Batteries Are Not The Future of Green Cars, says Tesla chief

Elon Musk is a dizzyingly accomplished badass as well as a quirky workaholic, which makes him kind of like Nikola Tesla minus the full-contact pigeon fancying. And hey, that's exactly what he named his electric automobile company, Tesla Motors. Musk, who has built Tesla's entire business on the advanced, computer-controlled battery technology his engineers developed for the Tesla Roadster sports car, thinks that batteries are kaput in the long run.

In their place, he's betting on a technology called ultracapacitors. Capacitors are totally different than batteries -- rather than being buckets of wet chemicals, they're solid state devices already ubiquitous in today's consumer electronics. Ultracapacitors are just giant, super energy-dense versions of their smaller antecedents, and they should be able to charge and discharge much more quickly than today's batteries, which will be critical for topping off electric cars in a manner that in any way resembles our current habit of filling up at the gas station.

Imagine being able to charge your cell phone in a matter of seconds or your laptop in a few minutes. That might soon be possible, thanks to a new kind of nanostructured battery electrode developed by scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Electrical storage devices known as capacitors charge and discharge very quickly, but because they hold their charge on the surface of metal plates, their storage capacity is limited. Batteries, on the other hand, can store much more energy because they hold their charge inside the bulk of a material, usually an oxide or a phosphate compound located inside the cathode. Unfortunately, because these materials are not good conductors of electric charge, it takes a long time to get the charge in or out of a battery.

Scientists have tried to get around this problem in the past by adding electrical conductors to the energy-storage material, but this reduces the material’s volume, so it tends to lower the battery’s capacity. University of Illinois materials scientist Paul Braun and his colleagues came up with a novel solution, published online this month in Nature Nanotechnology. http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vao ... 11.38.html They built a tiny metal lattice with so many nooks and crannies that when it’s filled with a charge-storage material, the electrons in the material never have far to go before reaching the metal and being conducted away.

Braun and his co-workers found that the lithium-ion battery could charge and discharge between 10 and 100 times more quickly than the fastest devices on the market today. Its storage capacity was actually slightly larger than normal (by about 10% to 20%). And because every step of their manufacturing process is used in industry today, the researchers say there should be no major problems with incorporating their cathodes into commercial batteries. They just need to show how to scale up their technology—so far they’ve tried it only on watch-size batteries. “I have every reason to believe we can scale up,” says Braun, “and we are looking to partner with the right people to do that.”

However, materials scientist Yury Gogotsi of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, sounds a note of caution. Although he says the latest work shows the importance of a smart electrode design that uses common materials, he questions how long the batteries can withstand continued charging and recharging over such short intervals. He is also less sanguine about scaling up.