Panasonic held a press conference yesterday at which they revealed a new type of battery — well, really, it’s a traditional battery but using a new material. These new silicon alloy anode-equipped lithium ion batteries are supposed to provide a minor boost to battery capacity now, but with the potential to greatly increase it later. The following graph should illustrate that nicely:
So generally they’ve been able to increase capacity by around 11% per year, but that potential annual gain is increased to 30% with the new anodes. Unfortunately, they don’t provide much of an increase just yet: their “weight energy density,” which is a measure of how much energy gets packed into the cells per unit of weight, is pretty much on par with current battery technology. But! Next year or the year after, they’ll be able to push it farther than they would have been able to push current tech.
Of course, that’s next year, and until the batteries have proven to be what they say (not to mention cost-effective), we probably won’t see hide nor hair of them. It’s nice to see a serious advance like this, though; the potential gains for electric cars are huge: imagine a 30-50% reduction in weight or similar increase in range.