Imagine plugging in your dead cell phone or laptop for 20 seconds, and you have a full charge! Imagine doing that hundreds of times without the battery wearing out! Imagine doing that while reducing/eliminating the problem with exploding lithium batteries… And what if the batteries were cheaper too?

Soon you may be able to live the dream:

Battery that ‘charges in seconds’

What this is is a new lithium battery manufacturing process that speeds up the flow of ions and electrons inside the battery, along with a change of materials (lithium iron phosphate instead of lithium-cobalt) that is cheaper.

The new battery technology will also help electric cars:

Breakthrough promises battery revolution

There is only one small problem in the car marketplace: Car batteries use a lot of lithium, and current mines don’t have that much capacity:

Will lithium prevent clean revolution?

Some analysts are already sounding warnings that the latest lithium-ion battery technology will at best occupy a small niche market. Lithium is a limited natural resource with most deposits in Bolivia, Chile and some in Australia and Tibet.

A strategy expert at the Paris ESCP-EAP campus, Professor Frederic Frery, points out that even if the current total lithium production of 25,000 tonnes annually is used for electric car batteries, this would only suffice for 1 million of the 50 million new cars sold annually.

“If all the lithium were used for electric cars the resource would only be enough to last for 10 years,” he warns.

Someone will make a lot of money if he/she can discover new lithium deposits.

More information here:

- How Lithium-ion Batteries Work