SAN FRANCISCO’S booming tech industry has brought a unique start-up culture with plenty of money to spend on things such as memberships for ultra-luxe clubs.

Samsung will now offer fast charging electric cars thanks to a new battery technology.

The new battery created by the company will give the vehicle a running range of 600 km on a single charge.

This battery can be charged in just 20 minutes.

Additionally, it incorporates components that have significantly reduced cell resistance.

This battery can receive an 80-percent charge in 20 minutes and cover up to 500 kilometers with said charge.

It was presented at the Detroit Auto Show this week.

Samsung is set to also reveal a new technology using graphene balls that can increase capacity by 45 percent and offers a much superior loading speed.

Samsung integrating fast charging electric cars using graphene ball technology

The company presented a variety of battery models designed for electric vehicles (EV) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) varying between 37, 50, 60, and 94 AH/h.

Furthermore, it is working with LG Chem to develop lithium batteries for VW-Audi, a project it has been developing for years.

The project has been confirmed by the two South Korean companies.

Material supply is set to begin before 2020.

Also, Samsung presented its 21700 cylindrical battery.

The company’s specialized division will soon present the new graphene ball technology.

This material manages to increase battery capacity by 45 percent, as well as raising the loading speed.

These graphene balls will be part of upcoming battery models launched by the Asian company, which has assured that the material improves capacity and safety.

Samsung will offer fast charging electric cars not only to improve the market but also in order to innovate.

Integrating fast charge and other novelties

The Samsung SDI presentation highlights the progress made so far by the industry, especially throughout 2017.

In recent years, the company has dedicated to making the greatest technological advances in the automobile market.

But let’s not forget their smartphones and the artificial intelligence technology developed for EVs.

By integrating these fast charging electric cars, the brand shows it has set out to improve its electric models.

Masdar in the United Arab Emirates and Norwegian multinational Statoil signed a collaborative agreement on the Hywind Scotland project during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. The two companies will purchase, install and analyse data from the Batwind battery system to explore its potential for future applications.

Hywind, which opened off the coast of Aberdeenshire last October, has an installed capacity of 30 megawatts (MW) and already powers 6,600 homes. It is set to displace 63,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

Statoil previously said the lithium-ion Batwind battery will have a 1MWh capacity, equivalent to more than 2m smartphones. It will also regulate power supply itself, laying the groundwork for integrated batteries within offshore turbines.

“The intermittent nature of solar and wind energy pose challenges for dependable power supply and grid stability. Energy storage is key to overcoming these challenges and unlocking the full potential of renewables,” said Bader Al Lamki, Masdar’s executive director for clean energy.

“By partnering with Statoil on the Batwind project, Masdar is addressing this critical need for affordable, reliable and regionally-optimised battery technologies and strengthening the viability of energy storage solutions. This has the potential to deliver far-reaching benefits in the development of renewables as a baseload power source.”

The two companies will collect vast amounts of data from the system under a range of conditions, investigating how it can improve the operational and cost efficiency of offshore windfarms.

“Batwind has the potential to add value by mitigating periods without wind – and, by that, making wind a more reliable energy producer year-round,” said Sebastian Bringsværd, head of Hywind development in new energy solutions. “This could expand the use and market for wind and renewables in the future.”

During Uber’s Elevate Summit in April 2017, a Detroit-based aircraft company and an automotive company from the same city announced a venture into the urban mobility space. A newly formed firm, Airspace Experience Technologies LLC (AirSpaceX), would have a new VTOL aircraft to go with it: MOBi-ONE.

A subscale model of MOBi-ONE was recently unveiled to the public by AirSpaceX, which is officially a subsidiary of Detroit Aircraft Corp. But it didn’t debut at an aerospace event. Instead, it was revealed at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

AirSpaceX founder and CEO Jon Rimanelli said during the Elevate Summit that the company receives funding from a U.S.-based automotive OEM, leaving it unnamed.

“Our goal is to deploy 2,500 aircraft at the nation’s 50 largest cities by 2026, targeting existing infrastructure at first,” said JP Yorro, COO at AirSpaceX. “The MOBi development program will be capital intensive, but air Mobility as a Service could generate billions for the economy. We are considering a broad array of financing options, including potential fractional ownership interest and profit-sharing models.”

