IBM hopes to develop lith-air batteries that will power EV for 300 to 500 miles on a single charge

IBM Aims for a Battery Breakthrough

A consortium led by IBM hopes to develop lithium-air batteries that will power electric vehicles for 300 to 500 miles on a single charge
By Steve Hamm

"Eager to place itself at the forefront of technology considered crucial to transportation's future, Big Blue is throwing its weight behind batteries.

On June 23, IBM announced a multiyear effort to increase the performance of rechargeable batteries by a factor of 10. The aim is to design batteries that will make it possible for electric vehicles to travel 300 to 500 miles on a single charge, up from 50 to 100 miles currently. "We want to see if we can find a radically different battery technology," says Chandrasekhar "Spike" Narayan, who manages the Science & Technology Organization at IBM Research's Almaden lab in San Jose, Calif.

To do that, IBM (IBM) is leading a consortium that will create batteries using a combination of lithium and oxygen rather than the potentially combustible lithium-ion mix that now dominates advanced consumer electronics and early electric-vehicle batteries. The new batteries could be used to store energy in electric grids as well.

IBM is also eager to reclaim U.S. leadership in battery tech from Asia. While many of the original breakthroughs for the batteries that power today's laptop computers and cell phones happened in the U.S., those batteries now come primarily from Japan and Korea.

Industry leaders have called for just this kind of concerted effort amid concern that the U.S. will miss out on one of the most important technology shifts in history—the switch from gasoline to electricity as the primary power source for light vehicles. The worry is that the U.S. will trade its current dependency on the Middle East for oil with a new dependency on Asia for vehicle batteries. "We lost control of battery technology in the 1970s," laments Andy Grove, former chairman of chip giant Intel (INTC). "Battery technology will define the future, and if we don't act quickly it will go to China and Japan."