Do we have “revolutionary” battery progress, or are the next-generation batteries we see proliferating more evolutionary? Progress has not been particularly speedy: your editor first saw Dr. Yi Chu at a 2009 electric aviation symposium, when he discussed the idea of achieving a “10X” battery within a few years. Following his tenure at Stanford University, he founded Amprius, which is now producing 500 Watt-hour per kilogram cells. This big jump in energy density is still short of his original goal, which was to have produced something around 1,000 Watt-hour/kilogram cells. MagniX Samson MagniX has been developing ever-larger electric motors for over a decade, and is now developing larger battery packs to power them. Their next-generation Samson batteries contain 300 Watt-hours per kilogram at the pack level, which means higher energy densities at the module and cell levels. The addition of a necessary battery management system (BMS) when cells assembled into modules or packs adds weight, but is necessary with lithium …
