Could Your Next Battery Be Made of… Cement?
Maybe not your car battery, but your home battery could, and that could charge your car.By Mark VaughnPublished: Oct 06, 2025 9:37 AM EDT
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Scientists at MIT have made an efficient battery out of cement, one that could form the foundation of your house and be used to charge your electric car.
- They took the existing cement battery and made it 10 times more efficient.
- So many structures are made of cement, it makes sense to use the cement to store electricity. No cost estimates were given.
Four scientists at MIT have come up with a new battery made of cement. Obviously, a cement battery is not going into your car. But you could have a cement battery at home, use it to store solar energy from the solar panels on your roof when you’re away at work, then plug it into your car to recharge that when you get home.
So this is kind of car-related.
Yes, you say, Dr. Emma Zhang and Professor Luping Tang at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden invented the cement battery five years ago. True, but the MIT guys figured out a way to increase the storage capacity of cement batteries “by an order of magnitude.” That is, they made them 10 times more energy efficient.sod tatong//Getty Images
Home batteries made from the cement in a building’s foundation could be used to charge a car.
Specifically, for a household cement battery to power a household, it used to have to be as big as a typical basement, 60 cubic yards. Now it is just as big as a typical basement wall, or six cubic yards. A cubic yard of cement—about the size of a refrigerator—can store over 2 kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to power an actual refrigerator for a day.
And since most houses and office buildings are made of cement somewhere in the foundation, that means new houses and offices could be built with cement batteries instead of just cement. With those, you could charge up when electricity is cheap (at night), or free (during the day when solar panels are humming away).
How did the researchers increase the efficiency of cement batteries? You can skip over this next paragraph where they tell us:
“Through nanoscale 3D imaging, electrolyte optimization, and multicell stacking, we demonstrate the production of high-voltage, energy-storing concrete components capable of powering devices and supporting mechanical loads.”
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In other words, it’s not just cement in the cement battery. These cement batteries are made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black (with nanoscale particles), and electrolytes, electron-conducting carbon concrete (or ec^3, pronounced “e-c-cubed”) that together creates a conductive “nanonetwork” inside concrete that could enable everyday structures like walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy.
Or so they said in their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and at news.mit.edu. In other words, the concrete around and under us could one day double as giant “batteries.” You have to use concrete anyway when you build a house or an office, so why not turn it into a battery?
The drawback? It’s less a battery than it is a capacitor—okay, it is a capacitor, a super capacitor—and capacitors traditionally release all their energy all at once, or at least really fast. Batteries can release energy more slowly, as you want to do when powering a house or charging a car. So I asked one of the authors at MIT.
“The discharge rate of ec^3 super caps can be controlled by the thickness of the electrodes,” said Dr. Admir Masic. “We have tuned the rate to be in the order of several hours. We do envision the car charging possibility through induction.”
So is this the next great thing? We’ll have to wait for more concrete conclusions.
Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford family and spent many hours holding a trouble light over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor while his father cursed the Blue Oval, all its products and everyone who ever worked there. This was his introduction to objective automotive criticism. He started writing for City News Service in Los Angeles, then moved to Europe and became editor of a car magazine called, creatively, Auto. He decided Auto should cover Formula 1, sports prototypes and touring cars—no one stopped him! From there he interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since.
Alexander Skarsgård Showcases the 871-HP Polestar 5 in New Film
Built on Polestar’s bonded-aluminum platform, the electric GT delivers supercar stiffness, 3.2-second acceleration, and Scandinavian style.By Natalie NeffPublished: Oct 06, 2025 8:00 AM EDTSave Article
Polestar
Polestar is leaning on Scandinavian star power to promote its new flagship electric grand tourer. The Swedish EV maker has released a short film featuring actor Alexander Skarsgård and the Polestar 5, a sleek four-door GT that evolved from the 2020 Precept concept.
Produced in-house, the minimalist film gives a cinematic walkaround of the Polestar 5 while Skarsgård explores the design and technology that define the company’s most advanced model yet. The actor, known for roles in Succession and The Northman, closes the piece with the line: “Fantastic. Tomorrow’s not dead yet.”
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Polestar 5 walkaround | Polestar
The Polestar 5 sits on the brand’s bespoke bonded-aluminum platform known as Polestar Performance Architecture (PPA). That structure, which the automaker says provides supercar-level stiffness and reduced weight compared with steel, supports a dual-motor setup producing 871 hp (650 kW) and 749 lb-ft (1,015 Nm) of torque. Polestar claims a 0-62 mph (0-100 km/h) time of 3.2 seconds.
Front suspension setup uses a double-wishbone configuration and MagneRide adaptive dampers. Power flows through an 800-volt electrical system, allowing faster charging and greater efficiency.
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Sustainability remains a major talking point for Polestar. The 5’s body is made from 83% aluminum sourced from smelters using renewable energy, and the remaining 13% is recycled metal. The interior features natural-fiber composites and Polestar’s own lightweight weave material, which the company says cuts fossil-based plastics by half compared with traditional interiors.
While the film functions as product marketing, it also reinforces Polestar’s identity, one focusing on design, performance, and an environmentally progressive bent.
But for a couple of sketchy, short-lived gigs right out of college, Natalie Neff has had the good fortune to spend the entirety of her professional life around cars. A 2017 Honda Ridgeline, 1972 VW Beetle, 1999 Ducati Monster and a well-loved purple-and-white five-speed Schwinn currently call her garage home.
