Nature: There’s a revolution brewing in batteries for electric cars, which will rely on alternative designs to the conventional lithium-ion batteries that have dominated EVs for decades. Although lithium-ion is hard to beat, researchers think that a range of options will soon fill different niches of the market: some very cheap, others providing much more power.

“We’re going to see the market diversify,” says Gerbrand Ceder, a materials scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Lithium-ion batteries have improved a lot since the first commercial product in 1991: cell energy densities have nearly tripled, while prices have dropped by an order of magnitude3. “Lithium-ion is a formidable competitor… The biggest challenges are resource-related,” says Ceder, who calculates that the projected 14 TWh needed for cars by 2050 will require 14 million tonnes of total metal.

C3.ai DTI P.I. Gerbrand Ceder developed the novel NLP-driven COVID Scholar literature review site in 2020 with a DTI grant.

Read the Nature story: “The new car batteries that could power the electric vehicle revolution.”

Photo by Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty