The new batteries that will revolutionize the world?

Amador Palacios
2 min readJul 12, 2021

It has every aspect of being a revolutionary development that is about to become a practical reality. These are solid state batteries that are already in their final experimentation phases and are expected on the market in the coming years.

There are many companies investing billions of dollars to try to get a place in this huge market; because the market is huge and includes all the devices that today have batteries, together with all the electric cars of the future, energy storage systems,…. almost everything we can think of.

Today the dominant technology is that of batteries with liquid electrolyte (lithium-ion and others), and all of them have an anode, cathode, electrolyte and separator.

The electrolyte stores the electrical charge that can then be supplied to any device through a connection between the anode and the cathode.

The battery is an invention from the second part of the 19th century that has evolved with the use of new materials and received a great boost with lithium-ion batteries that won for John B. Goodenough the Nobel Prize in 2019, many years after developing it.

But this nice man and many others have continued to develop materials to build solid-state batteries that are more efficient, safer, and take up less space than liquid electrolyte batteries.

And these projects are already in their final stages to achieve viable products capable of being mass-produced. Something that can change the way we use energy today.

These new solid-state batteries multiply by 2 or 3 the energy stored in current lithium-ion batteries, they take up less physical space and their charging time is about 15 minutes. They work at more extreme temperatures and do not have the risk of generating explosions, since dendrites are not produced inside.

This absolutely changes the market for electric cars, laptops, mobile phones, etc … for any product that needs a battery.

Samsung is announcing batteries of this type for cars with 800 km of autonomy and a life expectancy of 800,000 km; nothing to do with the current electric car situation.

And to put more interest in the subject, these batteries would be made with materials abundant on Earth (such as sodium), and therefore easier and cheaper to obtain.

They seem to have nothing but advantages

For this reason, as I said at the beginning, there are a lot of people and a lot of money working in this new big business (starting with the car companies), because nobody wants to be left out.

Prototypes are already announced, but until mass production and in large quantities there are still a few years left, but what does seem clear is that these new technologies can change the way we live.

Hopefully it is true and as soon as possible.

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Amador Palacios

I am an electronic engineer with more than 40 years working in industry. I like to reflect on Technological and Social issues