This Groundbreaking Battery Could Change Everything
This Groundbreaking Battery Could Change Everything
Faster and cheaper than anything else.
Batteries are crucial to our sustainable future. From EVs to sustainable energy storage, they enable us to rapidly decarbonise our industries and lives. But they are expensive, often charge too slowly, and have a deleterious impact on the environment and humanity through exploitative and destructive mining. Well, a startup called Group1 may have just solved these problems by using a revolutionary, and hereto, unused technology, potassium-ion battery chemistry. As such, they are effectively promising to make the perfect battery, free of any limitations of current lithium-ion or LFP cells. However, it’s not just their unique technology that makes Group 1 so promising; it’s the utterly genius execution of said technology that makes them so revolutionary. Let me explain.
Potassium-ion batteries work in the same way as lithium-ion batteries. Positively charged lithium/potassium ions travel from one side of the battery to the other and, in doing so, send a negatively charged electron through the circuit, powering it. However, potassium ions are larger than lithium ions, which means when they travel through the battery, they can cause irreversible damage to crucial parts such as the cathode, leading to incredibly short lifespans compared to lithium-ion cells.
This is why Potassium-ion battery technology has mostly been left alone, and battery development has mostly been focused on lithium-ion technology over the past few decades.
This is a shame because potassium-ion batteries have the potential to be spectacular! They can achieve similar energy densities as lithium-ion while charging significantly faster. In fact, they can, in theory, charge even faster than sodium-ion batteries, which are some of the fastest-charging batteries available today. They are also far more environmentally friendly and better for humanity. Potassium is far more abundant than lithium and much easier to mine, and as such, its mining damages the environment far less and is less carbon-intensive, which in turn makes it significantly cheaper than lithium. What’s more, potassium batteries don’t require expensive, environmentally damaging and human-rights-breaking additives, such as cobalt, to reach peak performance as lithium-ion batteries do. Again, this makes potassium-ion batteries cheaper, more ethically sound, and better for the environment.
This is where Group1 comes in, as not only have they solved the longevity issue, but also developed a potassium battery that is easy to manufacture with off-the-shelf parts and easily integratable into already existing EV and Energy Storage Systems (ESS).
Group1’s battery actually uses widely available graphite anodes designed to work in lithium-ion batteries. This makes scaling this battery easier, faster and cheaper, as they don’t need to create a custom anode. Their Potassium Persian White (KPW) cathode is what makes their batteries last so much longer than previous potassium-ion cells. Moreover, the materials used to make the KPW cathodes are also incredibly abundant, easy to mine with little environmental impact, and incredibly cheap. According to Group1, this all allows their batteries to not only be cheaper than lithium-ion cells, but even the LFP cells, the cheapest currently used by the EV sector. In fact, some estimates suggest fully-scaled potassium-ion batteries will cost as little as $30 per kWh, or a quarter the price of current lithium-ion cells.
But, unlike LFP cells, Group1 claims their battery can charge faster and have better low-temperature performance than current lithium-ion batteries. In fact, potassium batteries have the possibility of charging faster than sodium-ion batteries, some of which can currently charge from 0% to 99% in only 8 minutes.
However, Group1 has said it will put this technology into a 3.7 volt 18650 format battery and is aiming for large-scale production of this battery by 2027. This format and voltage is by far the most popular in the EV and ESS industries, with cars like the Model 3 using them. As such, it would be incredibly easy for ESS and EV manufacturers to rapidly adopt this battery.
So, EV companies could soon save literally thousands per car by switching to Group1’s batteries while also enabling faster charge speeds and reducing their car’s environmental footprint. So, calling Group1 revolutionary is far from hyperbole.
Thanks for reading! Content like this doesn’t happen without your support. So, if you want to see more like this, don’t forget to Subscribe and help get the word out by hitting the share button below.
Sources: Group1, Will Lockett, Science Direct, Science Direct, Energy Storage News