RENO, NV. – February 10, 2005 – Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) announced today that it has achieved a breakthrough in Lithium Ion battery electrode materials, which will enable a new generation of rechargeable battery to be introduced into the marketplace, as well as create new markets for rechargeable batteries. These new materials allow rechargeable batteries to be manufactured that have three times the power of existing Lithium Ion batteries at the same price and with recharge times measured in a few minutes rather than hours. . . . markets include hybrid electric vehicles . . . http://www.b2i.us/profiles/investor/ResLib...e=1&Category=24
The chart is a bit of an eye-popper also: [Broken External Image]:http://chart.etrade.com/graphs/NOW.ALTI.d05.gif
I notice the news release had the SEC-mandated Forward Looking Statement warning. Caveat Emptor. If it does work, sounds neat. I wonder if their Li-Ti oxide is safer than conventional Li-Ion cells? That is, you can expect a car to be involved in a crash, maybe even a fire.
very impressive statements made in this article. cant wait to hear the shake out on this. problem is, if its really revolutionary, it maybe months before we hear anything else.
[AFTER FURTHER DIGGIN'] Battery Program Summary An environmentally friendly , high-power battery, suitable for hybrid vehicles will soon appear based on a secondary Li+ ion battery concept. Value in use, from the consumers point of view, will favor a secondary Li+ ion battery concept for high capacity / high power batteries due to the long life and rugged nature of this battery type. The practical specific energy of high power, high capacity, secondary Li+ ion batteries exceeds lead acid batteries. Altair projects a practical energy density of its novel lithium ion battery concept to be double that of the commonly used lead acid batteries. http://www.altairnano.com/main_content/Dev...#BatterySummary Sounding like a future Prius battery . . . Now I'm Sufferin' Future Prius Envy Too! Hope we can upgrade when the time comes!
Of course, if they can really reduce the charge time to minutes, then it's not just hybrids - potentially you're looking at something that will make battery-electric cars viable. That's what I really want. I didn't really want a car that had to be fed petrol, I wanted one I could feed electricity from renewable sources. One of my key motivations for buying a hybrid was that increased demand for large-format battery packs can only help spur improvements in battery technology to the point battery-electric cars become commercially viable. Which would render all that hydrogen economy nonsense redundant.
Of course the other thing that really matters is the energy density of the new batteries. You'll notice they've been tight-lipped about this in their press releases! But we can guess how much it ought to be from their quote: Good lead acid is about 35 Wh/kg, so the altairs maybe around ~70 Wh/kg, which is less than a third of what you can buy today off the shelf (Sony best 18650s are at 220 Wh/kg - for comparison the battery in the '04 Prius is ~45 Wh/kg). However, this more informative altairnano pdf suggests it could be as much as 100 Wh/kg for the finished product. So a 200 mile range EV with a 100Wh/kg battery should require a 500kg altair battery - that's still the problem despite the excellent charge time - a 500kg battery is going to make for an expensive battery and a heavy car. Not to worry though, some other labs and companies are making serious progress in the right directions as you can read about here! http://www.knowledgepress.com/events/6301210.htm (Check out the 1,000 Wh/kg carbon nanotube batteries and the even more amazing 11,600 Wh/kg lithium air battery!)
I whole-heartedly agree - but it goes even further than that! There are some REALLY bright chemists out there at the moment coming up with some brilliantly inventive battery designs that threaten to improve all areas of operation by at least one and maybe even two orders of magnitude. When that happens (and it could easily happen tomorrow) it's not just the hydrogen economy that'll become redundant - it'll be the whole transport OIL economy too!
