`The Move to Solid State Lithium and Magnesium Batteries is starting and will reshape how far you go in an electric car on a charge.

The future of our technology and our planet depends on one thing: the battery

Most of us are running on empty. Since the mobile phone spawned a smartphone-first world, we've all been tending to the needs of batteries. The daily or nightly charge of the smartphone is the most prevalent, but laptops, tablets, drones, wireless headphones, smartwatches and other wearable devices are becoming more common.

From article, (with an expected 20 million electric vehicles to be selling each year by 2030, each using a massive lithium-ion battery.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) thinks there will be 530 million electric vehicles by 2040, and that their electricity consumption will grow to 1,800 terawatt hours in 2040 – or 5% of global power demand – from just 6 terawatt hours in 2016.

The batteries needed by an electric car are really big. The 2016 Nissan Leaf has a 30kWh battery capable of going for 172km/107 miles, while the upcoming Tesla Model 3 will have a 50kWh or optional 75kWh battery, which can go for 355km/220 miles and 500km/310 miles respectively. Is that your road-range-anxiety gone?

"The battery pack is likely to remain the single most expensive component in EVs for some time to come, and the costs are broadly proportional to capacity," says Robin Shaw, Chief Technology Officer for battery and energy storage supplier Hyperdrive Innovation.

He thinks the crucial point will come when the cost of a battery pack with enough range makes an electric car cheaper than an equivalent petrol or diesel car. "Having said that, I think the 400 mile range on a single charge is just around the corner, certainly within the next three years," he adds.
"Increasing energy density for lithium-ion, coupled with falling costs per unit, is an exciting innovation in itself," says Shaw, who thinks we're on the cusp of everything becoming electric.

“The way in which energy is generated, distributed and consumed is being transformed – it means a huge range of vehicles including warehouse robots, construction equipment, municipal transport and airport ground fleets turning electric," he adds.
Vehicle fleets in city centers, construction sites and transport hubs are all up for electrification. The key is to efficiently store energy collected from sun or wind, which at present can be done using lithium-ion batteries purely because of their decreasing cost.

lithium-ion batteries wear out relatively quickly.

Cue magnesium-ion batteries, which have a significant advantage over lithium-ion; they don't wear out as quickly, and they don't explode as easily. That's an underrated problem for electric vehicles (when they crash, specifically), so magnesium-ion batteries are an attempt to make a much more stable solid-state battery.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory are working on a magnesium battery, which offers higher energy density than lithium, but they couldn't find a non-corrosive liquid electrolyte (which serves as the catalyst to make a battery conductive).

"Magnesium is such a new technology, it doesn’t have any good liquid electrolytes,” said Gerbrand Ceder, a Berkeley Lab Senior Faculty Scientist. “We thought, why not leapfrog and make a solid-state electrolyte?” They managed it, too, discovering that magnesium scandium selenide spinel worked great.

It could have a transformative impact on energy storage. “There are enormous efforts in industry to make a solid-state battery," said Ceder.

The search for a solid-state battery that's safe and can store more energy is what electric cars need, it's what grids need, and it's what the world needs if vehicles are to run on electric power rather than fossil fuels. The planet depends on it.)

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