I used to think I was good at charging stuff. My phone, for instance, almost never dies because I charge it wirelessly overnight, and then, if it’s running low in the afternoon, I blast it with juice from a fast charger. But my battery’s maximum capacity recently dropped into the 80 percent range, and I know it will only be a matter of time before I have to get a new battery — or a new phone if I’m feeling gullible.

The lithium-ion batteries that power our phones, laptops, and even cars are inherently imperfect and destined to degrade over time. Almost everything we do makes this happen faster. That wireless charger I use overnight creates excess heat, which speeds up battery degradation. Ditto for fast charging.

That means charging your phone correctly is practically impossible.

While certain tips and tricks can speed up the process and extend your phone battery’s life, there’s nothing you can do about the limitations of the lithium-ion batteries in your devices. They all eventually stop holding a charge, which means they constantly need replacing. Lithium-ion batteries, especially the cheap ones, can also explode without warning.

There is, however, new hope for a breakthrough in battery technology.

A Boston-based startup called Pure Lithium recently announced a breakthrough with its lithium metal batteries. While the lithium-ion batteries in your phone start to degrade significantly after a few hundred cycles of charging and discharging, these lithium metal batteries, which use pure lithium rather than a lithium compound, can last over 2,000 cycles without significant damage degradation, an ongoing test shows. Plus, the lithium metal batteries can store twice as much energy and weigh half as much as conventional lithium-ion batteries. Pure Lithium cofounder and CEO Emilie Bodoin calls this combination of features “the holy grail of energy storage.”

“We have to have a step change, because there have been many inventions in the battery space over the last 20 years,” Bodoin told me. “[But] you cannot feel it in your phone or your device.”

That said, you cannot currently buy an iPhone with a lithium metal battery in it. Lithium metal batteries, along with the rest of the battery technologies that stand to replace lithium-ion, are still in development.

And so even though lithium-ion batteries are imperfect, they will continue to be ubiquitous for decades. The supply chain needed to build lithium-ion batteries, especially EV batteries, is highly reliant on China, but it can also scale up in a way that experimental battery technology cannot. Global demand for lithium-ion batteries reached 700 gigawatt hours in 2022 and,........

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