New company Boston-Power on cutting edge of U.S. battery technology

Articles — By forcechange on December 16, 2008 12:47 pm

With the generally sad state of American battery technology being a hot topic lately, it was good to read a post at Green Inc. about the first American based company to have their batteries sold inside a top tier laptop computer:

The battery company Boston-Power has existed for just three years, but last week Hewlett-Packard – one of the largest technology companies in the world – said it will offer the startup’s earth-friendly lithium-ion batteries in notebook computers in early 2009.

This is the first time a battery company based in the United States has ever sold a battery to a top provider of notebooks, according to Christina Lampe-Önnerud, Boston-Power’s founder and chief executive officer.

Boston-Power says their “Sonata” batteries can operate at 80 percent of original charge capacity for three years of typical use. Existing lithium-ion batteries will typically lose half their charge capacity after just one year, and will be all but dead after three.

In addition to better performance, Boston-Power is also promoting the batteries for their greenness. Their main advantage in that regard is fairly straightforward: batteries that last longer mean less waste and fewer resources expended to make new batteries.

“The biggest green claim that we make, and frankly, the aspect we’re the most proud of, is you need one battery for three years, not three or five or ten batteries,” Ms. Lampe-Önnerud said. Boston-Power’s founder and chief executive officer

Although it is great news that an American company is developing cutting edge battery technology, the manufacturing of the batteries, themselves, is still being done in Taiwan and China.  Nonetheless, it is a big step forward to have domestic companies on the front lines of the next great technology leap.

“Looking toward the future, Boston-Power hopes to expand well beyond laptop batteries. It opened a new lab dedicated to developing batteries for electric cars and other large format systems in October.”