First Quantum Battery Prototype Marks Big Step for Technology Expected to Change the World

The prototype quantum battery – credit, CSIRO

Australian researchers have developed and tested the world’s first quantum battery.

Their prototype is far from anything that will be a perspective power source in an EV or storage facility, but the experiment revealed some important directions for future research.

A theoretical concept since 2013, the prototype was charged wirelessly with a laser, one of the special properties that quantum mechanics in battery technology promises if it can be properly understood and harnessed.

Lead researcher Dr. James Quach of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency which led the study on the device, said it’s the first quantum battery ever made that performs a full charge-discharge cycle.

Dr. Quach explained that in society today, the larger the battery, the longer the charge time.

“That’s why your mobile phone takes about 30 minutes to charge and your electric car takes overnight to charge,” he said, adding that in contrast, “quantum batteries have this really peculiar property where the larger they are, the less time they take to charge.”

Less time really is an almost worthless descriptor in this case, because the prototype created by CSIRO was fully charged within a few quadrillionths of a second.

The problem is that the discharge rate was a few nanoseconds, which despite being 6 orders of magnitude longer, could be of no use to anyone now. Quach provided some interesting relative comparisons to help mere mortals conceptualize why this could be a world-changing innovation if improved.

If it takes 30 minutes to fully charge a mobile phone, and it too had a discharge rate equal to 6 orders of magnitude, that means it wouldn’t need to be recharged even after a decade of use.

“What we need to do next is… to increase the storage time,” Quach said, touching on this point. “You want your battery to hold charge longer than a few nanoseconds if you want to be able to talk to someone on a mobile phone.”

Additionally, the prototype doesn’t hold enough voltage to power anything substantial.

While this might all sound rather pointless, another, non-involved expert in the development of quantum batteries, University of Queensland Professor Andrew White, told the Guardian that the experiment was a huge success in getting the technology off the drawing board and into the real world for the first time.People would be far more likely to adopt EVs if they could be fully-charged in few seconds, even if their range was severely reduced. First Quantum Battery Prototype Marks Big Step for Technology Expected to Change the World

Read More........→April 01, 2026

Scientists Were Wrong About How Fast Solar Panels Degrade – They May Last Twice as Long

A solar park in Brandenburg, where the study took place – credit, A Savin FAL License

A huge scientific survey of over 1 million German solar installations has revealed a surprising statistic: their potential to degrade year by year has been significantly exaggerated.

Previous models have overestimated the rate of degradation in a solar installation’s ability to generate power by between 20% to 50% according to this new survey.

“Back of the envelope,” the authors admit, “the estimated cost of degradation would decrease, compared to previous findings, by about €638 million per year to maintain installed capacity in 2040.”

Germany has been steaming forward with green energy installation for 20 years. Having decommissioned many of its coal power plants, and controversially eliminated its entire nuclear fleet as well, the country has installed some 60 gigawatts just of solar capacity since 2006.

A common criticism of solar is that photovoltaic panels—like all electrical hardware—lose efficiency over time, and, being exposed to the elements 365 days a year, frost, heat, wind, and dust beat them down such that the power you expected to receive when you built the solar installation isn’t what you are receiving a decade after.

The survey, conducted by scientists from Brandenburg University of Technology alongside a collaborator from University College London, involved around 1.25 million large and small solar installations across Germany, totaling 34 gigawatts of capacity. At 16 years, the study period was longer than any other examination, while the study period accounted for newer generations of solar panels.

The authors found annual degradation rates of 0.52–0.61%, roughly half the average reported in prior studies, which also had limitations of smaller sample sizes (the largest other survey of this kind was with 4,200 installations) and shorter study durations averaging between 2 and 7 years.

Other key findings support the value of large-scale solar installations. Degradation rates slow as the PV panels age. In other words, new PV panels lose capacity faster than older ones. Additionally, larger installations like solar farms degrade slower than smaller ones like rooftop arrays.

“That is important because it suggests that utility-scale PV cannot simply be treated as a scaled-up version of rooftop solar,” said lead author Peitro Melo, speaking with PV Magazine. “Reliability and maintenance strategies have a measurably different impact on outcomes.”

Frost, extreme heat, and air pollution affect PV panels differently at different stages of their lifespan. Extreme heat tends to reduce the efficiency of older panels more than newer ones, even though for frost and air pollution, it’s the opposite.

“This is a positive result for the solar industry, from households who have bought systems up to investors in megaprojects. Lower degradation means greater output and revenue over a project’s lifetime.”

Another way to summarize the team’s findings is that this new and more accurately-estimated degradation rate for PV systems translates to a 4.8% reduction in the levelized cost of electricity from solar panels. This means that, in order to maintain nameplate power production across the entire German fleet, 2.3 gigawatts of PV panels would have to be installed every year, while under previous assumptions, replacement rates have reached as high as 4.5 gigawatts. Scientists Were Wrong About How Fast Solar Panels Degrade – They May Last Twice as Long

Read More........→March 31, 2026