Battery Manufacturer
Appears in 5 stories
World's largest battery maker; already mass-producing sodium-ion cells
Every rechargeable battery in every electric car on the road carries the same vulnerability: if something goes wrong inside a cell — a puncture, a manufacturing defect, a short circuit — temperatures can spike and trigger a self-feeding chain reaction called thermal runaway, producing toxic smoke, fire, and sometimes explosions. A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has now published results in Nature Energy showing a sodium-ion battery with a built-in chemical failsafe: an electrolyte that automatically solidifies into a physical barrier when the cell heats past 150 degrees Celsius, cutting off the chain reaction before it starts. The battery survived both nail-puncture and 300-degree-Celsius oven tests with zero smoke, fire, or explosion — a first for a large-format sodium-ion cell.
Updated 5 days ago
World's largest battery maker; pursuing its own next-generation battery technologies
The best commercial lithium batteries today store about 250 to 300 watt-hours per kilogram. A team from Nankai University and the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology — the institution that builds China's rockets and space station modules — has published results in Nature showing a new fluorinated hydrocarbon electrolyte that pushes lithium metal batteries to 700 Wh/kg at room temperature and nearly 400 Wh/kg at minus 50 degrees Celsius.
Updated Mar 23
Partnering with Quinbrook on eight-hour duration storage
When Tesla built a 100-megawatt battery in South Australia in 2017, it was the world's largest. Eight years later, Australia has become the third-largest grid battery market globally, adding 8.6 gigawatt-hours of storage in 2025 alone—a tripling from the previous year. The country now has nearly 100 grid-forming battery projects in its development pipeline.
Updated Feb 17
Launching mass production of sodium-ion batteries in 2026
MIT Technology Review dropped its 25th annual list of breakthrough technologies on January 12, 2026—250 predictions over a quarter century. This year's ten picks span sodium-ion batteries poised to power the next generation of cheap EVs, generative AI that's rewriting how software gets built, and personalized CRISPR treatments custom-made for individual babies. The list includes embryo screening for intelligence that's reigniting eugenics debates and hyperscale data centers devouring city-sized power loads to train AI models.
Updated Jan 12
World's largest EV battery manufacturer
On December 29, researchers from the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory published findings in Nature Nanotechnology that flip battery science on its head. Single-crystal lithium-ion batteries—designed specifically to avoid the grain-boundary cracking that plagued older batteries—are failing anyway. But they're cracking for the exact opposite reason scientists expected.
Updated Dec 30, 2025
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