Beyond Lithium: New Battery Tech Starts to Break Through - Yale E360

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Workers manufacture sodium-ion batteries, an alternative to lithium-ion batteries, at Namey New Energy Technology in Luoyang, China.<br>Zhang Yixi / VCG via Getty Images

the market for batteries these days is insatiable. demand has grown more than fortyfold since 2010, thanks mainly to electric cars: sales of evs hit 20 million in 2025, or about a quarter of all cars sold globally. shipping containers packed with batteries are also being called into play to store the electricity from renewables like solar. storage capacity for solar farms has grown twentyfold in just five years. this boom has fed a frenzy in battery research and development. “in the past five years, innovation went very, very fast,” says teo lombardo, a former battery chemist and now an analyst for the international energy agency. “in 2024, over 40 percent of energy-related patents were on batteries. that’s never happened before. that tells you how quickly the market is evolving, and how much interest there is.” lithium-ion batteries are today’s gold standard for lightweight, high-powered energy storage for laptops, power tools, smartphones, drones, and electric cars. but now, says lombardo, two new technologies are attacking lithium-ion’s dominance from either end of the cost spectrum: cheap but bulky sodium batteries promise to run budget electric vehicles and help to power the grid; and expensive but powerful solid-state batteries offer long ranges for luxury evs. meanwhile, plenty of other battery chemistries are being tested in the lab, with hopes that new winners might eventually emerge to power the future.“the battery market is becoming so large that it’s not a matter of one technology replacing another,” says lombardo. “it’s about specializing to serve different parts of the market.” "><br>The market for batteries these days is insatiable. Demand has grown more than fortyfold since 2010, thanks mainly to electric cars: Sales of EVs hit 20 million in 2025, or about a quarter of all cars sold globally. Shipping containers packed with batteries are also being called into play to store the electricity from renewables like solar. Storage capacity for solar farms has grown twentyfold in just five years.<br>This boom has fed a frenzy in battery research and development. “In the past five years, innovation went very, very fast,” says Teo Lombardo, a former battery chemist and now an analyst for the International Energy Agency. “In 2024, over 40 percent of energy-related patents were on batteries. That’s never happened before. That tells you how quickly the market is evolving, and how much interest there is.”<br>Lithium-ion batteries are today’s gold standard for lightweight, high-powered energy storage for laptops, power tools, smartphones, drones, and electric cars. But now, says Lombardo, two new technologies are attacking lithium-ion’s dominance from either end of the cost spectrum: Cheap but bulky sodium batteries promise to run budget electric vehicles and help to power the grid; and expensive but powerful solid-state batteries offer long ranges for luxury EVs. Meanwhile, plenty of other battery chemistries are being tested in the lab, with hopes that new winners might eventually emerge to power the future.<br>“The battery market is becoming so large that it’s not a matter of one technology replacing another,” says Lombardo. “It’s about specializing to serve different parts of the market.”

Innovations in the architecture of the battery cell have accelerated charging times — some can be charged in 10 minutes.

Making a battery is fundamentally simple: A child can create one out of a lemon, a galvanized nail, a copper penny, and a couple of wires. Chemical reactions occur between the two electrodes — the cathode and the anode — and the lemon-juice electrolyte that’s sandwiched in between them, driving electrons through the wires to light up a bulb.

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But making a really good battery — one that packs a lot of power into a small package, is cheap to manufacture, survives through a decade of charging cycles without degrading or starting fires, works in the cold of winter and the heat of summer, and can be easily refurbished or recycled — is another thing entirely. Creating good batteries is such a delicate work of chemistry and engineering that it typically requires decades of research to get it right. “It’s like a symphony. Everything needs to cooperate,” says Jagjit Nanda, a materials scientist and head of the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center in Menlo Park, California.<br>Back in the 1970s, the oil crisis spurred investment in energy alternatives. Lithium was an obvious choice for lightweight batteries because it’s the lightest metal on the periodic table. The key innovation was designing electrodes that could safely and efficiently host lithium ions in...