Ultracapacitors to the rescue?

One of the biggest needs across a vast range of technological niches these days is better energy storage options — better batteries. Some recent work at MIT may provide a major step toward meeting that need:

A new battery material that recharges 100 times faster than the lithium-ion in your laptop has been revealed by researchers at MIT.

The discovery could lead to cellphone-sized batteries that could be charged in 10 seconds.

"The ability to charge and discharge batteries in a matter of seconds rather than hours may open up new technological applications and induce lifestyle changes," wrote materials scientists Gerbrand Ceder and Byoungwoo Kang Wednesday in the journal Nature.

In energy storage, there has always been a trade-off between the amount of energy a material could store and how quickly you could discharge it. Batteries were pretty good at storing energy (although not nearly as good as oil), but getting energy into and out of them was tough. Ultracapacitors, and their cousins, supercapacitors, can deliver a lot of charge really quickly, but it takes 20 times more of their materials to store the same energy as a comparable battery.

As with any such early announcement, it doesn't mean the technology will be available immediately: this is still the research phase of R&D. The information published in Nature only shows 50 charge/discharge/recharge cycles — although with little loss of capacity — and until it has been tested to many times that rate, it can't be said to be commercially viable yet.

H/T to John Scalzi.

Update: Of course, any time something sounds too good to be true, it's worth keeping your enthusiasm in check:

Still, fast-charging electric cars is big news, right?

Well, no actually — li-titanate batteries, offering electrocars which can top off in a few minutes, have been around for a while and such vehicles are nearing the market.

In any case, Ceder and Kang — while apparently happy to speak to journalists of fast-charging, unless that was made up by the scribes — don't yet claim fast charging for their kit among their scientific peers. They have only proven fast discharging, as one finds when looking at their actual letter [. . .] MIT Tech Review, one of the few publications to bother looking properly, merely says "the fast-discharging materials may also recharge quickly".