Nanotech Anode Promises 10X Battery Life

UNIMurph sends word out of Stanford University that researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold by using silicon nanowires. Quoting News.com: 'It's not a small improvement,' [lead researcher Yi] Cui said. 'It's a revolutionary development.' Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium — which holds the charge — that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life... 'We are working on scaling up and evaluating the cost of our technology,' Cui said. 'There are no roadblocks for either of these.'"

Comments

Dupe

[calebt3]

Didn't we see this last month or so?

Re:Dupe

[Crypto Gnome]

You saw it.

I saw it

But clearly "they" did not see it, else "they" would not have submitted a dupe.

Re:Dupe

[calebt3]

Don't the editors at least read the headlines? Or do they have a lower standard to live down to than the rest of us?

Re:Dupe

[Zymergy]

OMG, I saw it too!!... I remember reading it here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/19/169259

Re:Dupe

[MichaelSmith]

Damn I thought we were going to get a factor of 100 improvement in battery capacity.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

I always knew the Energizer Bunny was stuffed with nanowires. The little rascal.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait until /. gets nanotech and goes grey goo on us. CowboyNeal will turn the whole world into a dupe!

Re:Dupe

[wizardforce]

Don't the editors at least read the headlines?

you must be new here. Dupes are not just the editor's doing although the editors really should google things like this it is ultimately other slashdotters that vote stories like these up in the firehose. No matter how many dupes happen on slashdot, people still vote up duplicates of stories probably because 1) no one googles them and 2) a lot of our fellow slashdotters apparently don't visit the site enough to know a dupe like this one.

Re:Dupe

[Rei]

It's not even 10fold -- at least not currently. It's only "several" times improvement without an equivalent cathode improvement. Now, that may well happen, but it hasn't happened yet. However, they think they may be able to commercialize it in five years.

Re:Dupe

[Rei]

And, let me add, I don't say this to diminish the importance of this news. A severalfold improvement is major, major news. Not in the least because this anode likely lends itself to very rapid charging at the same time. What we're looking at is, as it stands, giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle, meaning that there's no reason to stick with gasoline (when you can get lower maintenance (assuming long lifespan batteries), higher torque, quieter, more thermodynamically efficient vehicles that only require gas station visits on long trips, require hardly any new infrastructure (versus oil, which needs a lot of infrastructure construction) due to mostly off-peak charging (timer-based to get you a low rate and use our huge amount of unused off-peak capacity), lets us use domestic energy supplies instead of funding our enemies with oil imports, and even if all of the electricity came from burning fossil fuels, would still emit almost half the greenhouse gasses. An equivalent cathode improvement for electric vehicles simply means that you could then drive cross-country on a single charge.

As for lifespan, Yi Cui's team expects to be able to get at least 1,000 cycles out of this. That may not sound like much, but when you can go ~350 miles on a charge, that's 350,000 miles. And not like the battery just disintegrates up at the end of its lifespan; it simply doesn't hold as much charge.

Re:Dupe

[pipatron]

And not like the battery just disintegrates up at the end of its lifespan; it simply doesn't hold as much charge.

To be honest, that depends on what their marketing division means with a "cycle"...

Re:Dupe

[MichaelSmith]

What we're looking at is, as it stands, giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle

Also time shifted photovoltaic and wind power suddenly become much more viable. The problem with solar power is that we throw away much of the peak supply because we can't store it anywhere.

Re:Dupe

[ThreeGigs]

giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle

Stop and think for a second, or do some math, because electric cars will *never* 'fill up' as fast as a chemically powered car. Instead of pouring in gasoline, imagine that gasoline powering a flamethrower which you point into your gas tank, and you'll have a better grasp of what it means to transfer energy directly (as in electricity) versus high density potential (like gas).

Assume your electric car needs only 20 horsepower to maintain 60 mph.
One horsepower is about 750 watts, assuming perfect efficiency.
That's 15 kilowatts to keep the car going 60 mph.
To make the numbers easy, figure 300 mile range. That means you need to drive for 5 hours.
5 hours times 15 kilowatts is 75 kilowatt-hours.
Now let's assume the 'electric station' supplies electricity to charge your car at 500 volts.
75000 watt-hours divided by 500 volts equals 150 amps.
For an hour. Assuming perfect charging.
To get to a 3 minute charge time (one twentieth of an hour) you need 20x the amperage, or 3000 amps.

To carry 3000 amps of current for 3 minutes without melting insulation, my numbers show you'd need copper wire about 2.5 inches in diameter (and you'd still get a temperature rise of 90 degrees farenheit over ambient). And note to electricians who may think the numbers are off, don't forget you're charging with DC voltage, not AC, so you're gonna need about 5000 circular mils worth of wire.

I cannot imagine Joe Average plugging TWO wires, each of which is thicker than his wrist, into his car for a 3 minute recharge.

And yeah, you could drop it to 300 amps, but then you're talking 5000 volts.

So basically... you're never, ever going to see a 'gas station' for electric cars. They'll always be charged for long periods at home, or at 'charging garages'.

Re:Dupe

[JonathanR]

So basically... you're never, ever going to see a 'gas station' for electric cars. They'll always be charged for long periods at home, or at 'charging garages'. Which wouldn't really matter too much, since most people (who commute) will leave their car parked someplace for an extended period. For lengthy car trips, a trailer-mounted fossil-fuel powered generator could supplement the battery charge, and be available on a hire basis.

Re:Dupe

[ThreeGigs]

You won't see a trailer with a running generator and fuel supply on it like you describe, as it would kill efficiency and be inconvenient. Much simpler to just rent a gas powered car. However, I'm guessing that soon there'll be hybrids with a low power (10 HP), constant RPM (max 2500 RPM) diesel generator on board. Park the hybrid and let the engine keep running to charge the battery pack. Full battery pack plus 7500 watts of generating capacity would amount to about a 500 mile range, and allow you to recharge anywhere that isn't an enclosed space, or slow charge overnight from an outlet.

Re:Dupe

[fadir]

Maybe you take the wrong approach to "charge" a car.

What about standard, pre-charged batteries that you simply swap at the "gas" station instead of really charging the car? This way the whole process can be done in the same amount of time than filling up gasoline.
This is not even to complicated. You more or less rent the battery from the respective company and return it when it's empty (just to exchange it for a fully charged one).

The "gas" station has all the time in the world to charge the empty batteries, replace/repair faulty ones, etc.

Isn't that a more logical (and much safer) solution to the problem?

Re:Dupe

[mprinkey]

The analogous situation currently exists with small propane tanks for gas grills, etc. There are dozens of places that have racks of these ready to swap with your old one. I think this is an excellent business model. Each location will need to an inventory of batteries that is equal to the peak turn-over rate times the recharge time plus a bit of a cushion. The trick is getting automakers first to build electric cars at all and second to agree on a standard battery module.

Re:Dupe

[BlueParrot]

Your numbers are a bit off. The Tesla roadster quotes a range of 356km on 54kWh.

If you use 1000 V , 4 parallel plugs, a 100A charging current, that gives you 66kWh in 10 minutes. 100A is doable with AWG 1 ( 7.35mm ), and most of the time you wouldn't be charging from empty anyway, so something like 6 minutes is more reasonable. Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey, most people would probably just charge it at home over night.

Re:Dupe

[FroBugg]

This is why plug-in hybrids are our best real hope.

Something like the upcoming Chevy Volt does it even better than the plug-in modded Priuses available now. It uses its gasoline motor only to charge the batteries, and thus runs far more efficiently than a motor that sometimes pushes the car.

It requires absolutely no change in our gasoline delivery infrastructure (unlike hydrogen), but would require an increase in electricity generation to take advantage of the plug-in aspect for daily use.

Also, once we get a handle on cheap cellulosic ethanol we can use our existing gasoline delivery infrastructure to give them a carbon-neutral fuel.

Re:Dupe

[Ancient_Hacker]

You are correct in that it will take a heck of a lot of electrical energy and a lot of time to charge these batteries.

One work-around is to make the batteries easily swappable, like you drive in, the battery drops down, like dropping your gas tank, and a newly charged battery pops up. Could be done in ten seconds, much faster than filling your gas tank.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop and think for a second, or do some math, because electric cars will *never* 'fill up' as fast as a chemically powered car.

Note the recent development of the supercapacitor, which will allow electric cars to fill up just as fast as a gasoline powered car does now.

Just because chemical batteries are slow, this doesn't mean electricity MUST be slow. It simply means battery technology needs a lot of work, and thus, a lot of work has been done.

Re:Dupe

[sgt101]

Or, alternatively, you could lease the batteries from the manufacturer who will then support the energy distribution retailers (Shell, BP, ect) in swapping them in and out of your car.

So, you roll up, pop your cell out, it validates against your account and is collected in a bin.

A recharged cell is placed near enough to your car for you to connect it, or alternatively it's clipped into your car by machines. I guess that will depend on the weight of the component.

You pay, you drive off.

Your old cell is recharged, if it is near failure it is disposed of and a new one drawn down from stores. If not the recharged cell is (48hrs later?) provisioned to another customer at the "gas station".

So... it's not a problem, at all.

Re:Dupe

[iserlohn]

What you say is true only for batteries specifically, not for electric cars in general. There's nothing stopping you from changing the electrolyte or the battery itself. In fact, it's been done before... in 1907 - http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9719105

Re:Dupe

[Smidge204]

Not to excuse them, but at least it's a different article on a different website, and at least it's not another worthless copy+paste blog "article" from over a year ago. This dupe is pretty high standard compared to some.

=Smidge=

Re:Dupe

[InvalidError]

Until solar and wind power exceed overall power demand, there is no real need to store that power: any power from clean/renewable sources will reduce the amount of non-renewable resources used in other power plants and this in itself could be considered as a form of grid-based storage. Another form of grid-based storage is to operate hydroelectric turbines in reverse during low-demand hours to pump water back to the high-side, basically using the water reservoirs like capacitors to even out production requirements from other power plants.

Re:Dupe

[ErikZ]

So you're saying that the method of putting gas into the car gas tank doesn't translate well into putting electricity into a car battery.

Shock. Surprise.

New method, off the top of my head. Docking stations for cars. Since you don't have a gas powered engine in the front of the car any more, you can put the connector up there. You align up with the power supply plug in the wall and move the car forward into it.

To fix your high amperage/voltage/wire thickness problems, just put in 20 leads, and directly wire them to specific groups of batteries. 300 amps divided by 20 is 15 amps, and 250 volts. Ta da.

And that's with 20. Make the standard connection have more and it becomes even easier.

What's wrong with high voltage anyway? (I'm more familiar with the effects of AC high voltage over DC)

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

The "gas" stations can just replace the batteries which can be done faster than filling the tank.

