The quest for inexpensive and reliable grid-scale energy storage has taken a promising turn, with Stanford researchers announcing they’ve come up with a new electrode material that can withstand 40,000 charging and discharging cycles – about 100 times what the average lithium-ion battery can take.
“That is a breakthrough performance,” said Yi Cui, a Stanford professor who advised grad student Colin Wessells in his research and was coauthor on their paper, with colleague Robert Huggins, published recently in the journal Nature Communications. The key to the electrode’s durability, the researchers said, is the atomic structure of the nanomaterial used to make it: crystalline copper hexacyanoferrate.