The most important advances in materials this year could make cleaner vehicles and renewable electricity more affordable.
The best bet for low-cost electric-car batteries may be Tesla Motors’ “gigafactory,” which the car maker started constructing this summer in Nevada. The factory will use sheer scale to drive down the cost of batteries with fairly conventional lithium-ion chemistry—plans call for its annual production of lithium-ion batteries to match that of all other worldwide producers combined. However, radical changes in battery chemistry—solid-state batteries, and liquid batteries you can recharge in minutes by pumping in new electrode materials—also made encouraging progress this year.
