A Decade Away from Next-Generation Battery

New Battery Tech Still Years Away - Report

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 09/21/2006 | 11:32 PM ]

Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., Hitachi Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and MTI Micro Fuel Cells are among those racing to develop fuel cells, which produce electricity from an external supply of fuel as opposed to a battery’s internal storage capacity. They are leading the charge for more efficient power systems to keep up with changes in consumer gadgets. Laptops, once used primarily for creating documents and spreadsheets, are now hubs for power-eating tasks like video conferencing, hosting websites and interactive games.

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At the same time, consumers are starting to watch full-length movies on pocket-sized digital players, or view live television on mobile phones, which also puts a serious stress on battery.

“There is nothing in the near term that can satisfy all the requirements that have to come from a battery. It has to be light, small, last a long time and relatively safe. They haven’t come up with a chemical combination yet that can satisfy all those requirements,” said NPD Group analyst Stephen Baker.

The prevailing technology to power gadgets is lithium-ion batteries, which experts view as relatively safe despite last month’s recall of a total of some 6 million notebook PC batteries by Dell and Apple.

In time, fuel cells will be able to supply 10 times more power, and will be instantly recharged. But mass deployment is years away, after a long period of testing and tweaking, analysts said.

”The next step is fuel cells, but (they) are a little way away. In five to 10 years, fuels cells will become an integrated replacement for conventional batteries,” said Jim Tully, chief of research at Gartner.

• Reuters: New Battery Tech Still Years Away.