Sure, we love a good lithium ion battery, but there's other kinds on the horizon.

The technology advancement for all these new battery chemistries are extremely exciting.

In the next three to five years, we could expect some very, very exciting new solid state

battery technologies coming online.

It's Wednesday, July 31st, and this is Science Friday.

I'm Scifry producer Charles Burgquist.

To meet green energy goals, experts argue

that a crucial component will be batteries that store energy

from renewable sources.

For that to happen, we'll need a lot more batteries, and the current most popular kind,

the lithium ion batteries you probably have in your laptop or cell phone,

not a great candidate for that kind of scale up. Here's Ira Flato to talk about advances in battery technology.

Solid state batteries. in battery could offer some solutions here.

That technology is still in development,

but new research from teams at the University of Chicago and UC San Diego details the first

of its kind solid state battery architecture that trades out the rare and problematic lithium for the much more abundant sodium.

You know, kind of stuff that's in salt.

Their results were published in Nature Energy and here to tell us some more about the advancement is my guest

Dr. Shirling Monk professor of molecular engineering at U Chicago and chief

scientist for Energy Storage Science at Argonne National Laboratory, and she was an author on that paper.

Dr. Monk, welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, Ira, glad to be here.

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