The 94-year-old creator of the lithium-ion battery has invented another breakthrough storage device that is capturing the attention of industry heavyweights.
“John Goodenough, inventor of the lithium battery, has developed the first all solid-state battery cells,” Alphabet Inc CEO Eric Schmidt said on Twitter yesterday.
Goodenough’s claim that his new battery cells have three times as much energy density as today’s lithium-ion batteries is “promising,” Schmidt said.
A new and more powerful generation of batteries might be made entirely from glass, according to the conclusions of Goodenough and his team of researchers published by Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry.
They store and transmit energy at temperatures lower than traditional lithium-ion packs and can be made using globally abundant supplies of sodium, the research showed.
The research could result in “a safe, low-cost all solid-state cell with a huge capacity giving a large energy density and a long cycle life suitable for powering an all-electric road vehicle or for storing electric power from wind or solar energy,” the researchers wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Energy storage is seen as the missing link in the world’s transition to a zero-carbon economy, as batteries can fill power gaps from intermittent solar and wind energy.
Companies including Tesla Inc and Volkswagen AG have set their sights on lithium-ion to usher in a new generation of plug-in electric vehicles.
The research conducted by Goodenough and his team, who worked from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as at the University of Porto in Portugal, was driven by the “urgent” need to reduce fossil fuel consumption and combat climate change, the journal cited them as saying.
The researchers are working on several patents and are seeking to work with battery makers “to develop and test their new materials in electric vehicles and energy storage devices,” the University of Texas said in a statement.
Goodenough began focusing on storage technologies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s as a potential way of resolving the persistent oil crisis of the era, according to a 2015 profile published by Quartz magazine.
He developed key parts of today’s lithium-ion batteries in 1980.
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