Skeleton Technologies and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a battery that recharges in just 15 seconds. Now big barriers to EV ownership like slow charging, battery degradation, and range anxiety will be ruled out.
Dubbed as SuperBattery, this breakthrough is going to revolutionize the world of electric vehicles. With SuperBattery one can go through hundreds of thousands of charge-recharge cycles without degrading.
Taavi Madiberk, founder and chief executive of Skeleton, said, “This will be a key enabler of the energy transition,”
“In most cases we see that batteries are not able to fully replace the older technologies — we still have hybrid vehicles or the need for backup generators.”
Madiberk shared that Skeleton has recently signed a €1 billion contract with a well-known automotive company to bring the technology to market by 2023.
SuperBattery: The main game-changer in the SuperBattery is the Skeleton’s patented ‘Curved Graphene carbon material’. This facilitates strong power and a long lifetime of ultracapacitors to be linked with graphene batteries.
SuperBattery is designed to be used in combination with lithium-ion batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.
Madiberk said, “We are not a silver bullet or a complete solution on our own. You won’t have long-range electric vehicles running purely on our technology. But combining a lithium-ion battery with a SuperBattery can reduce charging time, as well as the overall cost and weight of the battery system in the car. We are a building block in developing a much more efficient system.”
“European research in energy storage — especially in Germany — is clearly some of the best in the world,” he adds. “It is just that our ability to commercialize it is not as good. That’s where we come in. Maybe we can change that.”
