POWER, UNLIMITED POWER: This Inexpensive Battery Could Revolutionize the Clean Energy Industry.

Christopher Wolverton and his team of researchers at Northwestern University, in collaboration with a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, have created a new lithium ion battery that shouldn’t work. For starters, it uses iron, a material that has always failed when used in other batteries. It also uses oxygen in a way scientists used to think would make batteries unusable.

Instead of producing another failing battery, Wolverton and Zhenpeng Yao, a PhD student in Wolverton’s laboratory, used computations to create a new formula that allows it to function. Specifically, they found the right balance of lithium, iron, and oxygen ions that enable the oxygen and iron to cause a chemical reaction that doesn’t result in the oxygen escaping, which would render the battery unstable.

In the end, their battery not only works, but it’s rechargeable, cheaper than traditional lithium-cobalt-oxide batteries — as iron is one of the cheapest elements on the planet, and cheaper than cobalt — and has a much higher energy capacity. It could one day be used in smartphones and electric vehicles, thereby boosting their capabilities. According to Wolverton, their new battery could keep phones powered eight times longer “or your car could drive eight times farther.”

A better way of storing energy is great. But someone, somewhere, somehow still has to produce the energy being stored.