With the electric vehicles becoming the order of the future, technology experts are spending hours in the lab developing battery technologies that are better than the best. In a similar endeavour to design a cheaper yet safer alternative to lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy and his company Ionic Materials has recently introduced a solid-state alkaline battery design using aluminium instead of zinc.
Aluminium-based alkaline batteries could potentially weigh less than lithium-ion designs and could be cheaper than the alkaline designs available today, Joy told the New York Times.
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The prototype designs of the aluminium-based alkaline batteries have demonstrated up to 400 recharge cycles; Ionic Materials believes that the number of recharge cycles could be tripled.
According to Joy and his team, the three main possible applications of the new alkaline battery technology would be consumer electronics, electric cars, and energy storage for the power grid.
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Presently, Ionic Materials does not have a factory to manufacture the rechargeable aluminium-based alkaline batteries on a commercial scale. It would take around five years for the company to commercialise it.
Meanwhile, the prices of lithium-ion batteries have dropped significantly over the past few years. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), “The real take-off for EVs will happen in the second half of the 2020s due to plunging lithium-ion battery prices, which are set to fall by more than 70% by 2030.”
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