How fast is lithium ion battery technology improving each year in terms of power density, costs, recharge cycles, etc.?

Any kind of battery needs to be able to store ions and electrons. Ions that freely flow inside the battery, and a gate that stops electrons flowing in between cathode and anode. 1. Why are lithium batteries the most common today? A battery requires space and weight to hold a charge. The less dense the the material, the more area it will take to hold the same charge, as  well as vice versa. The key to a good battery, would then be a material that individually as a molecule, relatively light, but one that can be tightly compacted together to reduce volume. To put the volume/weight perspective into a picture yields this (Copied from Wikipedia under GNU Free Documentation License): Notice how Lead Acid is at the bottom left and Lithium types at the upper right. The reason for this is because Lead Acid molecules are heavy, whereas lithium battery molecules to be relatively light. The graph shows two things: 1. For the same weight, Lithium based batteries hold more charge. 2. For the same volume, Lithium based batteries hold more charge. Thus: In almost every case where weight and volume matter, Lithium based batteries are more economical. Why? Because electronic devices that need batteries tend to be devices that are used while being transported. If the electrical device does not need to be used while transported, it would make more sense to use a wall outlet instead of a battery. Home appliances? Wall outlet. Laptop, cellphone, airplane, submarine? Batteries. Practically every example of electronics in motion requires some consideration of weight and size, making lithium batteries the ideal candidate. 2. Why is it difficult to move away from lithium batteries? Lithium comes in as the third lightest material element in chemistry. Under normal conditions it is the lightest metal. This explains why #1 is true. Combine this with pleasant electrical properties such as no "memory effect", relatively slow drain after charge, and relative maturity of the manufacturing technology, lithium would be very difficult to replace in the relatively short amount of time of a few years. Until we can economically miniaturize more complex energy solutions such as fuel cells or reactors, chances are we will be sticking with lithium batteries to come for a while.

has provided an excellent answer for why we haven't replaced lithium ion batteries so far, let me extend that by explaining why we won't be replacing them anytime soon either.1. Battery technology takes a long time to commercializeBelieve it or not, a revolution in lithium ion batteries is in its final stages now. The use of polymer electrolytes was a dramatic innovation in lithium ion batteries that has enabled the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and ultrabooks. A quick trip through one history of polymer electrolytes (there is a parallel but hard to research second history within the major Japanese conglomerates) will illustrate the timescales for battery commercialization.Polymer electrolytes offer many advantages over liquid electrolytes in Lithium ion batteries. Polymer electrolyte batteries are safer, they are more chemically and mechanically stable, and they allow cells to be made in wider a variety of shapes. Polymer electrolytes allow the Macbook Air's battery to be the shape of its body and prevent an iPhone from catching fire when you drop it.Polymer electrolytes for lithium ion conduction were first considered (often with batteries in mind) in the 1970s and 1980s. The major breakthrough came in the early 1990s when Jean-Marie Tarascon's group at Bellcore (spun off form Bell Labs during the breakup of AT&T and later renamed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telcordia_Technologies and bought by Ericsson) developed a polymer electrolyte made of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinylidene_fluoride (PVDF), 12% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexafluoropropylene (HFP), and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dibutyl_phthalate (DBP, a common commercial plasticizer). When impregnated with some inorganic filler particles and swelled into a gel using a standard liquid electrolyte for lithium, this concoction turned out to display all the properties required of a good polymer electrolyte. Critically, it also used inexpensive, standard chemicals and appeared to be easy to manufacture.When Bellcore's electrolyte made its debut in 1994, licenses were snapped up by major manufacturers. Then, nothing happened. Different theories have been presented as to why commercialization stalled. As far as I can figure out, a few unexpected challenges in scaling up manufacturing and the inertia of the leading lithium ion battery companies were the primary drivers of delays. Although there were a few attempts to introduce Li polymer batteries in consumer electronics (including the visionary but hilariously ill-fated http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/01/mitsubishi-pedi/ ), it was not until Apple adopted lithium polymer batteries in 2009, (http://seekingalpha.com/article/113727-apple-skips-zinc-in-new-notebook-batteries, http://www.apple.com/batteries/) more than 15 years after their invention, that they began to truly take off.2. There's still a lot of room to improve lithium ion battery performanceThere's not a lot of visibility into what performance-improving initiatives the big lithium ion battery manufacturers are pursuing, but the lithium-ion startup scene gives a good sense of what's possible.Anodes:The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anode of lithium ion batteries is typically made of carbon. Carbon anodes are ok, but silicon and silicon-carbon composite anodes can charge faster and hold more energy per mass and volume. The only problem is that the incredible volume expansion silicon undergoes when filled with lithium during charging leads to cracking which in turn makes battery cycle lives impractically short. http://www.clbattery.com/, Envia http://enviasystems.com/, http://www.leydenenergy.com/, Sinode http://sinodesystems.com/, Amprius http://www.amprius.com/, http://www.sakti3.com/, Nexeon http://www.nexeon.co.uk, and many more startups all are trying to crack this.Lithium metal anodes are even better than silicon anodes, but in addition to their own cycle life problems (due to dendrite formation), they present a serious safety/fire hazard due to their reactivity. Seeo http://seeo.com/, Solid Energy Systems http://solidenergysystems.com/, and some of the startups mentioned above are all working on solid-polymer electrolytes (as opposed to the gels I discussed above) to enable the use of lithium metal with a standard Cathode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode.Cathodes:Cathodes of lithium ion batteries are typically made of a lithium-bearing oxide such as lithium cobalt oxide or lithium manganese oxide. A123's core technology was a nanostructured lithium iron phosphate cathode optimized for high power and safety (and thus ideal for automotive applications). The cathode is currently the part of lithium ion batteries that most limits energy density on both a weight and volume basis. There are two potential holy grails here: Lithium air and lithium sulfur.Lithium-air batteries (with a lithium metal anode) have long been seen as the obvious end stage of lithium ion battery technology. Using oxygen from the air as the cathode eliminates a large portion of a battery's mass and volume. This has precedent in the primary (non-rechargeable) Zn:air batteries commonly found in hearing aids. As with advanced anodes, safety and cycle life are important problems but optimizing the air cathode has also proven to be quite challenging. Despite massive amounts of (largely secret) work by major battery manufacturers, car companies, large commercial research centers (IBM's effort is especially notable http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=3203), and at least one startup (http://www.liox.com/) many technical roadblocks seem to remain. This is one of those technologies that could have a big breakthrough tomorrow or never.By contrast, meaningful and visible progress has been made toward commercializing lithium sulfur batteries (also with a lithium metal anode). Although not quite as energy dense as lithium-air, they are still worlds better on that front than standard lithium-ion cells. In addition to energy density, a key advantage of using sulfur is that, by a chemical coincidence, sulfur passivates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivation_(chemistry)) lithium metal so that it becomes stable (at least kinetically) in air. As a result, lithium-sulfur batteries could be as safe or safer than ordinary lithium-ion batteries. While they eliminate dendrites as a cause of cycle-life degredation, lithium-sulfur batteries have their own source of cycle life troubles. When lithium-sulfur batteries operate, they generate polysulfides which dissolve in the electrolyte and become inactive. This process removes active sulfur and lithium from the battery which leads to instability and short cycle life. Polyplus http://www.polyplus.com/, Oxis http://www.oxisenergy.com/, and Sion http://www.sionpower.com/ are all relatively well-funded startups attacking the polysulfide problem.To summarize, lithium ion batteries or their close cousins are likely to be our main consumer electronics batteries for the foreseeable future. Rechargeable zinc-air or magnesium-ion batteries may pose a threat, but if they succeed they will bear a close resemblance to the lithium ion batteries they replace.

