Why Elon Musk's Battery Gigafactory is only the first step - so much more is needed

Why isn't there a global movement to improve battery technology? Improvements in battery technology year-on-year are practically stagnate and could be considered incremental at best. For example, if you compare the progress in electronics (best expressed via Moore's law) against battery improvements it is clear that there is, in fact, no comparison at all! As we all know, the number of transistors in a processor doubles approximately every 2 years - representing exponential growth and this growth has led to vast societal change.

However, did you know that lithium ion batteries have been commercially available since around 1990 and the energy density has increased by a factor of 1.5X every 10 years!

See the graphic at the bottom of the page showing the progress in best-in-class commercial lithium ion 18650 cells. Today, to a large extent, the size of your smart phone is determined not by the electronics but by the size of the battery required to power your device and perform all the tasks you require on a daily basis.

Why is this?

Why is it that the amount of transistors in an integrated circuit increases by 2X every 2 years yet batteries improve only 1.5X every 10 years?!

This is something we have been investigating in partnership with AMBER (Advanced Materials and Bio-Engineering Research at Trinity College Dublin). We have been asking the questions:

- What are the fundamental scientific reasons for lack of battery improvements?

- What are the limiting electro chemical and physical effects that are causing lack of progress?

- Are there unique approaches that could be exploited to change the game?

- What combinations of skill sets do we need to bring together for differentiation?

Furthermore, we are investing considerable effort into transitioning fundamental research to practical full batteries. In our opinion this is something that few do and in fact few researchers in this field transition improvements at the materials level in the lab to fully functional batteries.

Also, we consider that few combine the appropriate skills in deep collaboration to solve the big challenges in this field - these combinations are chemists, electro chemists, physicists, materials scientists and engineers.

So the investment made by Elon Musk with respect to the Gigafactory is impressive and necessary but that is only the first step. His approach is a business model approach to help reduce the cost of batteries. Who is driving similar investment towards improving the performance from an energy performance perspective??

Also, see the Nokia Bell Labs website for more information at https://www.bell-labs.com/our-research/disciplines/thermal-design/

For more information on AMBER visit here http://ambercentre.ie/  

Figure showing improvements in energy density for commercial lithium ion 18650 cells. The blue star represents an extrapolation of how long it will take to get to 1000 Wh/L which will take another 9 years! Data compiled by Paul King, Nokia Bell Labs.