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Lithium ion battery company Leyden Energy said today it has raised $20 million to ramp up production of its long-lasting batteries for consumer electronics.

The 4-year-old company said the funding, led by venture capital company New Enterprise Associations, will be used to add manufacturing capacity and build out its sales channels.

Leyden Energy's batteries last week become available from online retailer Dr. Battery, which is offering "Advanced Pro" battery replacements for Acer, Gateway, Lenovo/IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba notebooks.

A conventional battery has between 350 and 400 charge cycles before performance starts degrading. The Leyden Energy … Read more

Like the idea of a fully transparent cell phone, e-reader, or other device?

Stanford University graduate student Yuan Yang has come up with a way to make a see-through lithium ion battery, and it could pave the way for completely see-through flexible electronics (some partially transparent gadgets already exist). Developed in conjunction with Yi Cui, a professor of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the battery would cost nearly the same as a regular battery if produced on a mass scale, the creators say.

So how does one make a see-through power source? According to Stanford News, "Yang and Cui devised a mesh-like framework for the battery electrodes, with each 'line' in the grid being approximately 35 microns wide. Light passes through the transparent gaps between the gridlines; because the individual lines are so thin, the entire meshwork area appears transparent." … Read more

To make a cheap battery that stores wind and solar power, Aquion Energy is using the ingredients in salt and water.

A spinoff out of Carnegie Mellon, the start-up has raised $20 million of a planned $30 million funding round, according to a regulatory filing spotted by Earth2Tech. The company was originally funded with $5 million from the federal stimulus program by the Department of Energy and has added Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an investor.

Aquion Energy is developing a room-temperature sodium ion battery as an alternative to lithium ion and other batteries for grid storage. It expects … Read more

Sony has come under investigation as part of a wider probe by the U.S. Department of Justice into the competitive practices of the rechargeable-battery industry, the company revealed in a financial filing today.

Sony Electronics was first contacted in May with a subpoena from the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. A company spokesman told Bloomberg Sony is cooperating with the probe.

"Sony understands that the DOJ is investigating competition in the secondary batteries market. Based on the stage of the proceeding, it is not possible to estimate the amount of loss or range of possible loss, if any, … Read more

Start-up Leyden Energy on Monday is expected to announce a distribution deal for laptop battery cells that improve the life of typical lithium ion batteries.

The Fremont, Calif.-based company will supply cells for replacement batteries to Canadian distributor Dr. Battery, said CEO Aakar Patel last week. The batteries will have a three-year warranty and maintain 80 percent of their capacity after three years, he said.

The 4-year old, venture capital-backed company has not come up with a new type of lithium ion chemistry, but has commercialized an electrolyte technology which Leyden Energy licensed from DuPont, Patel said.

"With … Read more

Toyota and Microsoft head for the clouds, 2010 the safest year ever on U.S. roads--the technologies behind that, what Lexus has up its green sleeve in New York, and we hit the road in the 2011 Chevy Volt.

• 2011 Chevy Volt review and video

• Microsoft and Toyota team on telematics

• New way to monitor where all the bad accidents are

• Largest automotive lithium ion battery plant completed

• CNET's LOLCars gallery!

When a lithium ion battery reaches the point at which it can no longer be used in an electric car, it still has the potential to be used in other applications. But exactly what are the best uses for them?

The U.S. government is backing a comprehensive study to determine just that, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced Tuesday.

"To date, no one has comprehensively studied the feasibility, durability, and value of Li-ion batteries for second-use applications," NREL said in a statement.

The California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE) will lead the research project which will … Read more

Flash memory chips and batteries, major components in the iPad 2, appear to face different fates, owing to the location of the manufacturing facilities in different parts of Japan.

Clarity is hard to come by in Japan, especially in the earthquake-stricken areas. But the impact of the continuing crisis on two major technologies used in Apple's latest tablet is pretty clear.

While Toshiba's manufacturing production of flash memory continues to recover, lithium-ion battery production is not faring so well, as it was much closer to ground zero.

Flash memory/Toshiba: The world's largest supplier of flash memory--and … Read more

It's now becoming increasingly clear that the global supply chain for electronics is going to be far more affected by the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear crisis still unfolding in Japan than previously thought.

Take for example the attention today on lithium ion batteries used in notebook PCs. Demand right now is not terribly high--it's a time of the year when consumers are buying fewer PCs--but consider what happens if the crisis persists. As Taiwan's Digitimes observes, a good bit of the world's production ecosystem for lithium ion batteries used in notebooks are not only located in Japan, but many … Read more