Just 2 paragraphs down, it's very clearly explained:
> giving batteries this first charge at unusually high currents increased their average lifespan by 50% while decreasing the initial charging time from 10 hours to just 20 minutes.
And it's possible the benefit isn't nearly as big if you don't normally take 10 hours to fully charge a battery. It was just previously assumed that slower was always better.
The amount of time it takes to charge a battery is inversely proportional to the current - there is nothing surprising about the fact that using more current charges a battery in less time.
What is surprising about this research is that one small process change (doing that initial charge with a high current instead of a low one) resulted in a 50% increase in the total lifetime of the battery. That's the part that feels like "free money" in that, if accurate, this means battery producers could produce batteries with much longer lifespans without any fundamental change to their battery architecture or chemistry.
IT is free money in another way for manufactures as well: since they battery doesn't have to sit in their factory/fixtures for as long getting that initial charge there is a lot less in process batteries in their factory, less charging fixtures and jigs to buy... This process savings is often invisible until an accountant looks close and then they discover it is massive.
If you've got your widget rolling off the production line once every 90 seconds, you only need 14 chargers to have the charging done just in time on the line itself, eliminating the "storage for distribution" step entirely.
That sounds like a minor details, but accountants keep poking at that and discovering that extra steps like that are cost a lot of money. I'm guess tens of millions more $$$ which either goes to more profit or lowering prices - either is good (profit because I may be an investor, lower prices for customers)
> giving batteries this first charge at unusually high currents increased their average lifespan by 50% while decreasing the initial charging time from 10 hours to just 20 minutes.