Batteries are ubiquitous in 2021 – from sleek, ultra-thin smartphones to electric cars, they are just as important for modern consumer electronics as the silicon chips that run them.

While the pandemic has led to a shortage of the latter, it has also highlighted the increasing importance of the latter. As the world gradually shifts away from fossil fuels towards a fully electrified future, it is expected to rely heavily upon batteries that can store vast amounts of electricity reliably, while being light and eco-friendly.

However, the current battery technology is incapable of achieving that standard. The dominant lithium-ion batteries are heavy, costly to produce, and require mining of rare-earth minerals. They are also very slow to charge and aren’t as efficient or long-lasting as we would want.

Previous research has shown that for electric cars to deliver optimum climate benefit, they need to be made lighter. And the bulk of the weight from current generation electric cars are from their batteries.

For the last few years, as the world saw an explosion in the adoption of consumer electronics, as well increased demand for electrification, several new forms of battery technologies have been developed by various research groups around the world.

The most promising of which have been solid-state batteries that seek to replace liquids used in the current lithium-ion batteries, thereby making them much more efficient, reliable and long-lasting.

Now, researchers at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the University of Maryland in the United States have further given the technology a boost.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, researchers have outlined a new material that they developed for use in solid-state batteries and derived from a surprising source – trees.

The material is a solid ion conductor that is developed by combining cellulose nanofibrils – wood derivative polymer tubes – with copper. According to the researchers, the new material is anywhere between 10 to 100 times better at conductivity compared to other polymer ion conductors.

"By incorporating copper with one-dimensional cellulose nanofibrils, we demonstrated that the normally ion-insulating cellulose offers a speedier lithium-ion transport within the polymer chains," Liangbing Hu, lead author of the paper and a professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Materials Science and Engineering said in a statement. "In fact, we found this ion conductor achieved a record high ionic conductivity among all solid polymer electrolytes."