Re:Dupe

[CastrTroy]

Who cares if things get reported more than once. It's something that enough people thought was interesting that they thought it should be posted. Obviously some people want to discuss it. If you've already read the story, and don't want to discuss it any more, then that's fine, but there's lots of people who miss the story the first time around, and would like to discuss it.

Re:Dupe

[s_p_oneil]

You think these things are going to be the size of laptop batteries? They're going to be the size of a gas tank, or larger. Or if they are small, there will be a few hundred of them plugged together. Either way, it will not be easy to swap them out.

Re:Dupe

[CastrTroy]

However, batteries are heavy. For this to really work, they would need some sort of standard form factor batteries that could be lifted in and out of the car by some kind of machine. There's no way you'd get some minimum wage kid lifting 20 lbs. batteries all day, like you can get them to fill up cars at the gas station. Also, It would have to all be in one single casing, or it would take half an hour to unload and reload all the batteries.

Re:Dupe

[CastrTroy]

356 KM is not really that far. I know people who commute that far every day to work.

Re:Dupe

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

Instead of recharging your battery inside the car, simply exchange your exhausted battery for a fresh battery at the 'gas station'. They recharge your exhausted battery for however long it takes, and exchanges it for someone else's exhausted battery. People with gas grills are already used to doing something like this; when your propane tank is empty, you take it to a location where they exchange it for a full tank. They then fill the tank you gave them and sell it to someone else.

Re:Dupe

[MadnessASAP]

So whats wrong with 5k volts? or 10k? or even 50k? If you design the system to handle it and insulate properly it can be perfectly safe barring of course darwin award winners. People understand that you don't smoke at a gas station becuase gasoline fumes are flammable and will result in an explosion if they do, I'm sure they can also be made to understand that compromising the safety systems of 50k volts will also result in their death.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

That may work ok for $10-$20 propane tanks. I see dented and rusted ones all the time. I don't see it working anytime soon for the $500-$3000(?) batteries. Plus you'd need to have many many many multiples of them everywhere. That is a lot of investment in something that may be obsolete with the constant improvement in technology.

Re:Dupe

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Isn't that a more logical (and much safer) solution to the problem? On the surface, yes. But that means it's perfectly plausible to get different travel distances off of each swap, because you're swapping for batteries at different stages in their overall lifespans. OTOH, keeping the same battery for its lifetime would net you a slow, predictable decline in range -- something I suspect most people would prefer, as opposed to a guessing game as to how many miles they will travel after each swap.

Re:Dupe

[Keith_Beef]

What we're looking at is, as it stands, giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle, meaning that there's no reason to stick with gasoline (when you can get lower maintenance (assuming long lifespan batteries), higher torque, quieter, more thermodynamically efficient vehicles

No.

Charge time and range, compared to gasoline?

It takes approximately four minutes to fill the tank of my VW, to give me around 350 miles of range. I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hours (probably closer to eight hours, but I'll be generous).

Even cutting those four hours (240 minutes) by a factor of ten means a charge time of 24 minutes.

And I think you'll find that electric motors already provide torque comparable or superior to gasoline engines of a similar size and weight.

You got it right on the quietness and thermodynamic efficiency, though.

In fact, the electric buses used around the Montmartre area of Paris are so quiet that they have been fitted with a device to make a pinging noise to remind tourists to get out of the way.

Beef.

Re:Dupe

[mdsolar]

The point of the article though is that the range would extend to 3560 km, if that is how you want to use the batteries. Otherwise you need ten times less mass in batteries for the same (oops slightly greater) range.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

220 miles isn't that far? You know people that drive 220 miles to work every day? 3 1/2 hours? Are you really sure about that?

Re:Dupe

[mea37]

That might be a pretty good idea, for several reasons. But it's not a slam dunk; there are problems that would have to be resolved.

What is the total weight of the car batteries? How much energy will be spent physically swapping them? This isn't just a starter battery... If nothing else, this would probably be the end of the self-service gas station (at least until our car-refueling robot overlords sweep in to save the day)... And remember, it's the driver that's going to end up paying for any labor, or any energy expense in general from swapping batteries.

Another poster's concern about some batteries being in better condition than others doesn't seem like a huge deal in and of itself. The battery station is going to have to monitor the condition of the batteries in its inventory to dispose of them when they're no longer usable; so there's going to be some standard minimum: "you will get at least X out of this battery swap." Maybe you get more sometimes -- nice bonus. The station might set tiered pricing -- for an extra $x.xx you get a better guarantee about the condition of your new battery...

However, unless the station can penalize you for degradation of the battery you turn in (relative to the condition in which you got it), there will be no incentive not to mistreat batteries. What exactly that means will depend on the battery technology, but generally some usage patterns are better for overall battery life than others. If the average battery is abused, average overall life goes down, and then cradle-to-grave energy efficiency goes down (as you have to manufacture / recycle more batteries).

There would be overhead on the station's end to keep a sufficient inventory of charged batteries. To keep that to a minimum, there should be pretty tight standards to make all cars' batteries interchangeable. Is that currently the case in electric cars? How practical is it to have one (or at least a small number of) standard battery? (Again, we're no longer talking about the market for starter batteries here...)

Suppose I swap out my batteries and the replacements fail catestrophically; who all has liability exposure? The station? The previous owner? The manufacturer? How do you keep track of a battery's lineage of ownership?

Ooh, crazy Bad Hollywood Plot theory time -- a terrorist quietly assumes control of a battery station. Over the course of a few days, he swaps out the batteries from as many cars as possible, replacing them with packages that are half battery, half explosive. Once his devices are distributed, across the city vehicles start exploding at random. Film at 11.

Re:Dupe

[Rei]

Car batteries are not ~$40, 20lb propane tanks. Car batteries are $8k, several hundred pound devices bolted to the base of your car. Not going to happen.

Re:Dupe

[Rei]

I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hours (probably closer to eight hours, but I'll be generous).

Don't guess.

It's about three hours to fill a typical current EV that's at "empty". Tesla is 3-4. Aptera is 2-4. However, this is mostly battery limited. There are already fast charge batteries ready to hit the market -- Toshiba and AltairNano are producing them. 5-10 minutes charge time. EEStor's EESUs are also 5-10 minutes. And this is for an empty battery. It seems likely that the Stanford batteries, given nanostructured electrodes, will also be rapid charge/discharge.

And I think you'll find that electric motors already provide torque comparable or superior to gasoline engines of a similar size and weight.

That's what I said.

Re:Dupe

[Jeremi]

I cannot imagine Joe Average plugging TWO wires, each of which is thicker than his wrist, into his car for a 3 minute recharge.

Why is that so hard to imagine? Joe Average already plugs in a gas "cable" thicker than his wrist every time he fill up. Teaching him to plug in a slightly different, slightly larger cable seems like it would be the least of your worries. I'd be more worried about reliably and safely generating that kind of power on demand.

Re:Dupe

[Jeremi]

356 KM is not really that far. I know people who commute that far every day to work

Yes, it is that far. Those people are insane. If you're commuting more than 20 miles a day, the problem isn't with your car, the problem is that your house is located too far away from your job. You need to move, or take a different job.

Re:Dupe

[Rei]

Assume your electric car needs only 20 horsepower to maintain 60 mph.
One horsepower is about 750 watts, assuming perfect efficiency.
That's 15 kilowatts to keep the car going 60 mph.

It's simpler than that. A typical modern EV gets about 200Wh/mi at 60mph. Some get notably less, like the Aptera, but that's a crazy Jetsons-like car, so we won't count it ;) 200*60=12kWh/h=12kW. As for range, 200Wh/mi * 300 mi = 60kWh.

But hey, let's go with your 75kWh. It's in the ballpark.

Now let's assume the 'electric station' supplies electricity to charge your car at 500 volts.

Why limit it to 500V? The EEStor's EESU, for example, is a 3500V ultracapacitor.

But hey, let's go with 500V.

To get to a 3 minute charge time (one twentieth of an hour) you need 20x the amperage, or 3000 amps.

And? You do realize that when you're filling a gasoline car, you're putting enough energy in it that if it were burned ideally, could turn a car twice its size into a pool of molten metal. Let's picture a small car, just over 1 ton -- usually as a 12 gallon or so tank. 131 MJ/gal times 12 gallons 1.6GJ. The specific heat of steel is 500J/(kg*K). Assuming a 1500 degree celcius rise in temperature, you could melt 2.1 metric tonnes of steel.

That's an awful lot of energy. Even when not burned ideally, it's still a ton of energy. Picture the damage from a molotov coctail and how it's burning less dense alcohol and a lot less of it. Regardless of the energy source, it takes a *lot* of energy to get a vehicle to go long distances. All you're changing when going from gas to electric is the form that it comes in.

By the way, 5 minute charge time is a more typical number. But let's just go with 3 minutes and thus 3000 amps.

To carry 3000 amps of current for 3 minutes without melting insulation, my numbers show you'd need copper wire about 2.5 inches in diameter

Only if the wire is passively cooled. Oh, wait, you didn't bother to think about active cooling, now did you? A mere blower circulating air through an outer sheath lets you cut that to a typical power cord size.

Why do people always assume that engineers are idiots when talking about new tech?

Re:Dupe

[modecx]

This is the same business model that many specialty gas suppliers have worked on for a while now (bottled gas for industrial purposes like welding, etc.)

The problem is that the form factor for every car battery produced from now to eternity would basically have to be standardized... And the physical location of the battery and method for changing the battery will have to be standardized, so that it can be done by robots. Physical labor will drive up the price, and lower the speed of changing the battery substantially (just imagine the gas prices in Oregon, where a clerk does fill your car up--and quadruple that), and let's face it, it just isn't practical for men to manhandle batteries like the ones which drive electric forklifts.

Also, because having batteries accessible via the top of the car will drastically limit the freedom of designers to differentiate makes and models, it just wouldn't work that great--also, it would mean the center of mass would almost certainly be much higher than it should be, making the car less stable; I can imagine a robotic changer being built into a pit, so that you drive over it; the robot unbolts the battery from the bottom of the car, retrieves a new one from an underground charging pit and so on... So, either batteries are going to have to be built in semi-modular banks, to allow greater versatility--rather like a giant AA cell, or as one very large, structural unit, which may supplant more permanent structure in a car--acting as a sort of industry-wide standardized undercarriage.

It's going to be a long and hard path, whichever direction we go.

Re:Dupe

[russotto]

cannot imagine Joe Average plugging TWO wires, each of which is thicker than his wrist, into his car for a 3 minute recharge.

And yeah, you could drop it to 300 amps, but then you're talking 5000 volts.

