, literally any issue/disconnect over about a 2 mile length with tons and tons of old trees, takes us out. This is also partially the reason our power quality sucks so much - any issue is more likely to affect us more than others.
Again - when it comes to outages they are quite fast at repair, having dismantled and removed insanely huge trees, and then repaired the line, almost always within 24 hours.
But it's still annoying. Combined with #1, it's just easier to be semi-off grid (IE monitor grid and swap over when grid is gone or sucking) with a generator or equivalent. Note that because we all own historic homes built in the early 1900's, our electricity usage is is significantly higher than normal just due to lack of insulation, etc. Retrofits only help so much for various practical reasons.
In a newly built home, the generator cost would probably be closer to 15-20k. Battery cost would be similarly half. Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but still.
[1]. I have a very high end fluke power analyzer (a fluke 1775) that i've had for years to debug power quality issues. These are power quality analyzers meant to be used to test service issues like this. I actually bought it when i got tired of having PG&E lie to me in California.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/28/catl-secures-worlds-l...
What are you going to use them for?
Consumer batteries are already good enough IMO. Cheaper batteries in large quantities are what we need more of.
Any kind of consumer power technology can only ever be truly "good enough" if it never causes any inconvenience or significant cost.
I mean, that's not the case with current consumer power technology
For almost all devices there is no good reason to care that the nominal voltage of NiMH rechargeable batteries 0.2V lower than the nominal voltage of alkaline non-rechargeable batteries. Alkaline batteries have a steeper initial discharge curve and pretty quickly drop below 1.3V.
If your device has trouble with 1.3V it is either going to almost instantly stop working if it is a high load device, stop working after using maybe 10% of the battery's capacity of it is medium load, and maybe 30% for a light load.
On the lasting a decade or more front, I'm still using 19 of the 24 1st generation Eneloops I bought sometime before March. 2 died and 3 are missing. Last time I went through and measured their capacities, about 3 years ago, they averaged 1886 mAh. They were sold as having an average 2000 mAh capacity with a minimum of 1900 mAh.
I've also got 15 4th generation Eneloops bought 2014-08. Those are also all still fine, with an average capacity of 1960 mAh.
You might wonder why I bought the 4th generation ones since the 1st were still fine. It is because they greatly improved the self-discharge. 1st generation was specced at retaining 80% charge after a year. 4th generation is specced at retaining 90/80/75/70 after 1/3/5/10 years. I've got some lower power applications where changing batteries is annoying, so I want to minimize self-discharge.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-rechargeable...
The few times I've measured the voltage of my non-rechargeable AA batteries (which, granted, was infrequently, and not recently), I haven't seen them drop below 1.3V until they've been in use a while.
And I've much more reliably observed that when I try to use rechargeables in my electric toothbrushes (Oral-B Pro Clean, the kind with separately moving round and long brush sections, which are, alas, no longer available anywhere I've been able to find), they start out very sluggish, and gradually descend to near-uselessness, while using non-rechargeables makes the toothbrush very energetic at the start, declining fairly steadily over a month or three, with it matching the level of the rechargeable at something like 2/3 of the way down.
I'll take a look at the Wirecutter link; thanks!
https://battery-tech.net/battery-markets-news/gotion-unveils...
I agree with you, I'm sick of hearing about the "developments" in batteries, nano materials, and fusion. Need an add blocker for these.
Lithium iron phosphate has quietly gotten price competitive with lead acid and its wildly better tech. Not particularly sexy but its having a real world impact (LFP is commonly used for solar storage among many other uses).
It's also important to separate "commercial availability" into "commercially available in the US" and "commercially available for everyone else"
The US petroleum and automotive industries are spending many multiple millions of $$s to make sure the latest battery and electric car technology is not available inside the US.
This is a good example:
BYD Seal 08 debuts with Blade Battery 2.0: 1,000 km range, 5-min charging, 684 hp
https://electrek.co/2026/04/27/byd-seal-08-blade-battery-2-1...
This is a car in production in China now, which has 640 miles of range on one charge (not many gas cars have that range) and charges 10-70% in 5 minutes. Of course, the chargers that perform that high speed charge are also not available in the US.
With regard to quantum: let's just not drag that into a discussion of batteries.
https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+heinlein+shipstone+te...
Though maybe it's a little unfair to call either of those things a "battery", they seem like fundamentally different technologies to me even if in theory they could fill exactly the same role.
It calls for a couple of specific responses:
- A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!
- Energy can be put back into a battery, allowing them to be used over and over again!
- Electricity for putting into batteries can come from many different sources of generation. Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum, the extraction and burning of which is a very dirty process.
- Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
- Gasoline has a fixed chemical structure that contains a fixed amount of energy. Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
unfortunately burning things results in a lot more energy than the processes a battery uses.
> Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum,
Well... We do know how to make gasoline from the atoms - the same process that we use the make synthetic oil can result in gasoline as well. Of course this would case about 4x as much so nobody does. There is more energy in synthetic diesel some races use that since the energy content is part of winning. (generally though race cars use a gasoline engine running an alcohol because they can get more power and don't care about fuel economy).
> Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
Yes and no. Technology is getting better. The laws of chemistry and physics tell us the limits of this technology, but not how close to those limits we can achieve in the real world.
> johnea 39 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them b...
Thank you for raising this point!
It calls for a couple of specific responses:
- A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!
- Energy can be put back into a battery, allowing them to be used over and over again!
- Electricity for putting into batteries can come from many different sources of generation. Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum, the extraction and burning of which is a very dirty process.
- Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
- Gasoline has a fixed chemical structure that contains a fixed amount of energy. Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
Utterly false. Octane is a specific molecule with a fixed amount of energy. However gasoline is many different molecules with different energy content. The total is all close enough to the same that we don't normally think of this, but there are variations that we can measure in the lab.
> Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
There is, but that would be a lot more expensive (see synthetic gasoline above) and so we don't. More importantly, even accounting for the losses in a ICE, gasoline is still a lot more energy dense than we expect a battery to ever reach.
In fact, you cannot. MG 4X: preorders. IM L6 "Lightyear Edition" - only a handful for sale. Nio - only at battery "swap" stations which are not open to the public.
The mg4x is a different car (suv).
Silly headline. Just say solid state, yet again, the thing that's always been around the corner while lithium ion and sodium just ship ship ship on a massive scale.
If solid state works out, great, but it would no longer be a big breakthrough. Batteries are here and a major grid component today.