Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

MIT professor Donald Sadoway, one of the world’s foremost authorities on solid-state chemistry, is also optimistic about the future of grid-level storage. Backed by funds from the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and Bill Gates, he’s developed and demonstrated a Liquid Metal Battery (LMB) originally inspired by the high current density and enormous scale of aluminum smelters. Inside an LMB, the temperature is hot enough to keep two different metals liquid. One is high density, like antimony, and sinks to the bottom. The other is low density, such as magnesium, and rises to the top. Between them, a molten salt electrolyte helps the exchange of electrical charge. The result is a battery with currents ten times higher than present-day high-end batteries and a simple, cheap design that prices at $250 a kilowatt-hour fully installed—less than one-tenth the cost of current lithium-ion batteries. And Sadoway’s design scales.