The two thick wires you mention are no worse than those darn rubber nozzles. And 5000 volts isn't such a big deal. Yes, you'll need good insulation and interlocks, but if the battery can take it (and no reasonable battery can), transferring megawatts of power is not an unsolvable problem.

Re:Dupe

[Shotgun]

No.

You have to look out for people trying to game the system. I'd run a battery in my commuter car for a few years, until it started to degrade. Then take it to a 'station' and swap it out for a good one. I'd keep 'filling up' until I got one that was practically new. Then I'd stop 'filling up' and charge my batteries at home.

Batteries are like propane tanks, that are emptied of it's contents, but the bottle remains unchanged.

Re:Dupe

[Spazntwich]

Have you ever read the book "If you Give a Mouse a Cookie?" While dupes are not the end of the world, you sitting there and speciously defending bad editing (Seriously, it's their job to make sure stories only make it up once. You know, for the sake of the site regulars.) only encourages it, and once it's ok to edit badly, the quality will sink further.

So, again, don't get all pedantic on others just because you can't think of the consequences of an action or choice.

Re:Dupe

[ultranova]

Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey, most people would probably just charge it at home over night.

If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.

This also means that your effective operating range is limited by your car; you can't go farther than your car batteries can take you on a single charge, because you can't recharge them anywhere, and if want to be able to return home, you're limited to half of that. Of course you can take a bus/train, but that is inconvenient, expensive and only available in and between larger population centers.

Heh, I can just imagine a scenario where the leaders of some small town in the middle of nowhere ban all cars capable of reaching the nearest town, leaving everyone dependent on them for supplies...

Re:Dupe

[cnettel]

356 KM is not really that far. I know people who commute that far every day to work. One or two ways? 200 miles, for the metrically challenged, seems quite hefty. I know that there are people with that kind of commute, but what percentage would they constitute of the total (the total population or the total number of miles).

Re:Dupe

[ThreeGigs]

just to exchange it for a fully charged one

You buy a new car. With a new battery. With a range of 300 miles.
You use the car for a month, recharging at home.
You take a trip, and hit a 'swap station' on the way.

You get home with your 'new' battery, only to discover that your range has dropped to 150 miles, because the battery is a year and a half old and near the end of its useful life. Don't forget that lithium batteries only have a useful life of about 1.5 years.

Yeah, you could solve that problem by having car dealers install used batteries, but there's another issue. How much will a 'fill up' cost? Considering each battery will have a different capacity, you'll never know how much range you'll get from a swap.

You'll also need multiple batteries, as the needs for a 2 seat Smart ForTwo are different than for an electric Hummer.

As for safer, two points:
Easily removable batteries means easy accessibility to the battery compartment, which implies less safety in an accident. It also replaces gas siphoning with battery theft.

Standard sized batteries also leave less room for car designers to work.

I could see it potentially working with a dealer-based swap system, but not with widespread adoption.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because the batteries used in electric and hybrid cars are huge and numerous. Look at the GM Volt, the batteries form a huge T the length of the car in the chassis. It would probably take you just as long to swap the existing ones out and replace them as having them charged slowly.

Re:Dupe

[CastrTroy]

I read that to my eldest daughter just a few nights ago.

Re:Dupe

[PitaBred]

"several" is at least 3, which means I'll be able to go from 3 hours runtime with my current setup to 9+. That's freakin' awesome.

Re:Dupe

[Buelldozer]

100 Amps even for 6 minutes is essentially unworkable!

Most homes are equipped with TOTAL electrical service of 200 amps or less. Most older homes are 120-140A and my new home is 150A.

Are you suggesting to use upwards of 75% of the total electric service to charge your car? Even for six measly minutes? When your wife kicks on the microwave you'll blow your main breaker!

This doesn't even take into account apartment dwellers! Where are they going to get a 100A circuit from to do this? Most wall circuits are 20A or less.

Re:Dupe

[ThreeGigs]

356 km is about 200 miles, or 2/3 of my numers. Likewise 54 kwh is about 2/3 of 75 kwh. So I don't think my numbers are all that far off, it's just that your numbers are equivalent to a 30 mpg gas car with a 7 gallon tank. And comparing a car with no air conditioner, no heat and no 'creature comforts', that you can't use to get your groceries back from the market because there's no room, that has a low profile thus a low aerodynamic drag, with what would actually work as a 'family car' is disingenuous.

Most of my numbers were aimed at arriving at the size of the cable needed to handle the current, as most people can't visualize what 400 amps, or 3000 amps means, but they do get 'big wire'. Although I guess I could suggest they look at their electrical breaker box and the size of the wires leading into it, figuring on 100 amps per wire. It's just a visualization thing. And my 500 volt number is a simple rule of thumb, as the highest voltage you'll find in most consumer applications is 480v.

Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey
Exactly. Just refuting the minor bit in the parent post about how you can fill up an electric car in the same time as a gas car. I can put 10 gallons in a tank in 3 minutes, including paying and putting the gas cap back on, and in a 40 MPG car that gets me 400 miles. Versus 2 pit stops in an electric in your scenario, that take much longer and require the vehicle to be designed to handle rapid charging.

Re:Dupe

[Rei]

If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.

Sure there will be. Just a lot less of them. People will still need them on cross-country trips, so they'll mostly be gathered near highways. If there's still a demand, there will still be people around looking to profit off of it.

Re:Dupe

[Rei]

You don't need to fast charge at home. If you want a fast charge, you can go to a fast charge station. Or, if you really want a fast charge at home, get a fast charger. Basically, a second set of batteries that trickle charges from the grid, and rapid charges your vehicle whenever you plug in. It'd have the added bonus of providing backup power for your house and even potentially helping with grid load balancing (in exchange for a discount on electricity purchase prices).

Re:Dupe

[Deliveranc3]

Or you could manually swap out the battery (not an impossible problem because it can be stored anywhere in the car).

Or move to a more European exchange style system.

When did American's become such luddite conservatives.

Next thing they'll have hedge lobbying groups ala Britain.

Another point worth noting is that eastern economies are ramping up while energy use is becoming more efficient. Rural parts of India will be installing led lighting, getting hybrid or electric vehicles etc. America has been on the high horse of modernism because they started from scratch without the baggage of history, it seems the eastern economies are taking that spot now... For the Beijing olympics the Chinese government is tearing down thousands of buildings that are more than 500 years old (in the area south of Tienamen square).

I don't think they'll care about taking Chevrolet's and Fords off the road to help the planet.

Re:Dupe

[afedaken]

Something like the upcoming Chevy Volt does it even better than the plug-in modded Priuses available now. It uses its gasoline motor only to charge the batteries, and thus runs far more efficiently than a motor that sometimes pushes the car." The term you're looking for is "Serial Hybrid."

http://www.hybrid-vehicle.org/serial-hybrid.html

What I've not yet seen addressed are a comparison of the effective losses in power for each method of locomtion. For example, the Prius uses a cute little 70 horsepower Atkinson Cycle engine, both for charging and motive power. Given that fixed power, what I wanna know is, could more locomotion be generated by charging the batteries and running electric motors, than would be generated by simply applying the same amount of power to a transmission to move the care.

I freely admit to not having the answer to this question. On the one hand, in a serial hybrid setup, you eliminate all those nasty fiction and various other mechanical losses that come with driving a car. On the other hand, adding batteries to a car is no insignificant amount of weight, and said batteries get no lighter even as their potential draws down. And while mechanical losses are minimized, there is still resistance to think of.

Re:Dupe

[afedaken]

Joe Average already plugs in a gas "cable" thicker than his wrist every time he fill up. Fistly, I've never seen a gas "cable" thicker than my wrist at a gas station. (At least not one that wasn't attached to a tanker servicing said station.)

Secondly, a gas "cable" thicked than my wrist is significantly lighter than a SOLID COPPER CABLE thicker than my wrist. I could probably do it. But mom would have to switch back to full-server.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh, crazy Bad Hollywood Plot theory time -- a terrorist quietly assumes control of a battery station. Over the course of a few days, he swaps out the batteries from as many cars as possible, replacing them with packages that are half battery, half explosive. Once his devices are distributed, across the city vehicles start exploding at random. Film at 11.

You can pretty much apply that scenario to any business that holds on to your car for a few hours or more... mechanic, body shop, car dealer, long term parking, etc.

Re:Dupe

[Jeremi]

Fistly, I've never seen a gas "cable" thicker than my wrist at a gas station. (At least not one that wasn't attached to a tanker servicing said station.)

Hmm, maybe you're right. I haven't been to a gas station in a while, so I'm probably remembering the size wrong. :^)

Secondly, a gas "cable" thicked than my wrist is significantly lighter than a SOLID COPPER CABLE thicker than my wrist. I could probably do it. But mom would have to switch back to full-server.

Okay, so you have the cables mounted straight, on an adjustable slide-out tray that connects them to the car. I still don't see how this is a showstopper; compared to the other problems involved, it seems like a minor implementation detail.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think 300 miles on 75kWh is the same as 356km on 55kWh, so his numbers are good.

And your "4 parallel plugs" must each contain a return wire, so that's EIGHT 1-AWG conductors with pretty skukum plugs that can handle thousands of disconnects at 100A.
And of course to handle 1000VDC you'd have to be a trained electrician wearing full protective gear and face shield.

Re:Dupe

[cgraves]

Agreed. But just like last time, the Slashdot summary is completely wrong. Last time, the linked article was titled "Nanowire battery can hold 10 times the charge of existing lithium-ion battery" and the Slashdot summary summarized "A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours..."

This time, the linked article mis-reported, and the Slashdot summary followed. The Slashdot summary is also inconsistent with itself: It refers to "increased battery capacity" and then has the title "Nanotech Anode Promises 10X Battery Life". "Capacity" is not "lifetime"; it is proportional to energy density.

In both cases it is about the same research and publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, which I link to in my first post in this story: abstract, fulltext, fulltext pdf - for some reason they are all freely downloadable. In terms of "battery life", they have only demonstrated 30 cycles (data in the supporting information for the paper), and only 10 in the actual paper!

Re:Dupe

[MisterCaptainFunKill]

What about "electric gas stations" where you change out battery modules and the guys at the station recharge the depleted ones...

Re:Dupe

[mea37]

Well, I'm not sure why you'd latch onto the crazy Bad Hollywood Plot theory as the point to debate. For the sake of argument, though, there's a difference of scale that makes a huge difference to the plot in question. Think it through in these terms: How many cars could your villain rig quickly enough to go undetected? Answer: a lot more if he controls a refueling point that swaps batteries than merely a repair shop.

Re:Dupe

[BungaDunga]

Maybe add a chip to each battery so the station and you would both know how old it is?

Re:Dupe

[gregben]

Excellent post! The first realistic analysis I've seen on electric car charging on /.

