QUICK CHARGE

Tired of waiting for your mobile phone to recharge? Or worse, your electric car, which can take a lot longer, even if you have access to a 220-volt power source? Building on research published in Nature Energy in January, the Israeli company called Storedot and China’s Eve Energy have demonstrated that they can produce a new breed of lithium-ion battery that can recharge in five minutes. “I think such fast-charging batteries should be available to the mass market in three years,” Chao-yang Wang of Pennsylvania State University (one of the article’s co-authors) told The Guardian.

Even an electric car, he says, could fully recharge in just 10 minutes – not much longer than it takes to pump a tank of petrol.

These batteries might even help reduce the demand for lithium by reducing what Wang calls “range anxiety” among consumers. “This will allow automakers to downsize the battery,” he said.

The key, his team reported, is a “thermally modulated” recharging process designed to keep batteries from overheating during recharging.

As a side effect, his team found, it may even be possible to extend the life of an electric vehicle to three million kilometres, potentially making vehicle purchases (and the concomitant lithium demand) a once-in-alifetime need.