Why is battery technology stagnant, Zhihu?

It has always been a lithium battery since it entered the lithium battery era for more than 20 years. For example, mobile phones are basically lithium batteries. At present, the potential of lithium in metal is the lowest, and the voltage generated by using lithium as negative electrode is higher. In many other fields, lead-acid batteries are still widely used, while lithium batteries need time to be popularized because of their cost.

In fact, the progress of batteries is not small, but there is no substantial progress at present, because we want to make major revolutionary changes in this field. As we all know, the energy density of lithium batteries is very high, and the energy per unit weight of lithium batteries is five times that of lead batteries. Moreover, lithium is not a heavy metal, so it has little environmental pollution, light weight and long service life, which is incomparable to other batteries.

Until now, no battery more suitable for large-scale use than lithium battery has been found. For many years, scientists can only constantly improve the design of lithium batteries, and gradually improve the efficiency of batteries by replacing electrolyte or cathode materials. According to statistics, the annual progress can be around 3%.

It should be a big increase of 3% every year for more than a year, but in contrast, electronic products are updated faster, but chips are progressing faster, and the increased power consumption is far behind new products, which is easy to smooth out the progress of battery technology. It can be said that before there is no better technology to replace lithium batteries, we can only slowly develop battery technology through improvement.