Of course it is worse than this because no battery is able to accept 100% of the charge applied.
Less than 100% charge efficiency means a lot of battery heating, and that heat has to be dissipated.
That means liquid or forced air cooling (consuming more energy) to prevent battery overheating while
charging. The net result is that it is doubtfull that it will be possible to charge batteries fully
in less than 30 minutes.

Good deal

[alshithead]

Now, if we can see the same kind of improvements in electricity transmission, solar power electricity generation, and larger scale electricity storage, we might be able to really reduce fossil based fuels and CO2 emissions.

Re:Good deal

[BlueParrot]

solar power electricity generation

No , please, stop right there. Here, let me put it into perspective for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg

For those too lazy to follow the link.
World energy consumption:
Oil: 37%
Coal: 25%
Gas: 23%
Nuclear: 6%
Biomass: 4%
Hydro: 3%
Solar heat: 0.5%
Wind: 0.3%
Geothermal: 0.2%
Biofuels: 0.2%
Photovoltaics: 0.02%

WORLDWIDE photovoltaic production is about 13GW. A single nuclear reactor or coal fired powerplant can produce 1-2 GW. Solar couldn't even power a tiny european country with populations of a few millions. Let alone China, India, the US, Russia etc ... Even if you doubled worldwide solar cell output every five years, you would have to keep up such an exponential growth for 50 years just to replace 20% of our CURRENT energy demand. As China and India industrialize this will increase.

The most probable ways to reduce CO2 emissions from our energy generation are:
-Carbon capture and storage
-Expanding Nuclear power
-Increased use of Gas in place of Coal ( gas contains a lot of hydrogen and hence emits less CO2 per kwH than does coal ).

Ironically these are all measures which are fiercely opposed by Greenpeace et al, who instead want us to hope that wind and solar will save the day. At present production wind, solar and solar heat taken together produce about 0.82% of worldwide energy. To avoid a 2 C increase in global average temperature we need substantial cuts in CO2 emissions before 2050. Does anybody SERIOUSLY believe that photovoltaic / wind is up to the job?

I mean for the love of god, electric cars are great in that they could let us use Nuclear power or plants equipped with carbon capture technology, but they will not be solar powered. Not within the foreseeable future at least.

Re:Good deal

[Rei]

Since when does "what we have now" imply "what we'll have with the radical technology improvements that are presently occurring"? You do realize that not only are solar thermal prices dropping, but there have been some *major* advancements in the economics of photovoltaic systems. Silicon cells are typically profitable to sell at $4/W (and are currently selling at $5/W because of supply shortages). CIGS cells are profitable at $1/W. This is a major, major leap that'd make solar cheaper than coal almost everywhere in the world.

Let's look at Nanosolar as an example. Their first plant, when at full capacity, will make them one of the biggest solar producers in the world (430 MW/year if I recall correctly). But this is just their first plant. Selling cells that are profitable at $1/W at nearly $5/W means they'll be profiting hand over fist, which means that investors will fight for the chance to throw money at them. How long do you think it'll take them to scale up with essentially unlimited venture capital? I'm betting not very long. They built their current facility with $100M raised just a year and a half ago, and they've already delivered their first product. Given that most of that money had to go toward simply commercializing their laboratory-scale process, what sort of capacity do you think they could pull off with, say, the next $1B in cash? Dozens of GW/year? And Nanosolar is just one CIGS manufacturer among many. And there's CdTe, too. Unmet demand begs for a market solution. It's inevitable that it's going to be filled.

Longer term, here's a crazy new tech for you to chew on: nanoantenna solar cells. A completely different process than conventional cells, which use photons to knock electrons off a donor, these new cells are simply designed to receive solar energy in the same way that a larger antenna receives the several-orders-of-magnitude-longer wave radio signals. They should be able to be produced on a cheap reel-to-reel process like CIGS cells, yet they have the potential to be as much as 80% efficient, even receiving the infrared that the Earth emits at night.

Re:Good deal

[BlueParrot]

Let's look at Nanosolar as an example. Their first plant, when at full capacity, will make them one of the biggest solar producers in the world (430 MW/year if I recall correctly). But this is just their first plant. Selling cells that are profitable at $1/W at nearly $5/W means they'll be profiting hand over fist, which means that investors will fight for the chance to throw money at them. How long do you think it'll take them to scale up with essentially unlimited venture capital? I'm betting not very long. They built their current facility with $100M raised just a year and a half ago, and they've already delivered their first product. Given that most of that money had to go toward simply commercializing their laboratory-scale process, what sort of capacity do you think they could pull off with, say, the next $1B in cash? Dozens of GW/year? And Nanosolar is just one CIGS manufacturer among many. And there's CdTe, too. Unmet demand begs for a market solution. It's inevitable that it's going to be filled.

First of all, Nanosolar HOPES to make the cells at $1/W, they are nowhere near that cheap yet, and this is the price their marketing department HOPES to achieve. Secondly, that is the price for the cells without factoring in energy storage devices, energy conversion systems, servicing etc ... Thirdly, it is the price under optimal conditions, with perfectly aligned cells. In any real applications they will only be optimally aligned for a small part of the day, unless you intend to use expensive devices to track solar motion. They are also relying on indium, an element which is thought to become scarce due to increasing demand, and of course, mass-deployment of indium based solar cells would certainly push the price up. Finally, even if they were able to start producing these at competitive costs and at a large rate, you still have the problem that you will have to increase solar photovoltaic output by a factor of 1000 just to reach 20% of current energy demand.

With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand, it seems likely that nations will turn to coal. This effectively implies you will either have to do carbon capture and storage or start building nuclear plants very soon unless you want to have your greenhouse gas emissions rocket due to massive deployments of coal plants. To think that solar will replace Coal, Oil, Gas AND nuclear within 30-40 years amidst the east rapidly increasing the energy intensity of their economies, is wishful thinking at best.

But no, we're going to gamble on some hypothetical solar breakthrough. Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night, diffuse and limited output, as well as the high price, having been demonstrated. If you think the press release about what one heavily subsidized solar company "hopes to achieve" negates any of my arguments, then I'd say you are naive at best.

As for nano-antenna solar cells, again, you are talking several decades of development at the very least. They won't save us from the energy gap that is likely to occur within 20-30 years, and they only deal with the costs incurred by the cells themselves, they don't address the cost of storing and converting the energy.

Re:Good deal

[TooMuchToDo]

You're aware Texas is on it's way to be generating almost 23,000GW (yeah, you read that correctly) in the next 3 years. Wind and solar are indeed up to the task.

Re:Good deal

[Rei]

First of all, Nanosolar HOPES to make the cells at $1/W, they are nowhere near that cheap yet, and this is the price their marketing department HOPES to achieve.

And your information comes from? Nowhere, that's where, because they're not sold on the open market yet, so claims like "they are nowhere near that cheap yet" are complete BS. All of their capacity is currently going to a German municipal plant. Secondly, all of the CIGS companies are giving numbers in the same ballpark, as are the CdTe companies.

Secondly, that is the price for the cells without factoring in energy storage devices, energy conversion systems, servicing etc

Duh. That's part of a general solar economics calculation. Only an idiot would just multiply $1/W times the desired number of watts. A large, batteryless installation in Anchorage, AK of nanosolar cells gets a 30 year IRR of 7-8%. In Las Vegas, it's more like 13-14%.

Thirdly, it is the price under optimal conditions, with perfectly aligned cells. (and on, and on...)

(Dragnet theme)Duh, duh duh duh. Duh, duh duh duh, duh!(/Dragnet theme)

Do you think we're idiots? What's next? "Third, the cells only produce power when the sun is visible. Fourth, you need to have wires to conduct the power. Fifth, you need "humans", who can use the power...."

They are also relying on indium, an element which is thought to become scarce due to increasing demand, and of course, mass-deployment of indium based solar cells would certainly push the price up.

Indium is more common than silver, is easier to recover than silver (because of its close interrelationship with zinc ores), and CIGS cells use a miniscule amount of it (nanoscale-thickness coatings). Indium's current high price is more related to a lack of demand for it before LCD TVs started using it in bulk; this led to a few of the world's only indium recovery circuits shutting down without new circuits replacing them at other mines. It's not a problem. It only takes a few years to ramp up production.

Finally, even if they were able to start producing these at competitive costs and at a large rate, you still have the problem that you will have to increase solar photovoltaic output by a factor of 1000 just to reach 20% of current energy demand.

Huh? Did you ignore my post, above, where it already addressed this?

With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand

Whaa? For one, nuclear is making a serious comeback in the US. Two, oil is not running low. Light sweet crude is, but light sweet crude != world petroleum production capability. Venezuelan super heavy crude and Canadian bitumen syncrude are taking off. Third, the demand for gasoline has been rising constantly year to year. Are you confusing the annual demand fluctuations with year to year growth in consumption? Demand is always lowest in the winter, highest in the summer.

[quote]But no, we're going to gamble on some hypothetical solar breakthrough.[/quote]

Hypothetical? Yeah, about two dozen companies, some of which have been selling them in smaller volume for years, is "hypothetical". What's next -- are CFLs hypothetical as well?

[quote]Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night, diffuse and limited output, as well as the high price, having been demonstrated.[/quote]

In the pacific northwest, and to a lesser degree the west coast as a whole, energy storage is a non-issue. The west relies a lot on hydro power, and hydro pairs perfectly with solar (it already has a low capacity factor, so there's no additional economic cost to the hydro producers). Even in the east, solar alone with no storage can eliminate the p

Re:Good deal

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, what we have now is what we have now. The USA is rich in uranium, as is most of the world, I imagine. We could completly eliminate coal as a source of electricity, and switch to nuclear until such time as renewable sources become viable. I am skeptical that solar power will ever become viable for all our needs though. Consider, 3/4 of the earth surface is covered in water, roughly 10% of that land is suitable for solar arrays, and even with 100% efficent tech, it's unlikely that you will have more than 90% capture, due to weather. Factor in the daylight cycle, and the curve of the earth, and you're begining to see just how rarely you can capture a kilowat with one square meter and one hour.

Once you get into space however, it's a whole new ballgame.

Re:Good deal

[TooMuchToDo]

You missed the parent's point. While his numbers for Nanosolar were off, they've already sold out their first year of production. And they're going to sell out the next two years of production very quickly. Once they bring up a new factory, production speed is only going to increase.

Re:Good deal

[Eivind]

As these things go though, "doubling every 5 years" is not ambitious at all, infact that is very VERY conservative and much less than the increase in production of PV currently taking place. It is, afterall, less than 15% of growth a year.

The IEA PV trends report from 2003 estimated 20% growth a year for the next decade, but has since been revised upwards. Current trend is looking more like 25% growth in area produced year, which gives somewhat more than that in power generated because average efficiencies are climbing (allbeit slowly).

