Cambridge, Massachusetts company 24M has declared its semi-solid lithium battery technology is the most significant change to Li-ion in two decades.
The company says its battery cell design combined with manufacturing innovations will slash today’s lithium-ion costs by half while providing enhanced battery performance.
“The lithium-ion battery is a brilliant, enabling technology, but its economics are flawed. It’s prohibitively expensive; it’s cumbersome and inefficient to make; and today’s version is approaching the limits of its cost reductions,” said Dr. Yet-Ming Chiang, 24M’s Chief Scientist.
“24M has fixed the flaws. We’ve made the world’s favorite battery better, fundamentally changing its cost curve by designing a more elegant and simpler cell and then making the batteries the right way – the way they should have been made from day one.”
So what’s in the secret sauce of this battery also claimed to have unprecedented safety and abuse tolerance?
24M says lithium-ion battery cells in use today have significant inactive, non-charge carrying materials such as metals and plastics. 24M’s semisolid thick electrode eliminates more than 80% of these inactive materials and increases the active layer thickness compared to traditional lithium-ion by up to 5x. As well as reducing costs, the thicker electrodes mean more energy storage within the same amount of space.
Another improvement is the way the batteries are manufactured. Usually the production process for lithium-ion batteries is expensive and takes days. 24M says because its technology doesn’t require binding, drying, solvent recovery or calendaring, cell creation takes just 20% of the time needed to produce a conventional battery.
As no organic solvents are used, 24M is offering a greener battery; one that is 100% recyclable.
The company says a manufacturing plant using the technology costs about 10% of a conventional plant to establish and requires one-fifth the space.
Throop Wilder, 24M’s CEO, says 24M battery costs will be less than USD $100 a kilowatt-hour (kWh) by 2020.
Before solar households get too excited, that’s just the cost of the battery – there’s a lot more that goes into a home battery storage system. Still, given developments such as this and Tesla continuing to push at the cost boundaries with Powerwall in the months ahead, affordable home energy storage isn’t far off.
For those still considering going solar, it’s a very good time to; but perhaps with storage in mind in the future. A battery upgradeable system may be a wise choice – save today and store tomorrow.
24M’s cells are currently undergoing customer trials.
