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There's a nice summary of battery developments at Stanford.
But what we REALLY need are 2 breakthroughs.
The best news would be of a device the reconditions lithium batteries electrically and/or magnetically. Perhaps this sends AC through a battery. Or perhaps switches the current from positive to negative to remix the lithium and break up the patterns that inhibit charging and releasing the charge.
There was one article that frees up unused lithium using a fast-charge cycle, extending a batter by 30%. Maybe that's a start.
Next best would be a device that reconditions them physically, perhaps with vibrations (sound waves).
But this article discusses how the electrodes degrade. And this article says the degradation changes over time.
Third best would be to make the electrodes removable. This is a bit difficult because lithium is very reactive to water, so can't be done safely by all consumers. Still, it would be cheaper than recycling a whole battery.
The fourth best option is recycling. I don't know how much we do of that. I live in Mountain View, California, and I didn't realize till I looked it up today that they accept lithium batteries with the battery recycling. "For safety, please tape over the contact points of each lithium battery." their site also says: Most Walgreens and Whole Foods also accept old batteries and cell phones for recycling.
Even better would be to make lithium batteries easy to recycle. This could mean making their waterproof cases out of something that's easily dissolvable by a certain uncommon solvent that doesn't react with the lithium. Or perhaps freeze it to a very low temperature to crack off the case.
The BIG breakthrough would be sodium batteries. Sodium is very common, much less expensive. For use as home-power storage, they don't need to be as efficient as lithium batteries.
This article (Jan '22) points to a challenge with them. This one talks about a breakthrough. Plus, some are commercially available.
I'd love to know how close we are to having sodium batteries available for electric cars. Hopefully this will make them much less expensive.
Even better would be to have removable batteries, so instead of having to charge up your car overnight at a medium-power charger, or for an hour at a high-power charger, the battery can be replaced with a charged one in under 2 minutes, the same kind of time as filling a car with gas.
Since "gas stations" would have these batteries available, they'd also benefit from large solar arrays to charge batteries, using the DC power from solar panels without the cost of converting the energy to AC and then back to DC at the charging station. While DC to AC can exceed 95%, but is often much lower. AC to DC is apparently 80-90%. Even if it only saves 10%, that's a significant energy and cost savings.
I'd love a monthly news update about how close we're getting to these breakthroughs being commercially (ubiquitously) available.
See also this article about using Lignin (made from trees) for battery cathodes.