Furthermore, increased awareness and interest in global warming is likely to lead to increased incentives and consumer-interest, so I personally think the trend is more likely to grow rather than stall. My guess would be 30% growth a year for the next decade, which is aproximately double your estimate. This is also ignoring HEAT from the sun, which is currently at about half a percent of our energy-needs and *also* growing rapidly.

Still, you're right: Neither solar nor any other renewable can singlehandedly solve the problem in the next 20 years timeframe. They can contribute, particularily when many and diverse ones are used, but they can't alone solve the problem.

Proven tech can do a lot though. Did you know that if USA where as efficient measured in GDP/Energy-consumed as Sweden is, you'd be consuming -half- the energy you currently do ? That's not rocket science, that's what Sweden does -TODAY- (and Sweden is improving too!)

We're going to need more than -one- answer; if it was easy, it woulda been done a long time ago.

Re:Good deal

[gandhi_2]

Here's another way to think of the problem:

How many trees do you have to burn to get enough energy to MAKE a wind-powered generator or a PV cell?

How many trees does it take to smelt uranium and build a nuclear power plant?

How about a hydroelectric dam? These are things we will need energy to make. Does a PV cell result in a net energy gain if you account for how much it took to make one? Starting with the mining processes....all the way up to installation on your roof.

These are serious questions, because our grandkids will likely have nothing but bushes to burn for fuel. Kinda hard to make anodes, batteries, PV farms, etc once we've SUV'ed our resources away. Sort of like how hard it is to get into a phone booth with a spear in your chest...but that's another story.

Re:Good deal

[ThreeGigs]

First of all, Nanosolar HOPES to make the cells at $1/W, they are nowhere near that cheap yet, and this is the price their marketing department HOPES to achieve

Minor information injection here:
Nanosolar _is_ making solar 'sheets' now... no wishful thinking involved.
They've contracted with a German company who has ordered roughly 600 megawatts worth of sheets ....at.... drumroll please..... 90 cents per watt.

The sheets will be mounted in panels in a factory near Berlin, and used in Germany, which because of favorable laws requiring utilities to buy back power from customers, is experiencing a HUGE demand for renewable energy sources for the homeowner.

Re:Good deal

[msevior]

Minor information injection here:
Nanosolar _is_ making solar 'sheets' now... no wishful thinking involved.
They've contracted with a German company who has ordered roughly 600 megawatts worth of sheets ....at.... drumroll please..... 90 cents per watt.

Do you have a reference for this? It is very interesting news.

Re:Good deal

[srussell]

-Expanding Nuclear power

Aww, no, see... I saw a chart just like the one you linked to from 1910, and the percentage of Nuclear power used in the world was 0%. By your logic, this means that Nuclear power is utterly impractical and won't be able to produce enough energy for a small country, much less the world.

Or did the fact that increasing the use of photovoltaics will consequently increase the percentages of photovoltaics on that chart escape you? What, exactly, did you think that that graph proved, other than current world use? Potential?

--- SER

Re:Good deal

[olman]

Even if you want to use solar for everything, most pricing I've seen for bulk energy storage is about 4c/kWh to the consumer. With solar this cheap, that's affordable.

On what exactly? Hot air?

We do not have very good ways of storing energy. Battery technology sucks balls, especially on industrial grade. Sure, you could use the energy to make methanol for example and burn that later but that's not terribly efficient process. Growin plants and all that. Hydrogen has a nasty habit of evaporating through solid steel. Flyweels are right out for GWh class storage as well.

Have you factored in the costs of powering regions which do not get much sunlight during winter months and/or do not have sunny weather in general? Are we shipping pressurized hydrogen on megatankers now?

You take a $/W number that everyone knows is unrealistic unless you've got orbital solar panel exposed to sunlight 24/7 in hard vacuum. Then you go and compare the cost directly with coal that's guaranteed power when you need it at a known, stable efficiency. That's cute. Or intellectually dishonest. One of the two.

Re:Good deal

[Martian_Kyo]

I used google to search for result (I refuse to use google as a verb) and came up with this: http://www.celsias.com/2007/12/23/nanosolar-update-first-panels-now-shipping

Re:Good deal

[msevior]

While it may well cost Nanoslar 90 cents per watt to make these panels, I don't think they would sell them too far under the current commercial price of $4-$5 per watt. If there is demand at $4 why sell them for $1?

In any case this is incredibly good news. If they can make 430 MW of product per year at $4 million per MW from a $100 million dollar facility, that gives them well over $1 Billion per year to expand production. So in 2011 they may have 10 plants in full operation and another 100 under construction or ramping up. This has the potential to become very big, very fast.

Re:Good deal

[Zeinfeld]

How about a hydroelectric dam? These are things we will need energy to make. Does a PV cell result in a net energy gain if you account for how much it took to make one? Starting with the mining processes....all the way up to installation on your roof. Its called energy accounting. My Father was doing it for ICI in the 1970s after the first oil shock. My wife now works for a consulting company that provides that type of data.

The energy input required to make solar panels is one of the major concerns in the design process, particularly for anyone proposing cheap methods.

Cheap, long lasting battery systems plus low cost, efficient photovoltaics would allow a large amount of residential electricity use to be met by solar. Just panel every south facing roof. At the moment the cost is high, but the intrinsic cost of manufacture is rather less.

Re:Good deal

[smaddox]

I think CIGS are currently less durable than single crystal SI cells. I could be wrong on that though.

Re:Good deal

[pev]

Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night

True yes, but then again we don't use as much energy at night either! e.g. in the UK :
    http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/Demand8.htm

With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand, it seems likely that nations will turn to coal.

Actually I would have thought that eventually the only logical thing that will happen is that nations will start forcing their lazy citizens to use only the electricity that they need and stop wasting it left, right and centre. If that was the case suddenly more solar dependence would seem massively more achievable.

~Pev

Re:Good deal

[Anonymous Coward]

If only 'global warming' was caused by man... But it isn't. Watch 'The Global Warming Swindle'. We don't WANT nuclear power, thankyou very much.

"To avoid a 2 C increase in global average temperature we need substantial cuts in CO2 emissions before 2050."
Oh rly? And how do you suggest we stop the sun from going through its normal cycles of higher and lower output of heat? We're already past peak oil, so you needn't worry too much about people producing much more CO2 anyway.

CO2 levels FOLLOW increased solar output... they don't cause it.

Re:Good deal

[Rei]

On what exactly?

Compressed air and/or pumped water storage. The prices I've seen listed are about 4c/kWh.

Have you factored in the costs of powering regions which do not get much sunlight during winter months and/or do not have sunny weather in general?

With $1/W solar cells, it doesn't really matter. I'm not sure you understand how cheap that is. Even solar power Alaska comes out cheaper than coal with $1/W cells.

You take a $/W number that everyone knows is unrealistic unless you've got orbital solar panel exposed to sunlight 24/7 in hard vacuum

Um, no. Wattage ratings of solar cells go by a fixed standard. Nanosolar and all of the CIGS manufacturers (who give similar prices) cells follow the exact same standard as silicon cells. By this standard, silicon cells are ~$4.80/W. The price per watt is *NOT* the price of the power output. It's the price of a cell producing a "standard watt". You then plug this in to how much insolation you get in a given region, factor in all of the other capital costs, and then amortize them (and maintenance) over the life of the system.

Really, you must think people are utter idiots if they can't figure out that you need to do that.

Re:Good deal

[austinm3]

Just curious where you got "Even if you doubled worldwide solar cell output every five years..." considering that PV production has gone up by a factor of about 7 in the past 5 years and is doubling every 2 years making it the world's fastest-growing energy source (according to The Earth Policy Institute). That is not even to mention that the pace is accelerating as a new wave of technologies comes to market (50% growth last year). At the current rate of growth, and using your numbers for production required, solar production would supply the equivalent of all of todays energy in less than 24 years. Not that I think that will happen since growth will curtail eventually, but your numbers based on a 5 year doubling are way off:

It is also worth pointing out that the earth receives enough energy from the sun in 40 minutes to match global energy consumption for all of 2006. So basically we would just need to capture 0.008% of the total energy available from solar radiation to provide enough energy for today's level of use. Given the advance of technology and the value of energy to mankind, I hardly think that sounds like a far fetched goal.

Re:Good deal

[Rei]

There's nothing about the CIGS chemistry itself that's inherently less durable. On the contrary, since it's flexible, it can't break like silicon. On the other hand, CIGS cells can be put on any kind of substrate, and these can be less durable than other substrates. You print your cell on thin plastic, and of course it won't last as long as something with a heavy steel backing and a thick plate of glass on the front. In Nanosolar's case, if I recall correctly, they use a semi-flexible aluminum backing. I think that's probably a nice balance between durability and weight/cost.

Re:Good deal

[Rei]

Solar is more land efficient than coal or hydro, which together make up 60% of our generation capcity, when you consider the area used for coal mining and the lake backed up by the dam, respectively. An order of magnitude more land efficient than hydro, actually. I'm not sure how much land natural gas production/transportation/generation takes up, and likewise, for uranium mining/processing/enrichment/generation/waste storage, but I doubt they're out of the ballpark.

To top it all off, consider where solar can go. Solar thermal plants are built on the most barren and lifeless of sunburned desertscapes. Photovoltaic farms can also go there, but they can one up solar thermal -- they can go on *waste urban space*. And there's more than enough waste urban space to meet all of our needs even with inefficient panels.

Re:Good deal

[olman]

Compressed air and/or pumped water storage. The prices I've seen listed are about 4c/kWh.

Fair enough. But again you're omitting some key facts, are you not?

To start on the water reservoir business, you have to put about a billion USD on the table and that's if you're building the damn thing in China dozen years ago!? The chinese plant has storage capacity of around 9300MWh (13000MWh gravity potential at 70% efficiency). That takes 8 million cubic meters of water pumped 600 meters up. Or about 200m by 40m by 1km pool. Whoa nelly. Let's say one modern nuke plant is at around 1000MW so that engineering monster can store about nine hours worth of power output from the plant. Going to have to build quite a few pools to survive between September and April.

Let's look at that energy storage cost figure next, shall we? one billion cost, 9300MWh storage cap. Divide 1e9 with 9.3e6 and you have 107,5USD / kWh. Oops.

The price per watt is *NOT* the price of the power output. It's the price of a cell producing a "standard watt". You then plug this in to how much insolation you get in a given region, factor in all of the other capital costs, and then amortize them (and maintenance) over the life of the system.

Really, you must think people are utter idiots if they can't figure out that you need to do that.


No, I just think people who preach numbers as gospel without checking them are idiots.

