Latest / Kvetch & Release / New battery tech 100X more powerful than currently available

Transcript

New battery tech 100X more powerful than currently available · Kvetch & Release

• 0:03
  Welcome back to AM eight hundred CKLW. Hope you are all doing well.
• 0:08
  Maybe you're like me. It gets towards the end of the day. You're
• 0:12
  looking at your phone. You've got plans to maybe go out at the end
• 0:16
  of the work day, maybe go out at night, and your phone says
• 0:19
  you're at forty percent battery, and you're starting to figure out, Okay,
• 0:23
  how much longer can I get out of it? Do I have to go
• 0:26
  somewhere and plug it in right now? Maybe you're like me and you carry
• 0:29
  around a portable battery pack, but that's not always convenient anyways. It's frustrating.
• 0:34
  Oh my gosh, batteries they're just so infuriating, and increasingly our entire
• 0:40
  life is attached to things that require electricity, and sometimes a lot of it.
• 0:45
  Well, Japan's TDK company has developed a new material for small solid state
• 0:52
  batteries, and this sounds pretty wild. They're saying that the energy density of
• 0:57
  it is significantly higher than current batteries, one hundred times more. If I
• 1:04
  could get a phone that lasted for two days, that would be great.
• 1:07
  If one could last for one hundred days, I'm just trying to wrap my
• 1:11
  head around that. One person who was always able to break down the tech
• 1:17
  world for us is Carmi leaving CTV's tech expert, Carmie, are you like
• 1:21
  me as the cell phone almost dead at the end of the day, Oh,
• 1:25
  It's almost dead long before then. I strategically positioned chargers all through the
• 1:30
  house and in my car. I even have a backup battery in my bike
• 1:34
  bag. And I'm constantly plugging my phone in because I know the way I
• 1:38
  use it, and as you probably imagine, I'm a pretty heavy use of
• 1:42
  my phone. I will burn the battery usually by mid afternoon if I don't
• 1:47
  plug it in at some point. So I'm constantly living almost like a camel
• 1:51
  in the desert, I'm sorry, going from oasis to oasis. Where can
• 1:53
  I plug my phone? And where can I get a little bit of charge
• 1:56
  to keep myself going? Because like everyone else, I live in deathly fear
• 2:00
  of my phone going dark, and unfortunately, batteries simply don't keep up.
• 2:05
  And that has been the case since the very first smartphone. We've essentially been
• 2:08
  living this really weird, nomadic, find me an outlet life for years without
• 2:14
  even realizing just how unhealthy that is. For us. Yeah, I mean
• 2:19
  we are literally, as you said, tethered and chained and we can't get
• 2:22
  away from the outlets. But this is a breakthrough that could not only change
• 2:27
  cell phones, this could like fundamentally change society. It could because if you
• 2:30
  think about all of the I mean the devices that we use, the mobile
• 2:35
  devices are wonderful. They allow us to do substantive work away from a traditional
• 2:42
  home office or regular office. We can you know, I can get work
• 2:45
  done anywhere. And every time I send an email from the middle of nowhere,
• 2:49
  I kind of look up at the sky and go, Wow, that's
• 2:51
  really cool. I remember not being able to do that. So it is
• 2:53
  a miracle. But power really is the big constraint and has been. Battery
• 2:58
  technology has not advance to the same degree as all the other technologies that make
• 3:01
  our smartphones as miraculous as they are. And so you know, we've been
• 3:07
  hearing their companies around the world have been researching next generation battery technologies that would
• 3:13
  replace the lithium ion sort of traditional battery rechargeable battery cells that we use today.
• 3:19
  Because the batteries that we use today, the charge doesn't last long enough.
• 3:23
  They tend to degrade over time. So if the battery is a couple
• 3:27
  of years old, it's pretty lousy. You've got to replace it. There
• 3:30
  are safety issues because they use liquid, right, so if you look inside
• 3:35
  a traditional lithium ion battery, it's essentially like a sandwich of liquid and other
• 3:38
  materials, and that if there's a problem with it. If you damage the
• 3:43
  battery, for example, it's subject to igniting, and we know full well
• 3:46
  they're like little bombs when that happens. And so there's been a lot of
• 3:51
  research on something called solid state batteries which addresses a lot of these problems.
