Batteries

Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang ’85, Prof. Craig Carter and Throop Wilder co-founded MIT spinout 24M, which “will manufacture next-generation lithium-ion batteries using its cell technology,” reports Reuters.  

Bruce Anderson ’73, founder and CEO of MIT spinout 247 Solar, speaks with Bloomberg Baystate Business Hour host Janet Wu about the power of solar energy and growing climate concerns for the future. “We are facing dire circumstances here,” says Anderson. “We have no clue what the climate’s tipping point is where it all of sudden goes in a direction that we cannot recover from, no matter how much carbon we remove from the air."

A team of researchers from MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory successfully reached a 30% jump in thermophotovoltaic (TPV) efficiency, reports Robert F. Service for Science. “[TPV] is a semiconductor structure that concerts photons emitted from a heat source to electricity, just as a solar cell transforms sunlight into power,” explains Service.

Qichao Hu ’07 - founder and CEO of SES, a battery research company and supplier to the electric vehicle industry - speaks with Wired reporter Omar L. Gallaga about electric vehicle batteries. “Huge battery innovations happen about every 30 years, according to HU, and the good news is we’re about due for the next evolution,” writes Gallaga

Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Nidhi Subbaraman about the dramatic drops in costs to manufacture and sell renewable technologies. Subbaraman notes that Trancik’s research shows that “the steep drop in solar and lithium-ion battery technology was enabled by market expansion policies as well as investment in research and development by governments and the private sector.”

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights how a number of MIT spinoffs are working on changing the world’s energy-storage systems. “Behind these companies are key technological advances in chemistry and materials, many of them pioneered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” writes Bray. “These breakthroughs have put battery startups at the forefront of the region’s climate-tech sector.”

Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang and his colleagues are developing a new, inexpensive iron-air battery technology that could provide multi-day storage for renewable energy by 2024 through their startup Form Energy, reports Anuradha Varanasi for Popular Science. Chiang explains that “the battery can deliver clean electricity for 100 hours at a price of only $20 kilowatts per hour – a bargain compared to lithium-ion batteries, which cost up to $200/kWh,” writes Varanasi.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo visited MIT.nano this week, where she emphasized the importance of investing in semiconductor research and manufacturing, and noted that MIT is the “gold standard” for collaboration between academia and industry, reports Jake Freudberg for GBH News. “Ultimately, what we need is the great ideas and research that are beginning in universities to be turned into products made at scale in America,” said Raimondo.

WCBV reporter Sharman Sacchetti spotlights U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s visit to MIT.nano. “Investing in chip manufacturing and supply chain domestically will allow us to make more goods in America, which will bring down inflation,” said Raimondo of the importance of boosting domestic manufacturing of semiconductors.

WBUR reporters Bruce Gellerman and David Greene spotlight Form Energy, a startup co-founded by MIT scientists with the mission to find a low-cost way to transform the global electric system. The startup “had a eureka moment when they thought about harnessing the rusting process to power batteries,” write Gellerman and Greene. 

National Geographic reporter Sadie Dingfelder writes that MIT scientists are using piezoelectric materials to develop a battery-free, underwater navigation system. “There are a lot of potential applications,” says Prof. Fadel Adib. “For instance, a scuba diver could use these sensors to figure out the exact place they took a particular picture.”

24M Technologies, an MIT startup, and Volkswagen Group are joining forces to "manufacture next-generation lithium-ion EV batteries using the 24M SemiSolid platform,” reports Mark Kane for Inside EVs.

Nth Cycle, a company co-founded by Prof. Desiree Plata, has developed an extraction device that uses electric signals to identify valuable metals or black mass leftover from discarded electric batteries. “This modular system is easy to move and adapt and is far more efficient and environmentally friendly than the traditional methods of smelting or using a chemical wash to sort out the metals from the gunk,” writes Jon Chesto and Larry Edelman for The Boston Globe.

Forbes contributor David Blackmon spotlights Ambri, an MIT startup that is developing liquid-metal batteries. Blackmon writes that Ambri has developing a new battery technology that could “help renewables like wind and solar scale up more rapidly in the coming years and help them occupy a larger share of electricity generation around the world.”

Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle spotlights MIT startup Form Energy, which has created a battery prototype made of iron and oxygen that stores large amounts of power and can release it over days. Von Drehle writes that this new battery could usher in a “sort of tipping point for green energy: reliable power from renewable sources at less than $20 per kilowatt-hour.”