What would the world look like if batteries could last forever? A research team led by Jeff Dahn, a core advisor at Tesla and a professor at Dalhousie University, recently published a paper announcing a groundbreaking discovery: under specific conditions, ordinary lithium-ion batteries can support electric vehicles to travel 7 million miles, or be used in typical household scenarios for 500 years.

This study focuses on the Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt (NMC) ternary material system. Currently, global electric vehicles and AI data centers tend to use low-cost and more stable lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. However, as a co-inventor of NMC technology, Dahn pointed out through eight years of testing data that NMC batteries actually have the potential to exceed LFP in cycle life, provided they are treated "gently."

Research shows that to make batteries almost degrade, only a few simple principles need to be followed:

  • Temperature control: Maintain operating temperature below about 26.7 degrees Celsius using a cooling system.

  • Shallow charging and discharging: Keep daily charge levels around 70%, and only fully charge for long trips.

  • Slow charging: Avoid high-power fast charging, and it is recommended to control the time for a full charge to about 3 hours.

A Blessing for AI Data Centers' "Second Life"

This discovery holds significant meaning for the AI industry, where computing power demand is exploding. With the surge in energy consumption of AI data centers, the demand for long-cycle, highly reliable backup power is becoming increasingly urgent.

According to the concept, these "long-life batteries" can be disassembled and assembled into large-scale energy storage containers after completing their service life in electric vehicles (at which point their capacity may still be over 80%), providing stable power support for data centers for several decades.

Previously, car owners were generally worried that frequent participation in grid scheduling (selling vehicle power back to the grid) would damage expensive batteries. However, Dahn's research results provided reassurance: even if charged and discharged daily with the grid, battery capacity degradation is almost negligible.