MOBi-ONE would be designed to transport passengers or cargo to and from urban locations within 60 miles. It would be able to fly at a top speed of 250 mph, using existing electric vehicle architecture and autonomous technologies, according to Detroit Aircraft Corp. The company continued to say that recent advances in electric propulsion, automation and lightweight materials make a futuristic aircraft like this possible.

“MOBi-ONE will offer clean, quiet and connected on-demand air mobility to the mass traveling public at an affordable price,” said Rimanelli. “Our vision is to mass produce aircraft leveraging lean automotive design and mass production techniques so our vehicles are affordable to the mass traveling public.”

According to Detroit Aircraft Corp., it designed and built MOBi-ONE at Detroit City Airport. AirSpaceX teamed with Camilo Pardo, chief designer of the 2005 and 2006 Ford GT, for the aircraft’s design. Pardo and Rimanelli began working together in 2011, prototyping and developing several VTOL concepts over the years, Detroit Aircraft Corp. said.

The company plans to manufacture a full-scale aircraft following completion of engineering packages. It would then undergo FAA Part 27 certification and be operated by AirSpaceX.

California has long sought to be at the forefront of a cleaner environment and cleaner energy standards. Although Bakersfield was the site of some of America’s earliest oil production at the beginning of the 20th century, more recently, California has worked to dramatically reduce smog and CO2 levels through strict emissions requirements and, more recently, a carbon “cap and trade” program. The state’s clean energy goals for the future were similarly ambitious. By 2030, California aims to get half of its energy from renewable sources. Getting there will most likely require significant innovations in renewable energy technology, especially batteries and other types of energy storage, especially now that the state is fully committed to closing Diablo Canyon, its last nuclear plant in operation.

In an announcement on Thursday, California’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted to allow the state’s primary utility company, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), to close the Diablo Canyon plant in 2025. One of the CPUC commissioners described the vote as a move “away from the era of nuclear power and toward the era of zero-carbon renewable energy.”

Diablo Canyon’s closure had expected for more than a year. In June, 2016, PG&E announced that it would close the plant when its operating permits expired in 2025. The closure was part of a joint agreement between environmental groups, labor groups, and the utility.

Closing the plant will have a significant effect on the California utility market. The Diablo Canyon plant produces about 8 percent of the state’s electricity. The closure of the plant comes as state regulators are increasingly pressuring utility companies to move away from natural gas generation in favor of a combination of solar and wind power and battery storage.

The Diablo Canyon closure will come at an already difficult time in California’s utility market. An additional order approved on Thursday requires PG&E to change how it supplies power during periods of peak demand. Presently, PG&E purchases power from three natural gas generators when it needs to boost capacity. The CPUC ordered the utility company to solicit bids for energy storage and approved green generation methods, specifying that these resources must be online early enough to ensure that contracts with the gas generators will not be renewed for 2019.

In part, this is an attempt to make use of the recent surge in the supply of solar power in California. The state’s overall generation last fall, the most recent period for which data is available, increased by 9.5 percent over 2016 and much of this increase was the result of more solar panels. California has more installed solar generation capacity than any other state.

Whether this will be enough to push the state to its ambitious carbon reduction goals is another question. As renewable energy skeptics frequently point out, renewable energy sources like solar and wind are inconsistent means of generation. Even though California’s often sunny weather gives solar a boost, the panels do not produce any electricity at night.

In an attempt to mitigate this, California utilities have been building large amounts of energy storage. Last year, state utilities built 332 MW of batteries, up from only 200 megawatts in 2015. This storage capacity comes as renewables jumped from 11 percent of the state’s electricity supply to 25 percent in a decade. Solar power provides about 15 percent of the state’s electricity.

At the same time, the three natural gas generators slated to be closed provide necessary extra capacity for the state. The Metcalf Energy Center, for example, has sufficient capacity to power roughly 454,000 homes, more than exist in San Jose. Under the current plan, this plant would be closed.

