“Range anxiety, the fear of running out of power before being able to recharge an electric vehicle, may be a thing of the past, according to a team of Penn State engineers who are looking at lithium iron phosphate batteries that have a range of 250 miles with the ability to charge in 10 minutes.
"We developed a pretty clever battery for mass-market electric vehicles with cost parity with combustion engine vehicles," said Chao-Yang Wang, William E. Diefenderfer Chair of mechanical engineering, professor of chemical engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, and director of the Electrochemical Engine Center at Penn State. "There is no more range anxiety and this battery is affordable."

And the icing on the cake:

“The researchers also say that the battery should be good for 2 million miles in its lifetime.”

To put that in perspective, your average fossil-fuel-driven car has a lifetime of around 200,000 miles if all goes well.

So we are clearly getting to a point (and fast) where the exponentially increasing need for batteries to store renewable energy is offset by the fact that these batteries will basically last forever.

With such rapid changes in technology, it becomes a more interesting question as to how much more environmentally-destructive mining will have to continue to get the raw materials needed to battery-ize the whole planet.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, a massive infrastructure of battery recycling companies is sure to make itself more and more visible over the coming decade too.

This stuff gives me hope.

[Cover photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash]