Dyson of vacuum cleaner fame is making a significant investment in the small Michigan company Sakti, which is developing a solid-state lithium battery that they say could eventually store usable energy at $100 per kWh vs $500 per kWh for current lithium-ion batteries. Energy density is also said to be double that of current li-ion. (Haven’t seen any numbers for the power density, i.e. kW per kg.)

• Dyson powers $20M investment into solid-state battery company Sakti3 – VentureBeat
• In Battery Revolution, a Clean Leap Forward: Vacuum maker Dyson is investing in Sakti3’s energy technology – WSJ
• Secretive Company Claims Battery Breakthrough: The Michigan start-up Sakti3 says its solid-state cells more than double the energy density of today’s best Li-Ion batteries – Scientific American
• Will this battery change everything? – Fortune

Of course, as the articles indicate, there have been lots of claims over the past several years of big advances in batteries in laboratories that were not validated in real world conditions. Dyson, though, is quite a serious R&D outfit and I expect they have done their due diligence to determine if this company has a better chance than the others to fulfill its ambitious claims.

Here is a TEDx talk from last fall by Ann Marie Sastry, co-founder and CEO of the Sakti and  Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan: