Tesla-backed engineer Jeff Dahn seeks million-mile batteries

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Jeff Dahn, a Dalhousie University engineer, wants to develop a battery that will never go out of style. He wants you to be able to climb into your electric car and drive a million miles — 40 times the circumference of the world — before your battery finally sputters out.

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Impossible? Perhaps not. Dahn received a March award. Killiam Award, a $100,000 grant given annually by the Canada Council of the Arts to five researchers “who have actively devoted their careers to pushing the boundaries of knowledge and finding solutions to the issues we face every day.”

This award was the latest acknowledgment that Dahn might be onto something. The publication of a 2019 paper by the Journal of The Electrochemical Society(JES), Dahn indicated that his research group is funded exclusively by Tesla Inc. and Natural Sciences Engineering Research Council. They are close to finalizing a lithium-ion battery that can last for more than 1.6million kilometers.

“We think that lithium-ion batteries can last for a century with the right chemistry,” he said in an interview. The problem is time. Someone would need to track the battery’s performance from beginning to end, for a hundred years. “Proving that it can last a century actually takes a century,” Dahn added, laughing.

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To be clear, this battery wouldn’t enable you to go a million miles without stopping. You’d need to charge it, but if you were using The battery cell Dahn was presentedIn October 2020, the team would have it capable of enduring 10,000 charging cycles, which is equivalent to 5.3 million kilometers. Many electric vehicles, however, can only handle 800 cycles and travel approximately 320,000 kilometres.

Your electric car’s battery would last a million miles. You would need to keep it in another car and then another one. But the battery itself would be viable for many decades.

‘We’re not like that’

Dahn was one of the first to develop lithium-ion batteries, which are used in every day devices like cellphones and cars. He refuses to accept full credit.

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“This is an effort that involved scientists, engineers, manufacturing specialists all over the world, from virtually every country on the planet,” Dahn said. “My contributions were small by comparison.” He added that his graduate and postdoctoral students also played an outsize role.

Since then, his research has shifted to long-lifetime battery technology, which he believes is cutting-edge.

“There are no other academic groups in the world that work on developing really long, decades or longer, lithium-ion cells,” Dahn said. “Most academics are looking for a quick home run with a gee-whiz paper in ScienceOr Nature. We’re not like that. We’re trying to really make a difference and do something useful.”

A long-lasting battery is a nice-to have for the average consumer but they will not be essential. Commercial vehicles require special attentionThese include long-haul trucks and taxis, since most wealthy countries are on track for phasing out internal combustion engines in the next few decades. Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder and majority shareholder, wants to see these batteries power a fleet of self-driving taxis.

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Dahn’s research is “going to be essential not only to transportation,” said Marc Fortin, vice-president of research partnerships at NSERC, “but also for more sustainable, greener energy sources in the future… This has many important applications, not only for Tesla, but for many other areas.”

We’re trying to really make a difference and do something useful

Jeff Dahn

Dahn, like Musk, believes that electric vehicles are the future. He’s on the waiting list for three electric cars, and he’ll take whichever becomes available first. “Get into an electric vehicle. Try it,” Dahn said. “You’ll never go back to gas.”

By 2035, gasoline powered vehicles will be obsolete There will be no more available for purchaseAccording to the federal government. Enormous electric vehicle battery plants are popping up all over the world, many of which can produce billions of watts of energy, earning them the venerated title of “giga factory.” The federal and Ontario governments just announced that Windsor will be home to Canada’s first giga factoryThis will produce 45 gigawatts per year of energy, enough to power approximately 5,000 homes.

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Dahn stated half the power from that plant could power Nova Scotia’s entire province for one day. As it stands now, this energy is not earmarked to power households but cars.

“All those batteries are spoken for,” Dahn said. “They’re going into vehicles. In fact, every giga factory around the world that is making lithium-ion batteries — all their output is spoken for.”

These batteries are seen by Dahn as a way to solve the energy crisis and mitigate the effects of climate change. “So if you think you’re going to get us off fossil fuels, what are you going to use for energy storage? You have to use the cars,” he said. “That’s where the batteries are. They’re in the cars.”

In Dahn’s vision of the future, electric cars double as renewable energy storage devices. “You have to be able to store (renewable) energy for when the wind isn’t blowing, and the sun isn’t shining,” he said. The future electric car will have a lot of unused energy, thanks to long-lasting, million-mile batteries. The excess energy from an electric car can be used to power homes, buildings and other devices that are connected to the grid. Cars won’t just consume energy anymore, but could also be a valuable source.

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This process is called Vehicle-to-Grid, or V2G, and it’s something Dahn is really excited about. The batteries must be extremely powerful to make this work. That’s why he’s hoping to finalize a battery that can last several thousand charging cycles.

V2G sounds great. However, it will require buy in from governments, energy companies, and car manufacturers. It will also require smart technology and “vehicle-grid integration.” In other words, charging stations will need to be bidirectional in order to push and pull electricity between the cars and the electric grid. They will need software to communicate with the grid and direct the energy where it’s needed.

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When asked how long this could take to implement, Dahn said, “It’s got to be less than 50 years for sure, otherwise we’re going to be so hot on the planet, it’ll be terrible.”

Dahn said that he’s seen a lot of promising research on alternatives to lithium-ion batteries for energy storage, including gravitational storage, where large quantities of renewable energy are stored by lifting heavy objects, and dispatched by releasing them; new kinds of battery technologies such as iron-airSome claim that the e-cigarette can provide 100 hours of electricity for a fraction of the cost of a lithium battery. sodium-ion batteriesThese are slightly less energetic-dense than lithium ion but more affordable; Solid-state batteriesThese batteries are more efficient and safer than a lithium-ion one.

“We need them all. We need them all because it’s a war,” Dahn said. “It’s a war on climate change. We need everyone coming to the table to win this war.”

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