A few weeks ago, I posted about the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on lithium-ion batteries. In this week’s Automotive News (subscription required), one of those laureates (M. Stanley Whittingham) provides a very interesting perspective on the future of lithium-ion batteries and the impact on electric vehicles. Whittingham describes how researchers are working on increasing the energy density in the battery which allows for smaller batteries, that weigh less, and are also cheaper. He believes that lithium-ion will be the primary battery technology for the next 10 years because the work on solid state batteries isn’t yet cost-efficient to manufacture, and are impractical for larger-scale systems like electric vehicles. Interestingly, Whittingham describes how decreasing the time it takes to charge electric vehicle batteries actually reduces the lifetime of the battery. And he agrees that the U.S. needs independence from China relative to battery raw material supply as well as manufacturing capacity. In fact, Quartz recently reported that China controls between 50% and 77% of the global market for raw materials of four key batter components – anode, cathode, separator and electrolyte.
Nobel Prize Laureate Talks Electric Vehicle Batteries
