Why new battery technologies rarely/never appear

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Lithium-ion had a lucky break early on. Successors will need billions of dollars to catch up – if they don't flame out first

www.theregister.com

Battery boffins therefore think that lithium-ion has at least a decade of dominance ahead of it.​

"The battery industry is all about cost," says Sam Jaffe of Cairn ERA, a battery research outfit. "And cost is a function of scale: you need big factories and mature supply chains. That's not something you can build overnight. It took lithium-ion 15 years before it went from a highly specialised product to more of a mass-market product. That will be true of any upcoming battery technology: it takes decades."

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