Thanks for the link, Donal.

1. The field of battery research is exploding in recent years, and with manufacturing going up by a scale of 100,000 - costs are collapsing. Your second link shows a chart on page 3 of the PDF, with a wide range of cost estimates on batteries from different consulting groups. What was interesting at that stage - 1-3 years ago - was WHO the consultants were working for. For example, a Fuel Cell and Hydrogen working group came out with one of the highest estimates, and got a lot of play, with hardly anyone noting that they were actually competitors to EVs and PHEVs. 

Anyway, as it turned out, real costs/unit - e.g. in the Volt - turned out to be at the bottom of the cost estimates, below the levels the anti-EV consulting groups had projected for 2020 and even 2030. Deutsche Bank were one of the lowest, and came back to announce - a year later - that costs had even turned out lower than they'd expected.

2. As for the new battery from MIT, it looks incredibly interesting, though not so much from a cost perspective. They claim they think they can halve the size and cost of Li-Ion batteries, but the downward trend will already see that within 3-5 years - not the 10 years needed to commercialize the new design.

Where it's interesting to me is the fact that it may - not sure, but "may" - offer another way to "refill." Right now, there's really 3 methods. 1) Plug it into the usual wall socket, and give it an hour per kwh. This is gonna work fine for most people, as long as their one-way commutes are under 30 miles or so. 2) Install special fast-charge sites. This takes not only special batteries, but special charging equipment, and it has a REAL impact on the grid. This stuff gets trickier. 3) Swapping out the battery entirely, a la Better Place. For 1001 reasons, I think this model is gonna fail (outside of small island nations), as it restricts battery innovation, takes batteries out of the hands of carmakers, and technically, faces a whole range of obvious obstacles. 

But a pumpable "liquid slurry"? That's a new kid on the block. Beyond the technical "can it actually do this" questions though, there are still the issues of how and where will they actually add the charge to the slurry? Because the grid impacts - as in #2 above - are significant. (For example, recharging 100 car batteries a day at a station, with say, 30 kwh's each, would draw 3,000 kw's an hour. That's 3 MW's - a heck of a punch.)

The idea that maybe they might be used as a new and improved form of battery at remote wind and solar stations is very intriguing as well. You could either levelize the otherwise somewhat-intermittent load, and make it effectively dispatchable, or even tap it off and use it for local/remote vehicles.

3. Right now, my money - and I think, our society's focus - should be on recharging method #1. It's not for everyone, but there's a good 100 million cars sitting out there today, in North America, inside garages that have electric outlets, being driven through light-duty tasks, of 20-50 miles per day. With battery costs falling fast, with next year's Plug-In Prius expected at $25-$30,000, the next Volt expected at <$30,000 and so on, and with the ability through this existing technology to reduce an average family's gasoline consumption by 80% (from 20 mpg to 100 mpg) - I'd take it.

4. As for the second link from MIT and the symposium, I'd just note that the field is so fast-changing that predictions are often outdated by the time they're written - and in particular, grand statements from Profs "Emeritus" just aren't that useful. "Electrification" is NOT seen by those in the industry as a "niche." Hell, look at what Nissan is betting, alone.

And the 1% improvement thing got completely blown out of the window by hybridization, much less electrification. 

Whether we can ACTUALLY capture those gains is a question of policy and such, but it's not that "the technology" isn't there to improve more than 1% a year.