Stanley Whittingham: The development of new energy batteries still faces many challenges

On November 2, the 4th World Top Scientists Forum continued to be held in Lingang New Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone. At the "Future Energy Development Forum" held on the 2nd, 2019 Nobel Prize winner Stanley Whitingham said in his keynote speech that renewable energy has very great economic value, energy storage can bring great resilience to human energy, and can also free the world from some energy that pollutes the environment. With government policy support, the world can wean itself off fossil fuels. In addition, Stanley Whittingham also said that in the development of new energy batteries, there are still many challenges.

Stanley Whittingham said that in the future development of renewable energy and clean energy, human beings may also need a lot of nuclear energy, and nuclear will be a very important element next. From an economic point of view, the cost of renewable energy is lower than the cost of lithium and cobalt. At present, the United States is also vigorously developing clean energy, and it is necessary to consider energy storage after having renewable energy. Citing an example of an energy storage device, he said it would be able to store 1.2 G of energy in 2020.

In addition, as human demand for batteries becomes higher and higher, the density of batteries designed with traditional methods will be very high, and new technologies need to be adopted to reduce the cost of batteries. At present, humans need batteries with longer life and higher density batteries, but they also need to reduce their cost. Stanley Whittingham also said that the current goal of him and his team in battery development is to be able to reach "500 capacity", which may be the limit of future chemical battery energy storage.

In terms of the challenges faced by the development of new energy batteries, Stanley Whitingham said that most of the current mature lithium batteries will use materials such as cobalt and nickel, which will also bring great consumption. If these materials cannot be recycled, it will bring a lot of waste. In addition, while scientists are solving technical problems related to lithium batteries, they should also pay attention to the very valuable material of "sodium", which will reduce the cost of future batteries and the cost of energy. In terms of hydrogen energy batteries, Stanley Whittingham said that the current hydrogen energy batteries will still have a very large volume and volume, which is also a technical challenge.