Lithium ion batteries are pretty good and getting better - already, products like cameras and mp3 players that a few years ago were working on throwaway batteries are now switching to rechargeable lithium ion batteries. We've seen progress as well in the recharge times. The Prius with its Nickel Metal Hydride batteries seems just so yesterday. But we're not looking at an exponential improvement in battery technology, akin to Moore's law and computing power - as said in this interview 18 months ago, with MIT materials scientist and battery expert Yet-Ming Chiang, who cofounded the battery startup A123 Systems;

"One thing we have to keep in mind is you can't really conceive of anything like Moore's Law for electrochemical energy storage. Moore's Law was based on being able to perform similar functions [for computing] using either fewer electrons or, more recently, fewer photons. But energy is constrained by chemistry and the periodic table. Expecting Moore's Law from battery chemistry is like expecting steel next year to weigh half as much and be twice as strong. People who are working on better batteries are very optimistic. There's definitely room for growth; there are many avenues for improvement. If you look at it realistically, I'd say a factor of two improvement in the next decade is quite realistic. A factor of 10 is not."

Which strikes me as a very sober observation - just what I like.

So you can understand the fuss that has been generated by EEStor - still no company website - over the last couple of weeks and their battery-ultracapacitor hybrid technology based on barium-titanate powders which they claim  will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, this technology will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals.

The hardcore figure you need to know is that they claim that their technology can deliver an energy density of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries.

So  they appear to have doubled energy density in 18 months - rather than over 10 years, which is a bit like Moore's law after all. And they intend to use their technology in this vehicle the Zenn Car - a stock I will add shortly. And here's some youtube about the Zenn for your amusement;






For all that, there is still a big performance gap with electric cars that horsepower hungry American consumers are perhaps more sensitive to than Europeans;  the energy density of petrol or gas is way, way, more - about 13,000 watt hours per kilogram. Still, I suspect that this gap will be closed not so much by improvements in battery technology, but by weight reduction. There is still so much heavy metal in today's cars and many cumbersome safety features. The next generation of GPS satnavs will most likely calculate not just where you want to go, but keep any eye on the position of all other vehicles relative to you on the road, intervening automatically in the brakes where necessary. My view is that in the long run, say the next 15 years, the shift to plastics/lighter materials and a presumption towards crash avoidance rather than crash survival, will probably be more significant than batteries in extending range and power.

Anyway, If you want to understand the progress in batteries that has been made over the last year, I strongly recommend reading the collection of articles here under the MIT Technology Review Better Batteries Report.