From IEEE Spectrum, December 24:
As she drives her electric vehicle to her mother’s house, Monique’s battery gauge indicates that it’s time to reenergize. She stops at a charging station, taps her credit card at the pump, inserts a nozzle into the car, and in 5 minutes exchanges 400 liters of spent nanofluid for fresher stuff. As she waits, a tanker pulls up to refill the station itself by exchanging tens of thousands of liters of charged for spent fuel. Monique closes her EV’s fueling port and heads onto the highway with enough stored energy to drive 640 kilometers (400 miles).
The battery in her EV is a variation on the flow battery, a design in which spent electrolyte is replaced rather than recharged. Flow batteries are safe, stable, long-lasting, and easily refilled, qualities that suit them well for balancing the grid, providing uninterrupted power, and backing up sources of electricity.
This battery, though, uses a completely new kind of fluid, called a nanoelectrofuel. Compared to a traditional flow battery of comparable size, it can store 15 to 25 as much energy, allowing for a battery system small enough for use in an electric vehicle and energy-dense enough to provide the range and the speedy refill of a gasoline-powered vehicle. It’s the hoped-for civilian spin-off of a project that the Strategic Technology Office of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is pursuing as part of a drive to ease the military’s deployment of all-electric supply vehicles by 2030 and of EV tactical vehicles by 2050.
Using lithium-based batteries would create its own set of problems. You’d need a charging infrastructure, which for the U.S. military would mean deploying one, often in inhospitable places. Then there’s the long charging time; the danger of thermal runaway—that is, fires; the relatively short working life of lithium batteries; and the difficulties of acquiring battery materials and recycling them when the old batteries are no longer any good. A battery that mitigates these problems is DARPA’s objective. The new flow battery seems to hit every mark. If it works, the benefits to the electrification of transportation would be huge....
....MUCH MORE
Some boilerplate from a 2018 post:"Why lithium-ion may rule batteries for a long time to come"
So many new chemistries or manufacturing techniques look good in a lab and just don't scale.
We could post a breakthrough every single day to no greater effect than wasting the reader's time....
The Telegraph's International Business Editor was pretty fired up about a flow battery from Harvard in 2016:
Evans-Pritchard: "Holy Grail of energy policy in sight as battery technology smashes the old order"
For a couple years he was so down in the dumps that I described AEP's writing as "running the gamut from despondent to suicidal'.
He ends this piece with the one word sentence "Rejoice."
And many more. Scaling is hard.
