USA TODAY: …A team that includes former Energy secretary Steven Chu says it’s building a lithium anode battery that might give electric vehicles a 300-mile driving range and triple a cellphone’s juice. Stanford professor Yi Cui says it will likely take three to five years, though, to bring the product to market.
Their work is partly of an intensifying push to build a better battery — not only for portable electronics but also for storing solar and wind power for times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Universities, start-ups and major companies are working with new materials, such as vanadium, or tweaking the lithium-ion battery that Sony introduced more than 20 years ago.
In a new breakthrough, the Stanford team says it’s using nanotechnology to create a pure lithium battery — an advance sought for decades because of its light weight and superior efficiency… (more)