You admitted it yourself the $1/W figure is completely meaningless. What matters is what's the average cost for kWh in any given region in average. In california you may have nice positive feedback since you need more AC the more sun you get, but over here we need more heating when we get f- all sunlight for months during winter. Even if it's technically daytime, it's usually overcast. In summer sun may be up 20 hours / day but didn't we just have a discussion on the practicality of large scale energy storage?

I'm sure your amortization calculations factor in a modest profit for capital for the projected 50 year service life and add to the cost of the energy accordingly?

Re:Good deal

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about solar thermal, like the PS10, and like the plants in california and nevada. Photovoltaics aren't the only solar show in town. And I, for one, think solar thermal is definitely up to the job, certainly by 2050, because it's already in process.

Re:Good deal

[Rei]

Divide 1e9 with 9.3e6 and you have 107,5USD / kWh. Oops.

Oops indeed. You assumed that the pool only works once.
Need a towel for the egg on your face?

You admitted it yourself the $1/W figure is completely meaningless.

The hell it is! It's how you tell how much power a cell produces in standard conditions costs per watt. The less it costs for the same amount in standard conditions, the more valuable the cell is. You punch the number in and adjust from standard conditions to your actual operating conditions. You can't get much more meaningful than that.

What matters is what's the average cost for kWh in any given region in average.

Which depends on the region, which is why you give solar cell output numbers relative to a standard set of operating conditions (1kW/m^2, 25C) so that you can adjust based on your local insolation. Do you expect every solar cell that comes on the market to have to have an entire table of how it performs in different regions to explain what can easily be represented with a single number, all because someome like you has trouble understanding simple conversions?

but over here we need more heating when we get f- all sunlight for months during winter

You use electric home heating? A) Tsk, tsk, and B) you're majorly in the minority.

I'm sure your amortization calculations factor in a modest profit for capital for the projected 50 year service life and add to the cost of the energy accordingly?

That's what IRR is -- your rate of return on the investment averaged over the lifespan of the project. If you want to see all of the factors that are taken into account by a typical solar economics calculator, check one out.

Re:Good deal

[Anonymous Coward]

The most probable ways to reduce CO2 emissions from our energy generation are: - Carbon capture and storage - Expanding Nuclear power - Increased use of Gas in place of Coal ( gas contains a lot of hydrogen and hence emits less CO2 per kwH than does coal ). Gas instead of Coal would help, but more Biofuels would help a lot more... They're created from plants that are consuming C02 in this millennium! I'm not sure about power plants, but I've heard that efficiently burning BioDiesels can run at a net loss of C02 emissions (when considering the entire life-cycle) depending on the Plant source... And even a 90% reduction would make a HUGE difference! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel http://www.sustainability.dpc.wa.gov.au/CaseStudies/biodiesel/biodieselprint.htm I think Biofuels will help our C02 emission problem enormously, despite the "Governemts+Oil Companies" lake of assistant...

Re:Good deal

[Gat0r30y]

You make some valid points, however you miss the crucial improvement photovoltaics offer over traditional energy distribution, namely it is much easier to distribute capacity. Are you going to purchase a home coal power plant any time soon? Obviously not, but if you could drop 1$/W and quit paying your electricity bill you just might have too consider it. With 1$/W you could pay off your system fairly quickly (as compared to other methods of generation at least, Ive even heard numbers as small as 4 years). When you consider the incentives many states have for solar, it becomes especially interesting. Places like MA and CO I know you can sell back what you produce, and since solar generation is generally peaking at the same times as peak use, it can be quite profitable. Granted solar power isn't going to replace electric utilities any time soon, and nobody expects there to such a dramatic shift away from traditional power generation. However, suplimenting existing capacity with solar (particularly when done in a distributed model, where each home can act as an independent utility, selling back unused capacity to the utility) can certainly change the game in the energy market.
It may not be a fair assumption to say that electric cars wont be solar powered.

Re:Good deal

[jdschulteis]

I used google to search for result (I refuse to use google as a verb) If you're going to English on /., you need to comfortable yourself with verbing.

Re:Good deal

[ultranova]

Actually I would have thought that eventually the only logical thing that will happen is that nations will start forcing their lazy citizens to use only the electricity that they need and stop wasting it left, right and centre.

Unneccessary, since this is one of the problems the free market actually can solve and is solving, with the price of electricity rising constantly. At this rate, the guy pedaling the treadmill providing power for a computer will have a higher salary than the guy using that computer.

Re:Good deal

[jafac]

No;
The most probably way to reduce CO2 emissions is:
Mass extinction of humans from;
War, disease, famine, or ecological disaster (Global warming?).

Fortunately, the folks who seem to be "running things" these days seem to be very much in favor of this option.

So, look forward to this, and frankly, I'd also be looking for investment/business opportunities. (assuming I don't get caught up in this mass extinction thing with the rest of you mooks. If I do, well, then I don't have to worry, do I?).

Re:Good deal

[PastaLover]

The only problem with biofuels is that you need to grow them somewhere, and we're rapidly running out of space where we can do that. While they're more or less carbon-neutral, you don't want to have to cut down the rain forest to be able to grow enough of them.

10x more...

[thekm]

...this mean we also get 10x the lipo explosion?

Re:10x more...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

Sony

[calebt3]

This is Sony's way of making a military-grade exploding battery.

Save an additional 50% power

[enoz]

... by publishing the story half as many times?

Save even more power by not marking this as redundant?

Lets Experiment

[Exile1]

Ok, in one month lets repost this article, and see if we can go for a triple post.

Re:Lets Experiment

[TimSSG]

We are not going for "triple post" we are supposed to try for first post. Tim S

Re:Lets Experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Triple post? Or 1000x improvement in battery life?

Hurray!

[Zekasu]

Now I can have 10x the explosion in my Dell laptop!

But will it explode 10X more powerful ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Lithium Ion battery does explode. A Lithium Ion battery that is 10X as powerful, or last 10X as long ... now, will it explode 10X more powerful ?

Please give that a thought, shall we ?

Re:But will it explode 10X more powerful ?

[BlueParrot]

Very briefly put, no. The explosive nature of lithium batteries has very little to do with the electric energy stored in them. If the electric energy stored in a battery was even remotely close to the amount of energy released by burning the chemicals they are composed of, then we would all be driving electric cars by now. In fact, more modern lithium batteries are less prone to explode because they have lower internal resistance, so they don't heat up as much when discharged. I keep seeing this fallacy about energy content vs explosive danger when people discuss batteries, but it is frankly nonsense. Many high-power explosives don't produce a whole lot of heat when they detonate, it is the rapid shock-wave that gives them their destructive power. Conversely, regular butter contains enough energy to drive your car on it, but it is quite tricky to ignite and hence fairly safe.

Anyway, poorly manufactured Lithium batteries are dangerous because they ignite easily. It has very little to do with their energy content.

Re:But will it explode 10X more powerful ?

[mrcaseyj]

The Wikipedia article on Energy Density lists the energy density of lithium batteries with nanowires at about 6MJ/kg and the energy density of TNT at about 4MJ/kg. And unlike butter or gasoline or some other things, I think the lithium battery has the oxidizer in the package (though maybe not right in the molecule like TNT). I don't think they're going to let you take many of these on the plane with you.

Re:But will it explode 10X more powerful ?

[MikeTheMan]

Who needs gas when you can power your car with exploding batteries? Hmm? That's right, no one. And now our energy problems are forever solved.

OK...

[All Names Have Been]

"...There are no roadblocks for either of these."

So quit with the jibber-jabber and make with the 50 hour laptop battery.

Re:OK...

[tgd]

It'll never happen, at least in the US.

There's TSA limits on the amount of lithium that can be in a battery. Using nanowires to hold more lithium will get you a bigger, yet far more dangerous battery you can't bring anywhere.

Its not so good in cars either, given how dangerous lithium ion batteries are. I'd rather have a RTG or a box of dynamite in my car.

Supersonic Tesla

[Cur8or]

Electric cars will now be able to go 10 times as far or 10 times as fast. I vote for a 0 to 60 Mph in 0.25 seconds Tesla.

Re:Supersonic Tesla

[aproposofwhat]

At an average acceleration of just over 11G, you'd likely only ever do that 0-60 one time, before crashing uncontrollably after losing consciousness :P

Re:Supersonic Tesla

[Cur8or]

In my mind I kind of saw a lot of burning rubber, but very little movement. Maybe with some fatter tires the inevitable traction issues could be mitigated.

Re:Supersonic Tesla

[kcbanner]

All we need to do is use some of the energy to get to 88mph, and divert the rest into the flux capacitor.

Re:Supersonic Tesla

[Jesus_666]

But it should also have the brakes from the 2008 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500KR. You know, for those times when you really need to go from 300 to 0 mph in less than 12 feet.

Re:Supersonic Tesla

[IdeaMan]

Roads stink for how expensive they are.
Some enhancements:
Change geometry of road to include slots, notches, chines, etc that a matching wheel on the car engages with.
Embed rows of magnets surrounding a slot in the road.
Sucker, Fan, and rocket cars: direct air up or create suction under the car.
Ground effects.
Aerodynamics (wings)

Any of these could be employed to increase acceleration and deceleration.
Why do you think the F16 vs top-fuel dragster comes out with the jet winning? They cheat by using a catapult.

Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Caspian]

This technology sounds wonderful. I'd absolutely adore batteries to last ten times longer than they do at present. It would be amazing... imagine 20 or 30 hours of 'real life' battery life on a laptop instead of 2-3 hours. However, I'm really getting tired of stories on Slashdot that basically can be summarised as "Scientists promise [amazing product] using [amazing technology]". Nanotech, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, micro-scale fission power plants, exotic materials... whatever. You know what? I'm sick of reading stories about theoretically possible things that might (but probably won't) make it into an actual product some time in the near future.

Slashdot ought to have a section for "navel-gazing scientific speculation". Seriously, this sort of "we can make [x] perform [10, 100, 1000...] times better!" bullshit belongs right alongside the "in [10, 20, 50] years, everyone will be in flying cars!" type of crap which has filled Scientific American for, well, forever.

It's 2008. We still don't have flying cars, practical nuclear fusion, fission-powered cars, or multi-petabyte holographic storage devices. In the real world, advances in technology are usually incremental and evolutionary in nature, or a serious tradeoff at best (As an example, the move underway from platter-based hard drives to solid-state hard drives, while revolutionary in nature, involves massive tradeoffs in price-per-gigabyte which are only slowly lessening). It took CD technology a decade or two to give way to a successor with 10 times the storage capacity (dual-layer DVD-R), and making bits smaller is (arguably) a lot easier than increasing energy density (barring the use of nuclear technology or other exotic things which-- again-- isn't realistically going to happen any time soon).

So where's the "NotGonnaHappen" tag?