I don't know a lot about this field, but this certainly counts as a "major improvement": http://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0321batteries_PaulBraun.html Having said that, as the other answers are pointing out, we've definitely hit a wall in terms of power density that conventional chemical batteries can provide. The other things you're comparing to (memory speeds, storage density, etc.) just don't have the same fundamental limitations.

I think the answer was present in the question itself. Moving from one wonder material to another. For semiconductors, people invented High K metal gates, strained materials to increase mobility, better chemicals for lithography etc etc. Make no mistake though, the price of manufacturing as such has gone up because of these, its the volume that keeps this business profitable. For batteries, it has not happened. Lithium ion and such foams are the last thing we know in terms a major evolution in battery tech. materials.

Very slowly, and jumpy... in short, the way most specific technologies advance. You get a big jump in capacity when there's money to spend or when someone realizes a big breakthrough. Cost is largely a function of volume... one of the reasons that Tesla is using Lithium batteries in their home power unit, where energy density is less of an issue than cost, is because they're leveraging that to drive up volumes on their batteries. This isn't unique to Li-ion. The same slow improvements have taken place over the course of the life of the NiMh cell as well. It's only when a new technology gets to market, in most cases, that you see a big overall jump in many factors, like the jump from NiCAD to NiMh or NiMh to Li-ion. But money can play a part. General Motors design for the Chevy Volt, which is really an "extended-range electric", not a hybrid, called for a battery that could be longer cycled than the typical 60% capacity of a hybrid cell (it never goes to empty, it never goes to full, and that keeps the battery lasting indefinitely). So they pushed vendors hard, and wound up with a cell that benchmarks at 5,000 charge/discharge cycles, versus the usual 300-500 of your typical laptop or cellphone battery. It's also the case that many of these things are known but not yet practical. The Li-ion cell was in various stages of experimentation for nearly 30 years before the first practical cells shipped. And it's only recently they've had the surge current capacity to be useful in EVs. That's progress, but often progress in directions that the average consumer doesn't appreciate -- because that's where the funding is.

Currently, one of the biggest problems of lithium-ion batteries is that they can’t be charged very quickly. By replacing the graphite anode with NTU’s titanium dioxide gel, the researchers say they've created LIBs that can be recharged to 70% capacity in just two minutes. Furthermore, because the new gel is much more resistant to micro fracturing and dendrite formation, the new batteries have extreme endurance of over 10,000 charge/discharge cycles — about 20 times more than current LIBs. In real-world terms, this new lithium anode could triple or quadruple the battery life of your smartphone or electric vehicle — or, alternatively, make it so you can get away with a much smaller battery. For EVs, where the cost of the batteries is a major barrier to mass-market pricing and adoption, this could be a very serious breakthrough. Stay updated on  https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Your-next-smartphone-EV-will-6787510.S.5928047614162386945?trk=groups_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=.nmp_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1.gmp_6787510

From what I remember, it's because we've hit the limit on how much charge can be chemically stored in our current batteries. Sure, there's developments to eke out an extra percent or two here and there with our current technologies, but the vast majority of what we can do with existing technology has been uncovered already. And new technologies are either years/decades off from being developed (http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/11/batteries-energy-kung.html is quite a fascinating read, although is from 2011) or the new technology is closer to science fiction than actual existence (such as fuel cells or forms of nuclear fusion that can be described as tiny and portable).