By Futurist Thomas Frey
Your smartphone charges fully in 30 seconds. Your electric car goes 2,000 miles on a single charge that takes three minutes. Your home battery powers your entire house for a week from a unit the size of a shoebox. Power tools run for months without recharging. Medical devices operate for years without battery replacement.
This isn’t wishful thinking about incremental lithium-ion improvements. This is the quantum battery revolution—and it’s coming by 2040.
Quantum batteries leverage quantum mechanical effects to store and release energy in ways that classical physics says shouldn’t be possible. They represent a fundamental leap beyond lithium-ion technology the way lithium-ion represented a leap beyond lead-acid batteries. And according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s forecast on emerging technologies, we’re on track to have “materials with previously unobtainable properties” enabling transformative applications by 2040.
Energy storage has been the bottleneck holding back everything from renewable energy grids to electric aviation to portable electronics. Quantum batteries remove that bottleneck—and in doing so, they enable futures we currently consider impossible.
Continue reading… “Quantum Batteries: The Energy Storage Revolution Coming by 2040”