• 3:54
  It doesn't have the same degradation, it has much more what we call energy
• 3:58
  density. It puts out a lot more power and it holds a lot more
• 4:02
  energy than a traditional lithium ion battery. So the number that they use is
• 4:08
  what hours per leader, And if you look at your laptop of your smartphone,
• 4:12
  it's got about ten wat hours per leader, which is reasonable, but
• 4:15
  it's less than the battery that has been in your watch for the last forty
• 4:19
  years. So it's good but not great, and it gets worse with time.
• 4:24
  So solid state batteries are at about fifty watts per leader, so five
• 4:29
  times as effective as most of the batteries that we use today. And now
• 4:32
  TDK, which is very large Japanese manufacturer they've been around for a very long
• 4:35
  time. They've announced that their researchers have come up with a solid state battery
• 4:41
  design that holds a thousand wat hours per leader, so a hundred times better
• 4:46
  than the battery that you have in your smartphone today. They're saying this technology
• 4:49
  could make it last not for a day, but for weeks, potentially months,
• 4:56
  just hammering away it without having to go find an outlet. Uses new
• 5:00
  materials Instead of lithium ion, it's ceramics, oxide based electrolytes, lithium alloy
• 5:06
  composites, and so really exotic materials that hold their charge better, hold it
• 5:13
  longer, hold a lot more energy for the amount of weight. And if
• 5:15
  you think of the reasons why batteries are really lousy and things like cars because
• 5:19
  they don't go far enough and they're super heavy, this could address so many
• 5:25
  of the problems that we have with battery electric power, both on our wrist,
• 5:29
  in our pocket, or on the road. This could be the next
• 5:31
  big thing in energy. I mean, it certainly seems like that. I
• 5:36
  think to watching Star Trek, and I never once saw a charging cable sticking
• 5:43
  out of any of the walls in the space shifts. The only one that
• 5:46
  comes to mind is maybe the board. But they were recharging quite frankly,
• 5:49
  their human side more than the mechanical side. With that, it's really hard
• 5:56
  to even begin to express. It could be a world where your fridge could
• 6:00
  have built in batteries and if you lose power, it might not necessarily affect
• 6:05
  you for a week on end. You know, I imagine, you know,
• 6:10
  if you're flying through the neutral zone, there weren't any Tesla supercharger stations
• 6:15
  hanging around where you could just kind of pull in and charge everything up.
• 6:16
  And they didn't think about mundane things like that because they had already developed technologies
• 6:20
  that move them beyond that. And I keep thinking, you know, our
• 6:25
  devices get better, faster, more features, sport ai, but year after
• 6:29
  year, it's the battery that continues to vecce us. It's the battery that,
• 6:33
  a year or two after we bought that spanking new smartphone is starting to
• 6:38
  fail. And of course it's very difficult, if not impossible, to replace
• 6:42
  batteries in most consumer electronic devices today. So what if we had a better
• 6:46
  technology, What if they came up with something better than the same lithium ion
• 6:53
  formulations. Let's say that we've been using for decades. The battery in your
• 6:57
  laptop today is very much like the battery that have been in your laptop twenty
• 7:00
  years ago. It is not that different. Everything else has moved ahead,
• 7:04
  batteries have not. And so it's really time for us to get to that
• 7:09
  point, because I really would like to have that Star Trek Star Wars like
• 7:12
  Future Jetson's like Future where nobody worries about the mundane aspects of keeping something charged.
• 7:18
  They just use the technology as it was originally intended to be used well,
• 7:23
  And what a limitation as well in terms of developing technology. If the
• 7:27
  forefront at the conversation is what will we be able to accomplish based on how
• 7:32
  long the battery can last? That is a huge limitation just in and of
• 7:35
  itself. With TDK saying that they want to start shipping samples of this next
• 7:41
  year in a prototype phase and then hopes of mass production shortly thereafter, is
• 7:46
  that at all surprising to you how maybe quickly this could all be rolling out?
