Silver zinc batteries to rely on recycling to be cost-competitive

The ideal battery for mass-produced products needs to meet several criteria – it has to offer fairly dense energy storage, it needs to be made of cheap materials, it should be gentle on the environment, and it should be safe. As a baseline, lithium ion, the current darling of the battery world, has an energy storage density of about 130 Wh/kg, its indgredients lithium, cobalt, and manganese are moderately cheap, and it requires some care in recycling. It ranks about dead last in the flammability category.

ZPower, which is developing a battery for the consumer market with a silver-zinc chemistry, was demo-ing a prototype version powering a laptop at the recent Intel Developers Forum in the All-Day Computing section. The company claims its batteries will have an energy density of 200 Wh/kg and be completely un-flammable, with no nasty ingredients to end up in landfills. But silver has got to be one of the most expensive battery ingredients going. How can the company offer these at only a 20% or so premium over lithium ion? Dr. Ross Dueber, president of ZPower, says that the company will establish a trade-in policy for its batteries, and effectively recycle all of the silver. Sounds feasible – after all, the automotive industry has successfully implemented lead-acid battery recycling that reclaims over 95% of the lead in every battery.

And speaking of car batteries: Where does Dueber see silver zinc participating in the electric vehicle market, which lithium ion currently dominates all the speculation? He sees silver zinc gaining acceptance in the consumer battery market, and then taking on lithium ion in electric vehicles, where silver zinc’s energy density and non-flammable nature are strong advantages.