Zinc-Air Battery — Hot New Breakthrough in Battery Cost

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44EaTcV_-4o]Here’s an interview in which I discuss a company that appears to have made a considerable breakthrough in zinc-air batteries, enabling the sale of product at $160/kWh. If this is “for real,” which I believe it is, the potentials are enormous, for a number of reasons. First, it makes possible, for the first time, the storage of electric energy in large-scale for the power utilities, in turn allowing us to bring more renewables into the grid-mix. At the same time, think of what this means for electric transportation, where a huge percentage of the cost of an EV is its battery pack. Of course, price is not the only consideration – especially when it comes to EVs – but the other characteristics look acceptable as well.

Of course, the world has every right to be skeptical of the company and its claims, having seen zinc air batteries “trotted out” every year or so for the last four decades, and investors have been routinely disappointed – and in some cases actually duped. The issue is optimization. It’s easy to optimize one parameter, but at the expense of others. I’m reminded of the old saw: “You want it inexpensive, soon, and of high quality. Pick any two.”

But again, I happen to believe these people have made the breakthrough they claim. “The only thing it has in common with past efforts in this arena is that it uses zinc and it uses air; everything else about the design is unique,” the company’s president told me when I first met him in his office in New York a few months ago.