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A porous form of graphene, the world's thinnest and lightest nanomaterial, could help bring about the quantum leap in battery efficiency that's needed to better harness renewable energy.

Chasing the ‘Holey’ Grail of Batteries - Seeker

Battery-making gigafactories are about to arrive in Europe, challenging a lead Tesla Inc. is building at a plant in Nevada and opening the way for a quicker shift toward green power for both cars and utilities. German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday is scheduled to break ground at a 500 million-euro ($543 million) plant to assemble lithium-ion energy-storage units for Daimler AG, which produces Mercedes-Benz and Maybach luxury cars. The facility 130 kilometers (81 miles) south of Berlin highlights a push by both major automakers and power companies into energy storage. The technology is crucial to drive the next generation of green vehicles and to hold electricity from wind and solar farms for when it’s needed most. With two dominant industries moving in the same direction, the cost of batteries is likely to plunge quickly, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “As battery costs fall and their energy density increases, we could see cheaper battery-electric cars than their fuel-burning equivalents by 2030,” said Nikolas Soulopoulos, an analyst with the London-based research arm of Bloomberg LP.

Move Over Tesla, Europe's Building Its Own Battery Gigafactories - Bloomberg

Note that the Bolt batteries are rated at 60 kWh even though their actual capacity is likely to be higher by about 5% or possibly more. Nevertheless, for this article, we will assume the battery size to be 60 kWh. This battery size implies that GM's battery pack cost is in the range of $138 to $165 per kWh. This is a stunning range and well below any analyst prognostications we have seen to date. While the low end of the range appears somewhat unrealistic given the last GM disclosed cell costs of $130 per kWh, the high end of the range certainly appears to be reasonable. (For reference, we have modeled GM's battery costs at $170 per kWh). To err in favor of Tesla, we would estimate that GM's pack level costs are closer to the high end of the range at $160 per kWh. What does this mean to Tesla? Not very good news, we believe. Part of the Tesla myth is built around its supposed battery cost advantage. The last known official number on Tesla battery costs comes from Jeff Evanston, VP of Investor Relations, and is supposed to be under $190 per kWh as of April 2016.

The cost of owning an electric car will fall to the same level as petrol-powered vehicles next year, according to bold new analysis from UBS which will send shockwaves through the automobile industry. Experts from the investment bank’s “evidence lab” made the prediction after tearing apart one of the current generation of electric cars to examine the economics of electric vehicles (EVs). They found that costs of producing EVs were far lower than previously thought but there is still great potential to make further savings, driving down the price of electric cars.

Electric vehicles to cost the same as conventional cars by 2018

Researchers at Perdue University (West Lafayette, IN) have been developing new battery systems based on potassium, which is eight times more abundant than lithium and one-tenth the cost.

Potassium-ion batteries offer promise for renewable energy storage | Smart2.0

Gigafactory announcements have been trending in recent months, with plans for at least 10 new plants revealed in the last six months. Half a dozen have been planned in the last month alone. In Germany, for example, the Daimler subsidiary Accumotive laid the foundation for a $550 million plant designed to take annual lithium-ion battery production from its current level of 80,000 units up to around 320,000. And Energy Absolute, of Thailand, reportedly has plans for a $2.9 billion factory in Asia, with an annual production capacity of 1 gigawatt-hour per year, scaling to 50 gigawatt-hours a year by 2020... The most aggressive gigafactory plans, however, remain with the company that came up with the concept. Tesla’s Elon Musk has said he will announce “probably four” new gigafactories this year. One has long been slated for Europe, and another has been confirmed to be in the works in Shanghai, China.  The recent announcements follow at least five gigafactory proposals put forward for Europe before the end of last year, including facilities in Sweden, Hungary and Poland. Not all the new plants will focus on lithium-ion batteries, though.

10 Battery Gigafactories Are Now in the Works. And Elon Musk May Add 4 More | Greentech Media

German gas storage firm is planning a battery big enough to power a city the size of Berlin for an hour, using redox flow technology.  The planned project, which Oldenburg-based EWE Gasspeicher is billing as the world’s largest battery, will involve filling two salt caverns, each of around 100,000 cubic meters in volume, with brine to create a redox flow battery that has capacity of up to 120 megawatts and 700 megawatt-hours.  EWE Gasspeicher currently uses caverns for natural-gas storage and is looking to bring the novel redox flow technology, called brine4power or b4p, to market by 2023.  The project will be based on an experimental process, developed at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Thuringia, which employs electrolytes based on recyclable polymers dissolved in salt water.

