Rethinking energy storage technology as our need for battery power grows

This story is part of The Butterfly Effect, a special Spark series about technological advancements that had a much larger impact than most people anticipated.

When electricity went out in his Nova Scotia home during Hurricane Fiona, Jeff Dahn had a creative solution: use the battery in his electric vehicle to power up essential appliances in his house. 

"It's really nice to have an EV parked outside, which can run your home if necessary," Dahn, professor emeritus at Dalhousie University, told Spark host Nora Young. 

"It's way better than a generator, because when you run a generator, you're using fuel continuously at the same rate, even if you're not drawing any power from the generator. When you're using the vehicle-to-load option on the battery, it's only supplying electricity as needed."

While not everyone has the option to keep the lights on through an electric car, energy storage technologies like the lithium-ion batteries in EVs undergird the modern lifestyle.

Our demand for battery power grows exponentially as we buy more devices, gas prices climb higher and countries seek alternatives to fossil fuels. And historian James Morton Turner cautions that while the production of batteries scales up, we shouldn't lose sight of the environmental and human costs of resource extraction. 

"Where are we going to get all of those materials? How are we going to source them sustainably? How are we going to do it in a way that protects the local communities that are on the frontlines of mining and processing these materials?" Turner said. 

He discusses the environmental impact of our battery-reliant life in his new book, Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future.

Some proposed North American sites for new lithium mines are located on land belonging to Indigenous communities, where members have raised concerns about the impacts of this industrial activity on their livelihoods.

In Australia, lithium is extracted through an extremely energy-intensive process of hard rock mining, while in South America's "lithium triangle" of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, it's unclear whether the local economies will get the full benefit from their natural resources.

Then there's the question of what happens to the mines after the supply of valuable deposits has been depleted.

"How do we plan ahead to make sure they're going to be restored and managed in a way that's environmentally safe?" Turner asked. 

New battery materials

Current research is attempting to match the urgency to power the alternatives to fossil fuels. Dahn, who powered his home through his EV battery, is one of the scientists working on these improvements. 

One of his goals is to increase the energy density of the lithium-ion batteries, which means building batteries that "can store more energy per unit weight or volume, that translates to [a] larger driving distance in a car," he explained. 

As the energy density of batteries increases, so do the safety concerns associated with having a lot of energy packed into tiny volumes.

"Currently, our batteries have a liquid that serves as the transport medium in the cell," explained Linda Nazar, professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo.  

"That electrolyte is an organic solvent that is flammable, so if you pierce the battery or you subject it to some major abuse, it will be prone to flammability, because those organic materials will catch fire."

As the Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials, Nazar focuses on finding the solution to the problem of flammable liquids in batteries.

"There is a push towards trying to develop solid-state batteries, and there's real challenges with this – and as a community, we're trying very hard to put those into action," she said. 

In addition to improving the existing types of batteries, researchers are looking into alternatives to lithium – such as magnesium, zinc and sodium. Dahn says that new technologies like the sodium-ion battery tap into easily accessible resources. "Sodium is everywhere the ocean and it's not going to ever have a limitation in terms of availability.

"The demand is just exponentially growing over time, so you have to move to more sustainable materials that are abundant and can be sustained at large production levels," he said.

A better recycling process for batteries can also help address the costs associated with resource extraction.

"With the advent of recycling batteries, it really becomes a much more workable problem that what goes into the battery simply gets refined and put back in," Nazar said. 

The increased demand for battery power has put a lot of pressure on the industry, but it's also driving the necessary innovations, says Turner. 

"Breakthroughs in battery technology are really rare," he said. "But right now, there is so much research going on into batteries that there's going to be a breakthrough, but there's also going to be a lot of incremental gains in the near term."

Written by Olsy Sorokina. Produced by Adam Killick.