• 7:51
  It is, and pleasantly so because usually the devil in details like this
• 7:58
  is that they'll an ounce some kind of revel lutionary technology, but then there's
• 8:01
  little asterisk at the end. It's only in the lab and there are no
• 8:05
  plans for commercialization. There's no timeline for getting us into your hands, and
• 8:09
  there is a very wide gulf between scientists coming up with something in a lab
• 8:13
  and then scaling up that manufacturing process commercializing it so that you and I can
• 8:20
  buy it at an affordable price point and use it day to day. So
• 8:24
  the fact that TDK already has a roadmap for bringing this to market, that
• 8:28
  they will be releasing prototypes, so they're going to be putting in the hand
• 8:31
  in the hands of other manufacturers who will then work on ways of converting factories,
• 8:37
  for example, from with the ion traditional batteries to this new technology is
• 8:41
  incredibly encouraging. Usually you don't hear that the fact that we are and the
• 8:46
  fact that this is TDK, This is a company that has been around for
• 8:48
  decades, incredibly well respected, certainly has the access to the depth of resources,
• 8:54
  the best of Japan and Japan's engineering capability and industrial capability to bring this
• 9:01
  to light. So I'm hopeful here. I'm hopeful that we're finally moving past
• 9:05
  vaporware and we're actually going to see this in a device near you sometime soon,
• 9:11
  certainly not decades out, but maybe just a few short years. Last
• 9:16
  question for you, and I don't know, this might not be it's not
• 9:18
  really a question, it's just vibes, So feel free to respond based on
• 9:22
  that. But my cell phone, I use wireless charging. At the end
• 9:26
  of the day. I just toss it on at night and wake up in
• 9:28
  the morning it's charged, ready to go. I love it. Across the
• 9:33
  river in Detroit, Michigan, they are prototyping the first mile of wireless road
• 9:39
  to charge electric vehicles, wanting to stay at the forefront of the motor city,
• 9:43
  and the industry, of course is what they do oh on that side
• 9:46
  of the river. But I think to some of the limitations, although increasingly
• 9:50
  they're going the way of the Dodo bird. In terms of green energy with
• 9:54
  solar and wind, it's always been that storage capacity that's been the issue.
• 10:00
  Taking sort of everything that I've just said there, I mean, we could
• 10:03
  almost theoretically be going to a point where there's just constantly a flow of electricity
• 10:09
  around us. If we have a much greater capacity for storage combined with this
• 10:13
  wireless charge, and we could be walking around with our devices charging at all
• 10:16
  times. We could And you know, it all comes down to infrastructure.
• 10:20
  How much our cities and provinces and states and countries willing to spend to retrofit
• 10:26
  our road network and our infrastructure for this new reality. But if you combine
• 10:31
  roads that charge devices as they drive over them, and I'm going to include
• 10:35
  e bikes on that because I'm a big cyclist, that with batteries that are
• 10:39
  way better at holding a charge and are a lot lighter and a lot more
• 10:43
  powerful and power dense. That's the holy grail of energy, right. That's
• 10:48
  where energy is cheap, energy is accessible. We don't have to make compromises
• 10:52
  in how we use the technology day to day. We just get in the
• 10:56
  car, get on the bike, pull out the smartphone, use it as
• 10:58
  we and not have to worry about the thing dying in a little bit,
• 11:03
  not have to worry about where we're going to find that next charge point for
• 11:07
  our car. If we get to that point, I think that's where energy
• 11:11
  ceases to be a reason that countries go to war and with each other because
• 11:15
  over finite energy reserves and we can finally maybe move toward I don't know,
• 11:18
  maybe that sort of you know, federation utopian future that was promised to us
• 11:24
  in Star Trek, where all of these silly quibbles over energy have been addressed
• 11:28
  and we could just use technology for the promise, the promises that were originally
• 11:31
  made to us. You know that what a world that would be if we
• 11:37
  could move past the pettiness and the scarcity. Charmie, always a pleasure to
• 11:41
  chat with you. This is this one just blew my mind. I'm glad
• 11:45
  that you had the time to walk us through it. I'm so glad to
• 11:48
  have been with you. Thanks so much, John Karmie Levy is CTVS tech
• 11:52
  expert. We'll be back right after this break