Battery

​​Two short years ago, Tesla pieced together the world’s largest battery. The company is continuing its moves in this space with a massive new battery dubbed the Megapack, of which it says enough units can be linked together to take energy storage into the giga-scale realm.​

One of the largest natural sources of renewable energy could be right under our feet – literally – with geothermal energy. Now researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Sanoh Industrial have developed a new type of battery cell that can directly convert heat energy into electricity.

A South Australia-based startup says it's built a thermal energy storage device with a lifetime of at least 20 years​ that can store six times more energy than lithium-ion batteries per volume, for 60-80 percent of the price.

Engineers have developed a new type of hybrid cathode for a lithium-sulfur battery that seems to boast better energy density than existing versions of both lithium-ion and lithium-sulfur batteries.

At Mobile World Congress this week, Energizer unveiled the P18K Pop, which is basically more battery than phone. Packing a ridiculous 18,000 mAh capacity, it apparently lasts weeks on a charge – but on the flip side, it brings new meaning to the old phrase “brick phone.”

Inspired by the ocean’s role as a natural carbon sink, researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and Georgia Tech have developed a new system that absorbs CO2 and produces electricity and useable hydrogen fuel.

How we store that energy is a constant work in progress, and while scientists are making important but incremental advances with inventive new materials, others are out to entirely reinvent what we think of as a battery. Here are five of the most innovative examples from 2018.

A new study shows how fluoride might be put to work in better batteries. Researchers at Caltech, JPL, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Honda Research Institute have developed fluoride-based batteries that could potentially last much longer than existing lithium-ion-based devices.

Lithium-ion batteries aren't necessarily the best choice for grid-scale energy storage. Researchers at MIT have outlined a new system they call a “sun in a box,” which stores energy as heat in molten silicon and harvests it by tapping into the bright light it emits.

With a focus on storing energy from intermittent renewable sources such as wind and solar, Swiss company Energy Vault has just launched an innovative new system that stores potential energy in a huge tower of concrete blocks, which can be “dropped” by a crane to harvest the kinetic energy.

New research out of Rice University describes yet another promising possible solution to the problem of dendrite formation in lithium-based batteries, working a thin film of carbon nanotubes into the design as as way of drowning them out.​

​​Carbon fiber as we know it is one of the most impressive materials in our toolkit, but could it also play a role in energy storage? One team of scientists has been exploring the possibilities, raising some interesting possibilities for weight-saving vehicle design.