In the marketplace of battery development ideas, there are winners and losers. When it comes to the solid-state variety of research, we've seen lots of promising advances and expect some of these will lead to winners. And then there are announcements which make us furrow our brows and wonder if there something we're missing when a report doesn't seem to offer much in the way of technological advancement. This is one of those latter situations.

The headline sounds promising — Jülich researchers developing fast-charging solid-state batteries — but the devil is in the numerical details, even if some interesting points are raised. But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's take a look at the "who" and "what."

Researchers from the Jülich Institute for Energy and Climate Research published a paper in the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces which claims a 10-times greater charge rate in a new solid-state cell. Unfortunately, the baseline for the charging rate is low: 10 to 12 hours. This means the big increase in speed only gets the cell to a charging time of an hour. That's a rate of 3 C, something that many, if not most batteries in use today are capable of.