A company called ZPower designed new silver-zinc based batteries which are claimed to last 40% longer per charge than current lithium-ion batteries. Whether their claim can be justified can be tested in 2009. ZPower promised to introduce a new laptop then.
Currently the beach town of Nice in France is under the spell of Batteries 2008, an exhibition focused on power supply. ZPower's CEO, Ross Dueber, will discuss the technology in Nice as we speak (write).
Silver-zinc batteries were used by NASA's Apollo spacecraft in the sixties and seventies, explains Physorg.com. For years the technology stopped working after being recharged only a few times. Dueber is expected to explain the technology's improvements.
Of course we can expect that silver-zinc batteries will have a longer lifetime in the 21st century. "The biggest advantage is the batteries' longer lifetime," writes Lise Zyga, editor at Physorg.com.
Besides having a longer life due to special polymers, silver-zinc batteries are also safer than lithium-ion batteries. Silver-zinc batteries are water-based and therefore shouldn't burst into flames when heated.
If all the above is true we can be even more happy with the fact that silver-zinc batteries are very easy to recycle. A real downside though is that silver-zinc batteries aren't interchangeable with the lithium-ion ones. This means that manufacturers will have to adjust to the new format. Will they do this?