German Utility EWE Plans a Flow Battery Big Enough to Power Berlin for an Hour | Greentech Media

Alphabet Inc.'s secretive X skunk works has another idea that could save the world. This one, code named Malta, involves vats of salt and antifreeze.  The research lab, which hatched Google's driverless car almost a decade ago, is developing a system for storing renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted. It can be located almost anywhere, has the potential to last longer than lithium-ion batteries and compete on price with new hydroelectric plants and other existing clean energy storage methods, according to X executives and researchers. The previously undisclosed initiative is part of a handful of energy projects at X, which has a mixed record with audacious "moonshots" like Google Glass and drone delivery. Venture capitalists, and increasingly governments, have cut funding and support for technology and businesses built around alternatives to fossil fuels. X's clean-energy projects have yet to become hits like its driverless cars, but the lab isn't giving up.

Alphabet Wants to Fix Renewable Energy’s Storage Problem — With Salt - Bloomberg

A start-up company is trying to turbocharge a type of battery that has been a mainstay for simple devices like flashlights and toys, but until now has been ignored as an energy source for computers and electric cars. Executives at Ionic Materials, in Woburn, Mass., plan to announce on Thursday a design breakthrough that could make solid-state alkaline batteries a viable alternative to lithium-ion and other high-energy storage technologies. Alkaline batteries can be made far more cheaply and safely than today’s lithium-ion batteries, but they are not rechargeable. That issue, along with the superior power of lithium-ion batteries, has meant that alkaline batteries are not used in personal computers, smartphones or electric vehicles. Ionic could change that equation with an alkaline battery the company said could be recharged hundreds of times. One additional benefit of the company’s breakthrough: An alkaline battery would not be as prone to the combustion issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries in a range of products, most notably some Samsung smartphones.

A Better, Safer Battery Could Be Coming to a Laptop Near You - The New York Times

Hitachi Zosen in Japan has developed a prototype solid-state lithium-ion battery that it intends to commercialise over the next two years. “We can offer solid-state lithium-ion batteries that are on par with the liquid type in performance even now,” said Takashi Tanisho, president of Hitachi Zosen, in reports. Solid-state batteries are more durable and have better temperature performance. It has shipped samples of the battery to potential customers in the aerospace and automobile industries and plans to commercialise the technology in small cells by 2020, working with a local battery maker.

Hitachi Zosen ready to commercialise solid state lithium battery | eeNews Europe

A unique system for the compact storage of large quantities of energy is set up at Fraunhofer IISB in Erlangen and integrated into a modern DC power grid. As part of the center of excellence for electronic systems LZE, research is being conducted on how such an energy storage unit can contribute to the safe and clean energy supply of industrial plants and larger building complexes. The storage system is being set up as part of an LZE pilot project, titled DC backbone with current-gas coupling. The basic concept is to generate hydrogen from excess electrical energy, for example from a local photovoltaic system, and to store it safely and at high energy density in an organic carrier, even over extended periods of time. For later use, the hydrogen can be separated from the carrier again and converted into electrical energy by a fuel cell.

Long-term energy storage system uses hydrogen technology | eeNews Europe

For some alternative energy enthusiasts, Musk's deal wasn't good enough. Instead of buying Tesla's Powerwall, they build their own DIY versions using recycled batteries for a fraction of the cost. Then, naturally, they share their creations and swap knowledge with other hobbyists across the internet. DIY powerwall enthusiasts congregate on a dedicated forum, in Facebook groups, and on YouTube. They live all over the world: I spoke to makers on three different continents and a half dozen time zones.

DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes - Motherboard

Researchers from the University of Sydney and Nanyang Technological University have developed a three-stage method to produce catalysts for zinc-air rechargeable batteries. These have up to five times the energy density than lithium ion cells and use low-cost materials, but have struggled with recharging. There is increasing interest in using zinc-air structures for flexible consumer batteries as well as aqueous zinc battery sotrage systems in the power grid.

Zinc-air rechargeable batteries see advance | Smart2.0