Right now, two energy storage facilities are under construction in the state and a third, built with batteries designed and produced by Tesla, is already in operation. All told, the three storage facilities will add 77.5 MW of storage capacity to the grid. These facilities are being used by other California utility companies. PG&E, meanwhile, presented six energy storage contracts totaling 165 megawatts (MW) to the CPUC for its approval in early December. Despite the build up, battery storage capacities are dwarfed by production capacity of the natural gas generating stations they are intended to replace. The Metcalf Energy Center can produce more than 600 MW, meaning that many more of these storage facilities will be required to pick up the slack as the natural gas plants close.

The closing of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant only highlights the engineering challenges of California’s legally mandated transition to green energy and shows how much of this transition rests on the strength of battery technology.

While lithium-ion batteries are undergoing an historic scale-up, researchers are also hard at work looking for what battery technology might come next.

A big battery breakthrough could lead to electric cars that could drive longer on a single charge and are safer to operate. Better batteries for the grid could store more energy, enabling the deployment of more wind and solar.

“There’s a worldwide race for these kinds of concepts,” said Paul Albertus, program director for ARPA-E, the Department of Energy program that focuses on early-stage, potentially big-impact energy research.

Last month, Albertus and his ARPA-E colleague Sue Babinec published an article in Nature Energy that examined the state of research — and the challenges ahead — for the lithium metal battery.

The lithium metal battery, as its name suggests, uses lithium metal for the negative electrode part of the battery. A battery has negative and positive electrodes that shuttle ions back and forth through an electrolyte when charging and discharging.

Graphite is commonly used for the negative electrode in today’s lithium-ion batteries. But by replacing that graphite with lithium metal, a battery cell could store a third more energy.

According to the Nature article, a lithium metal electrode could increase a lithium battery cell’s specific energy by 35 percent and energy density by 50 percent. That could result in a battery cell that could deliver 350 or 400 watt-hours per kilogram, and 1,000 watt-hours per liter.

Current lithium-ion battery packs have specific energy of around 150 watt-hours per kilogram and energy density closer to 250 watt-hours per liter.

The DOE has a goal to find energy storage options for electric-vehicle battery packs at 235 watt-hours per kilogram and 500 watt-hours per liter.

In recent years the ARPA-E program launched an energy storage program called IONICS that doles out grants for early-stage research in areas like the lithium metal electrode. Entities using ARPA-E grants to work on the lithium metal electrode include 24M, Ionic Materials, PolyPlus Battery Company and Iowa State University.

Albertus and Babinec write that the lithium metal electrode, combined with research attempting to make a battery cell’s electrolyte out of solid materials (instead of liquid), could one day lead to a successor to the lithium-ion battery. The solid electrolyte would make the battery less flammable, and safer to operate.

It’s not easy to achieve a battery breakthrough, however. Scientists across the globe have been working since the 1960s on the lithium metal electrode, with research underway at big battery conglomerates, government labs and startups.

The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance last week announced a strategic investment in Ionic Materials with the hope of developing the next generation of EV batteries. Solid-state batteries are the holy grail for EVs because of their high energy density and improved thermal performance. Toyota, Fisker and others are looking to unleash the potential of solid-state batteries too.

There are some small lithium metal batteries that are used in niche applications in the medical industry, but no one has yet been able to scale up the batteries to the point where they can power a car or hold energy for a solar farm and sell them commercially.

In the Nature article, the authors highlight the parameters battery researchers should focus on when working on these types of projects. They also point out methods that would avoid false positives and eliminate what are called “dendrites,” or whisker-like forms of lithium that can grow inside batteries and cause problems.

In particular, Albertus and Babinec found that with the right low-cost parts, lithium metal electrode battery cells could reach a cost of $100 per kilowatt-hour. Keeping the cost low — below that of lithium-ion batteries — would be the key to a new battery successor.

Albertus said that unlike some battery technology that could be just a few years from being widely adopted, such as using silicon for a lithium-ion battery anode, the lithium metal battery could be a decade away.

“You can’t schedule breakthroughs,” Albertus added.