PR blasts about supposed innovation in battery design pour into ET’s mailbox like water into the Titanic, but a recent story about an MIT grad who founded a battery company is worth paying attention to. Qichao Hu is the CEO of SolidEnergy, a company that’s been working to improve lithium-ion energy density for the past five years. The problem with lithium-ion is that whether you measure by energy per kilogram or energy per unit weight, Li-ion batteries aren’t very good. The graph below also illustrates why fossil fuels are so difficult to replace. It’s not just because they pack a relatively high amount of energy — though they do — but because fuels like ethanol, kerosene, gasoline, and diesel are stable at room temperature and pressure (even if you need to keep a lid on them) and don’t require specialized storage or pumping procedures. Lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile, are the tiny dot at the bottom-left side of the graph. Anything that can bump them up...
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