All-Electron Battery – Stanford Strikes Again

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

With recent news of a solid-state battery coming for the labs of Yi Cui, a second solid-state solution seems to follow from another Stanford Laboratory.  The All-Electron Battery, funded at least partly by an ARPA-E grant that underwrote the program from 2010 to 2012, has fostered a startup, QuantumScape. Starting from the stated need for a battery “with twice the energy storage of today’s state-of-the-art Li-Ion battery at 30% of the cost,” ARPA-E worked with the premise that Stanford was “developing an all-electron battery that would create a completely new class of energy storage devices for EVs. Stanford’s all-electron battery stores energy by moving electrons rather than ions. Electrons are lighter and faster than the ion charge carriers in conventional Li-Ion batteries. Stanford’s all-electron battery also uses an advanced structural design that separates critical battery functions, which increases both the life of the battery and the amount of energy it can store. The battery could be charged 1000s of times …