The Quiet Race to Build Batteries That Charge in Minutes

Inside a low warehouse on the edge of the desert, engineers are charging batteries fast enough to make them warm to the touch — and then doing it again, thousands of times, to see what breaks.

The prize is a cell that can refill a work machine during a lunch break. Several labs now say they can hit that number in a demo. The open question is durability.

"Anyone can charge a battery fast once," said a materials scientist who has spent a decade on the problem. "The trick is charging it fast on Tuesday and again on Wednesday for eight years."

If the chemistry holds up outside the lab, it would remove one of the last practical arguments against electric equipment on farms and job sites.