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[giorgist]

Hey hey lighten up. This is news for nerds. If you want to read about things that are on the market, go read ebay. It does get frustrating, but be critical and enjoy NEWS. Things are not simply evolutionary, things are changing increadably fast on the big picture. Step back and look just a couple of ago. The difference is evident. Each technology/science front is moving forward pretty fast. And all together are starting to tie in ... look at MEMS ... 2GB USB sticks for a couple of bucks, all the music and human knowlege in your pocket, supercomputing/navigating phones, genome Vs History. All this comes to you care of Slashdot ... plus ponies ... pink ones ... what more do you want G

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Rei]

You can learn the caveats to each tech if you're willing to do the research. In this case, the first caveat is cycle life. They want to get 1000 cycles out of it, and think they'll be able to. But if they can only get a dozen or cycles, this tech is dead in the water. If they can get 1000 cycles, they'll almost certainly be flooded with venture capital for commercializing it (or make a fortune selling it to an established company). Either way, commercialization will be attempted. Then there will be a set of new milestones for how commercialization is going -- facility construction, purity standards for the components, nanowire quality standards, anode standards, whole cell standards, whole cell lifecycle testing, and so forth. It could fail on any one of those, although the odds for any given one are low. All in all, if it gets to the commercialization phase, I'd give them one in two, one in three odds of being successful. If they're successful, given that this is just an anode advancement, we're only talking about a "severalfold" improvement in energy density (likely with fast charge time to go along with it). It's still be a huge revolution, however.

Stay tuned. The results from lifespan testing should be published some time this summer.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[TooMuchToDo]

It's 2008. We still don't have flying cars, practical nuclear fusion, fission-powered cars, or multi-petabyte holographic storage devices. In the real world, advances in technology are usually incremental and evolutionary in nature, or a serious tradeoff at best (As an example, the move underway from platter-based hard drives to solid-state hard drives, while revolutionary in nature, involves massive tradeoffs in price-per-gigabyte which are only slowly lessening). It took CD technology a decade or two to give way to a successor with 10 times the storage capacity (dual-layer DVD-R), and making bits smaller is (arguably) a lot easier than increasing energy density (barring the use of nuclear technology or other exotic things which-- again-- isn't realistically going to happen any time soon).

It's 2008. We have extremely safe cars. We have practical, efficient nuclear fission (both for peaceful and weapons uses). We have the ability to store 1TB of data on a drive the size of a small cigar box. And don't forget that I can communicate from one side of the world to the other instantly either via fiber or satellite.

True, we don't have earth-shattering technologies occur overnight (you point this out as well, that research takes time). But if you've noticed, the pace of research and breakthroughs has been increasing over the last 30-40 years. Different technologies build on each other. Faster microprocessors allow us to build hybrid cards and space vehicles. Genetic engineering opens a whole new world in biology.

What I'm trying to get at is, don't be so pessimistic. This battery technology can and will be developed quickly. It's because we have few other practical options.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[mw22]

So where's the "NotGonnaHappen" tag? That's not going to happen.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[mcrbids]

It's 2008. We still don't have flying cars, practical nuclear fusion, fission-powered cars, or multi-petabyte holographic storage devices. In the real world, advances in technology are usually incremental and evolutionary in nature, or a serious tradeoff at best (As an example, the move underway from platter-based hard drives to solid-state hard drives, while revolutionary in nature, involves massive tradeoffs in price-per-gigabyte which are only slowly lessening). It took CD technology a decade or two to give way to a successor with 10 times the storage capacity (dual-layer DVD-R), and making bits smaller is (arguably) a lot easier than increasing energy density (barring the use of nuclear technology or other exotic things which-- again-- isn't realistically going to happen any time soon).

Flying cars don't need flying drivers, they need driving pilots. There are about 650,000 pilots in the United States with a certificate of Private Pilot or better. (the minimum license necessary to take more than 1 passenger in a flying vehicle) Compared to the population of 300 MILLION people, and you find that there are an awful few people who could "drive" a flying car. You find the economics of scale that will work at this level. Certainly, Detroit won't. Flying isn't the same as driving. There are no roads, and you have to pay careful attention to long-established procedures designed to avoid situations like running out of gas. (a minor inconvenience in a car, potentially fatal in a plane if you aren't well trained to handle it) I hate to diss flying, since I'm a pilot by hobby, and I love my hobby. But the requirements to pilot are significantly greater than the requirements to drive.

Nuclear Fusion is widely available. Look up. (you have to go outside to see it - it's called the "sun") As a source for electricity, it's coming at prices comparable to coal which is the cheapest non-renewable form of energy today in the USA.

Data storages has generally followed Moore's law, with a doubling time of about 18 months. What more do you want? I remember when a 100 MB HDD was big. Now, a little over 2 decades later, I routinely transfer files bigger than that all around the world via the Internet, and save to a flash disk the size of my thumb that requires no external power source, while my LAPTOP hard disk is 2,500 MB in size. I won't highlight my workstation/home-server with > 3 TB of storage.

Amazing!

Try using a 10 year old computer sometime. You'll be amazed at just how far we've really come.

And, technology is advancing on ALL fronts.

I recently added on to my home, doubling its size. Along with that came new regulations for insulation, higher-efficiency heating/cooling unit, insulation, double-paned windows, etc. I DOUBLED the size of my home, but my heating/cooling bill is about HALF what it used to be. Progress? Suffice it to say that the money I'm saving on my utility bill easily beats the monthly cost of the financed retrofit upgrades to my original home! In other words: it would be cheaper to buy the upgrades to an existing 100 year old home to get these improvements than to keep using whatever you had in the first place.

I drive a 10 year-old Saturn. It gets 30 MPG fully loaded at 90 MPH, quietly, with air conditioning, decent radio, and air bags. Back in the 1980s, I drove a VW diesel Rabbit that did about the same at the same speed. It was noisy, shook lots, had an AM-only radio, and didn't have A/C. Relative prices (inflation adjusted) makes the Saturn CHEAPER than the VW Rabbit. Hello progress ?!?

I use CFL lights throughout my home. Over their lifetimes, they are cheaper than incandescents in replacement costs alone, and 5 of these things use less electricity than a SINGLE incandescent bulb. I can light up my whole house for what it used to cost to turn on the porch light. I've banished incandescents from my home. And, I'm still not particularly good at turning

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[tehdaemon]

It has ALWAYS been this boring.

Actually, it is usually much more boring than this.

Can you come up with a time when it has been less boring?

T

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Badgam]

Developing the ability to produce these technologies is an important advance, because it shows that it is possible to bring it to market, and I'm pretty sure the sheer demand for improvements in battery life will ensure this technology makes it in the near future. The thing is, the main reason why flying cars and fusion power didn't take off is because they're either very difficult, very expensive, or impractical under current conditions. It has nothing to do with the failure of technology to advance quickly, it has to do with the fact that flying cars were an all-around terrible idea and fusion power was far more difficult and far more expensive to achieve than originally estimated. I mean, if you look beyond flying cars and see all of the other, far more important and world-changing predictions that came right, you'll see that "It's going to happen" is far, far more common than "It's not going to happen"...the optimists have won every single time because the pessimists were inherently unwilling to accept that new disruptive technologies emerge on to the market all the time. The death of many companies hinged on the fact that their leadership did not move to take advantage of new technology. I'd rather be on the side that says "it can happen" and be wrong than the side that says "it can't happen" and be wrong, because the forward-looking model can always bounce back and look for the next potential innovation while the latter will either fall behind and become obsolete or be forced to adopt the technology...except they won't be the ones selling it, they'll be the ones buying it from the company whose foresight allowed them to take over the market. And look at it this way: all things equal, we'll have our cheap multi-petabyte devices in 2020. And that's assuming doubling time doesn't speed up, which is pretty unlikely given the amount of money being poured in to it to deal with ever-increasing volumes of data.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The problem of the "flying car" is not technological, it's economic and societal. We already have Piper Cubs, Cessnas and so on.

Given the cost of energy, do you really want to pay for the cost to fly a flying car? I don't think energy is going to get any cheaper over the next century. Just the gas to fly a single prop aircraft is $45/hr, not counting all the other maintenance costs, and the craft can only go about twice as fast as legal highway speed. Do you really want to deal with sky rage?

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[mgblst]

You know, for stories I am not interested in, I generally ignore them by not clicking on the link.

Look some people want to hear what research is going on, what is at the cutting edge. These are things we don't hear about in the normal media. If you just want product deliveries, wait around for the Macworld or CES discussions.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Try using a 10 year old computer sometime. You'll be amazed at just how far we've really come."

Bad Analogy.

Guess you're not using AMD:-P.
My AMD 950mhz is still in daily use and not painfully slow for most casual use. What is really amazing is how much longer the new computers take to boot.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

You had a 950mhz AMD processor in 1998? Whoa, how did they/you manage that?

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[donatzsky]

Faster microprocessors allow us to build hybrid cards

So you're saying that I can have both an Ace of Spades and Diamonds on the same card? Neat.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[nmg196]

Point accepted, but some technologies DO come to market and work out OK in the end.

1. I would never have believed when I was at university exactly ten years ago, that in 2008, I would have a more powerful processor in my *telephone* than I had in my desktop computer I took to uni to study Computer Science with.
2. I would never have believed ten years ago that I could get 4 GIGABYTES of non-volatile memory in something the same size as my little fingernail (MicroSD) for a few pounds off eBay.
3. I also bet my colleague about 3 years ago that you would NOT be able to ever run your computer from any kind of solid state hard disk until at least 2010. I lost the bet - I assumed the OS and data would get bigger faster than solid state storage would increase in size, but 64GB SSD drives are now affordable and would easily take all my files on any of my computers.
4. We can access the Internet in the lounge, park or coffee shop at multi-megabit speeds, often for free. 10 years ago MOST people had never even heard of "broadband" and I was paying £20 per month for Demon DIAL UP at 28.8K. If you'd said that someone could get 2-8Mbit internet over shitty copper phone lines from a mile away, they'd have laughed. At the time I was struggling to make a 10Mbit work just within the confines of our office. Now our office as a 20MBit internet connection just a few years later. When I graduated from Uni in '99 (CompSci) our entire halls of residence (over 100 people) was connected back to the uni with one 64Kbit leased line - which cost the uni nearly £2000 per month. Now they have 100Mb broadband in every room connected to the uni using a laser.

I doubt MOST people would have believed any of these things would be possible in only 8-10 years - even on slashdot but sometimes it just does happen.

On the other hand there are some other surprises. If you expand the old graphs of PC processor clock speeds, we should have 12GHz CPUs now, but we don't. Clock speeds stopped increasing about 4 years ago. Processors are still faster due to architectural changes, faster bus speeds and more cores, but clock speeds are exactly the same if not slower than they were a few years back. My 4 year old desktop has a FASTER clock speed (2.4GHz P4) than my brand new more expensive desktop (2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo).

