One of the guys - Dr. Alan Heeger - won the 2000 Nobel Prize for the work building up to this so I am not taking this with the usual grain of salt.
From the BioSolar website:
A Breakthrough Super Battery Technology
The Problem
Why can't we use our iPhones for several days without charging, or drive our electric vehicles from Los Angeles to San Francisco without being stranded along the way due to a low battery? The answer comes down to storage capacity and cost.
A battery contains two major parts, a cathode and an anode, that function together as the positive and negative sides. Today's state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery is limited by the storage capacity of its cathode, while the anode can store much more. Additionally, the materials used in batteries are still quite expensive.
The Solution - A Low Cost Super Cathode
Based on our patent-pending supercapacitor technology that uses a novel conductive polymer material, we are developing a high capacity Super Cathode for use by battery manufacturers to create the ultimate high capacity, low cost lithium-ion battery.
Our novel high capacity cathode is engineered from a polymer, similar to that of low-cost plastics used in the household. Through a smart chemical design, we are able to make the polymer hold an enormous amount of electrons. Instead of conventional cathodes that use lithium-ion intercalation chemistry, which is inherently slow, we exploit the fast redox-reaction properties of our polymer to enable rapid charge and discharge.
Most lithium-ion batteries cannot retain more than 80% of its storage capacity after 1,000 charge-discharge cycles. The stable redox chemistry of our cathode material can enable much longer life. Our laboratory experiments have shown that our cathode can easily cycle over 50,000 times without degradation in supercapacitors, and we believe that it can be very effective in batteries as well.
Sounds like they are close to production - something interesting to watch. All of our tech suffers from poor battery performance.
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