The professor is a pioneer of the batteries.
The Model Y electric cars are at the new plant.
Photo by Sean Gallup.
Jeff Dahn wants to create a battery that will last a lifetime. He wants you to be able to drive a million miles in your electric car before your battery dies.
Is it possible? Maybe not. The Canada Council of the Arts gives a $100,000 grant annually to five researchers who have actively devoted their careers to pushing the boundaries of knowledge and finding solutions to the issues we face every day.
Dahn's research group, which is sponsored exclusively byTesla Inc. and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, received an award.
He said in an interview that they think the batteries can last for a century. Time is the problem. Dahn said that it would take a century to prove that the battery can last a century.
Jeff Dahn is an engineer at Dalhouse University.
The photo was taken by the university.
This battery wouldn't allow you to go a million miles without stopping. If you were to use the battery cell Dahn presented with his team in October 2020, it would be able to handle 10,000 charging cycles, which would correspond to over five million kilometres. Many electric vehicles have batteries that can only handle 800 cycles.
The battery of your electric car would probably last a million miles, so you would need to put it in another car, and then another, but the battery would still be viable for decades.
Dahn is one of the pioneers of the batteries that are used in everyday devices such as laptops, cars, and cellphones. He doesn't want to take full credit.
Dahn said that the effort involved scientists, engineers, manufacturing specialists all over the world.
He believes that long-lifetime batteries are cutting edge.
There are no other groups in the world that work on developing long, decades or longer cells. We are not like that. We are trying to make a difference and do something useful.
Commercial vehicles, such as taxis and long-haul trucks, will need a long-lifetime battery as most rich countries are on track to phase out internal combustion engines within a couple of decades. Musk wants to see these batteries power a fleet of self-driving taxis.
We’re trying to really make a difference and do something useful
Jeff Dahn
Dahn thinks electric vehicles are the future. He's on the waiting list for three electric cars, so he'll take whichever becomes available first. Dahn said to try it.
According to the federal government, gasoline-powered vehicles will no longer be available for purchase by the year 2035. The federal and Ontario governments just announced that Windsor will be home to Canada.
Dahn said that half of the plant's output could power the entire province of Nova Scotia. The energy is earmarked for cars, not households.
Dahn said that the batteries are going into vehicles. Every giga factory around the world that is making batteries is talking about their output.
Dahn sees these batteries as a way to solve the energy crisis and mitigate the effects of climate change. He said that you have to use the cars. They are in the cars.
In Dahn's vision of the future, electric cars double as renewable energy storage devices. Electric cars of the future will have million-mile batteries and plenty of unused energy. Excess energy can be diverted back into the grid when the car is not in use. Cars could be a valuable source of energy.
Dahn is excited about the process called Vehicle-to-Grid. The batteries need to be very powerful in order for this to work. He wants to finalize a battery that can last several thousand charging cycles.
Dahn said that V2G will require buy-in from energy companies, car manufacturers, and governments. It will require smart technology and vehicle-grid integration in order to push and pull electricity between the cars and the electric grid. They will need to have software that will communicate with the grid to direct the energy where it is needed.
Dahn said it would take less than 50 years to implement this, otherwise we will be so hot on the planet.
Dahn said that he has seen a lot of promising research on batteries that can be used for energy storage, such as iron batteries, which can be used to store large quantities of renewable energy.
We need them all. We need them all because it is a war. Everyone needs to come to the table to win this war.
Email: mcoulton@postmedia.com
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