He also said that the company had made progress toward an alkaline battery design that would replace zinc with more affordable aluminum. In the past, aluminum has not been usable because of issues like corrosion. Alkaline batteries based on aluminum would potentially weigh less than lithium-ion batteries and would be even cheaper to produce than today’s alkaline designs.

Ionic will make its announcement in Colorado at a conference for the 35th anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainable-energy research group founded by the physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, his former wife.

“They started with a very sensible set of criteria,” Dr. Lovins said of Ionic. “They use an unusual electrolyte to come up with a battery that uses common cheap materials and is benign.”

But he added a note of caution: “Batteries are very difficult and I want to see what they have and what can be measured and proven and whether it will get to market.”

Technological progress in battery technology has been glacial compared with the exponential advances in processing speed and data storage capacity that have been staples of Silicon Valley’s growth. In the last 150 years, only a handful of rechargeable battery chemistries have reached mass adoption.

Tesla, in partnership with Panasonic, is building a factory in Nevada with the intent of greatly expanding capacity to make lithium-ion batteries and lower production costs. Tesla officials said they wanted to create enough capacity to produce batteries for 1.5 million cars a year.

There is growing interest in pursuing such so-called solid-state battery technologies for both consumer and transportation applications. Last fall, the United States Department of Energy’s agency for supporting research in next-generation energy technology announced 16 research awards aimed at accelerating development of solid battery technologies, including a $3 million contract to Ionic Materials. The company said it had signed several licensing deals to produce commercial versions of its design, but it would not identify its partners.