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[drooling-dog]

But if you've noticed, the pace of research and breakthroughs has been increasing over the last 30-40 years. Different technologies build on each other. Faster microprocessors allow us to build hybrid cards and space vehicles. Genetic engineering opens a whole new world in biology. Maybe the "problem" is that we've become so accustomed to rapid progress in science and engineering that we've started to take it for granted. Now, when advances occur as they do every day, they're more or less anticipated and thus capitalized into our expectations. The "wow" factor gets harder and harder to achieve, at least outside the immediate field where a breakthrough is made...

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really want to deal with sky rage?

Sky rage wouldn't be much of a problem. It's not like there's only a few lanes so some asshat and block traffic for fun. Of course, runway rage would be a problem if they aren't VTOL.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[dylan_-]

On the other hand there are some other surprises. If you expand the old graphs of PC processor clock speeds, we should have 12GHz CPUs now, but we don't. Clock speeds stopped increasing about 4 years ago. Processors are still faster due to architectural changes, faster bus speeds and more cores, but clock speeds are exactly the same if not slower than they were a few years back.

I think the growth in computing power has remained fairly close to the mark though. Last review I saw for a Core 2 Duo had a benchmark that was rated as 1.0 for a 1GHz P3. The Core 2 Duo scored around 15, meaning you'd need a P3 running at 15GHz to match it, which is close to your figure. Obviously it's difficult to compare on a single benchmark, but it's interesting that for some tasks at least the growth is fairly constant.

Tom's hardware has a page here that'll allow you to compare your P4 to your new chip.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer-based technology HAS skyrocketed fairly constantly for the last 30years. The increases in capacity/speed/whatever are so common people have come to expect it.

And i'd like to point out that we DO have viable flying cars. The problem is that gas is so damn expensive now it doesn't make any sense to own one. Also anywhere you need to go is already paved over with road so it makes sense. If we decided to destroy all our highways i'm sure the switch to flying cars would happen quickly enough. But as it stands theres no reason to.

As for fission powered cars there is no reason to do so. We have electric cars which are effectively fussion powered since they get their energy from power plants. The reason cars dont have power plants inside them is because its pointless and a waste of money offering no real advantage.

Technology will spring up when there is a necessity for it. We don't have technology to defend ourselves from raptors either. But i'm sure if there was a large raptor attack we would invent stuff quickly.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flying "car": Here

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[TooMuchToDo]

I completely agree. The bar keeps getting set higher and higher, so "regular" breakthroughs never really awe us anymore. It's less of a technological problem, and more of an sociological expectation problem though. =)

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[TooMuchToDo]

Of course, I meant cars. Give me a break. I had been up for around 30 hours at that point. =)

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed accept for on the computer front.

I'm still using a G4 quicksilver which is 7 years old now ...and while it is showing it's age i can still edit hd video in Final Cut and audio in Logic Studio 8, I can still model in Modo and render in Lightwave, I can still do art in Painter or photoshop, I can still make all sorts of simple apps with quartz composer and Xcode.

it's no speed demon now, and i know 7 is not 10, but functionality wise my 7 year old computer can still hang with modern apps and keep my employed.
-Simon P.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It would be a problem because the boundaries between craft have to be a *lot* bigger than people accept for cars. And you're going to get the jerks that can't hold a prescribed altitude or direction. And you're going to get drunken flying. Personal flying machines has no place for most of the general public in the short term. Maybe it would be OK if it was all automated such that the user is not allowed to pilot it. But that would still not resolve the energy problem, if you're complaining about the cost of fuel, maintenance, cars and insurance now, don't try flying, it's worse in aircraft.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[porpnorber]

But will the computer vendors give us 20 hour battery lives, or will they give us 16 cores, quad-SLI, 20 channel audio and a holographic projector that can spin your icons around your head while you are trying to work?

Ok, I exaggerate, but my first laptop ran Linux kernel 0.something for about six hours, after I installed all the RAM I could afford and turned off the sync daemon. I bought it with a monochrome display on purpose. Battery performance has not been getting worse since then, but battery life has—I haven't had a laptop since that got past five hours, even in Linux—and it's not because I don't pay attention when I buy.

I don't know why short battery life is the laptop manufacturer's strategy, but it can't be an accident.

(You also notice that they region lock the DVD players on laptops. Because everyone knows that laptop owners never travel, I guess. They're bloody insane, that's the explanation.)

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[eyenot]

I differ! We're so used to being "wowed" by things that come with this sort of statement attached: "...that scientists say will still be some years before it is developed and on the actual market, or even something that can be demonstrated in a laboratory", that we've forgotten how to say "yeah, going wow is fun and all but the entertainment industry already makes over a trillion dollars a year, and science is supposed to be, you know, substantial".

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[wximagery95]

What I'm trying to get at is, don't be so pessimistic. This battery technology can and will be developed quickly. It's because we have few other practical options.

Necessity breeds innovation.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Badgam]

Actually, the clock speed one is interesting because it shows how technology can adapt to overcome roadblocks; had we not found other ways to circumvent the very real problems with further increases in clock speed, it would have presented a considerable slowdown in performance growth (the fastest I've seen today are 4.0 Ghz, about double the amount from four years ago), but due to changes in other aspects of processing these issues were by and large overcome. There are, of course, still many challenges regarding the transition to this new paradigm (for lack of a better term) in performance growth, but it is working and is making up for stagnation in clock speeds. In fact, it's highly likely that these new ways of increasing performance will surpass what would have been possible were clock speeds increasing, and it's also highly likely that these technologies would not have come to market were clock speeds still able to increase at projected rates. I guess it just goes to show how performance metrics themselves can become irrelevant when the means by which performance is generated change, as well as how technological barriers create more beneficial changes than they do problems.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[jafac]

Take Note:

The Fully-Loaded Diesel Rabbit of yesteryear may have been noisy, only had AM radio, etc.
But the Fully-Loaded Diesel Rabbit of TODAY will get you significantly more than 45 mpg highway (I've heard as high as 60, but I get 45 mpg in my Jetta).

And for what it's worth, I was getting 36 mpg in my 1972 VW Karmann Ghia.

With the top down.

Fuel economy standards have really gone NOWHERE in the gas-burner space, with the exception of hybrids.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[sydbarrett74]

But the requirements to pilot are significantly greater than the requirements to drive. Exactly. And as it is, 90% of the people on the road these days should never have been granted a DL. They can't drive for shit. I'd hate to think of them going airborne.

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[mcrbids]

Exactly. And as it is, 90% of the people on the road these days should never have been granted a DL. They can't drive for shit. I'd hate to think of them going airborne.

Sadly, the same could be said of pilots. Yet somehow, it generally works out. I guess it's good news....

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1960s?

some more

[Atreide]

Nanowires Boost Laptop Battery Life to 20 Hours
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/19/169259

Old News

[Anonymous Coward]

This was on engadget a while ago... Nothing has changed since then.
It seems like a bad idea to go public with the technology when you have no real business plan.
You can't really patent silicon, or nanowires. I'll bet Duracel and Energizer already have their own working models at this point.

Re:Old News

[eyenot]

The point is when you come out with a sci-fi like this as "real science", it's not about the feasability, especially not the market feasability: it's about the greed of corporate sponsors who will gladly take you on once you graduate, in order to get to be the first ones with a battery like this "on the market". You'll always have the excuse that it's breakthrough and nobody's done anything like it yet, and you'll always have the security that it's this huge burgeoning field of new discoveries that all the other corporations are drooling over and buying up scientists to develope. You'll have it made.

Never mind the knee-jerk "We've heard this before"

[mmell]

(although we have heard this before)

Nano-technology . . . last I heard, not the easiest stuff to engineer in. Nope - can't find too many qualified workers on street-corners. 'quipment ain't at the local machine shop.

Erm, even if this isn't just another load of vapor, just how much will these things cost? and how do you mass-produce 'em?

Oh, and we've heard this whole "new technology discovered which promises blah." We didn't need to hear it twice.

How is parent offtopic?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get that moderation at all.

Why graphite?

[drwho]

Why is graphite used as an anode material? What does it offer ? I was just reading some cool articles on how to make electricity from sewage ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MicrobialFuelCells/ ) and thinking this. I read articles where they similarly talk about little 'whiskers' or cilia that bacteria have in relation to this sewage-to-voltage idea and wonder if it's all related somehow.

Yea, I am starting to turn into a biochemistry hacker. Just imagine what my basement will smell like now...ha ha ha

could increase the availability of solar and wind

[FriedmannSolution5]

http://www.solarnetwork.net/ is an app that hopes for this - but bigger and cheaper storage would help with the intermittent nature of these 2 power sources. does anyone think that affordable battery capacity could increases the way hard drive capacity did over the last 10 years? 1997 I think I was installing 8GB drives in a machine maybe? maybe even 4GB drives for laptops? Today it's easily 10 times that size on average.

You were beaten to it

[Kupfernigk]

During the Falklands "war", it was discovered that the British Ministry of Defence had managed to supply the Army with radios that used rechargeable batteries, but no battery chargers below brigade level.* The Army was reduced to using heliographs on some occasions.

After the event, there were several studies of what to do about it. One suggestion was to make available lithium batteries as an alternative. The cells proposed were really quite big. After a few interesting incidents in testing, one of which had an engineer cowering behind a filing cabinet screaming "get that wire away from that thing", one REME officer suggested that with a simple piece of spring loaded steel, the cells could find an alternative use as emergency grenade substitutes. (Disappointingly, the actual solution proposed was to fit an internal fuse.)

Given the energy density of this proposal, a simple micro-Sterling generator driven by sticks of dynamite might be safer in the briefcase.

*The Ministry of Defence is kind of like the Pentagon, but without the competence.

Re:You were beaten to it

[N3Z]

*The Ministry of Defence is kind of like the Pentagon, but without the competence.

I'm confused. Is "competence" one of those words that means something completely different in British english?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Storing more danger?

[cheros]

As that technique stores a lot more energy in the same volume, I would imagine that a lot more energy will come out if something goes wrong with the battery.

This could get interesting later..

Blackouts

[TapeCutter]

"I vote for a 0 to 60 Mph in 0.25 seconds Tesla."

To avoid blackouts it should also come with a pair of pressurised pants like jet pilots use (preferably with room for an adult diaper).

We have extremely safe cars

[Grampaw Willie]

Ha!

yer cars are loaded with demolition charges

these are placed to insure that your car is totaled in the event of a minor accident

this is so tha the insurance company can part our your car and give you a screw-job settlement and make money on car accidents

the safety argument is a pretext for this scam: a good seat belt is all that is needed

when the demolition charges blew in my wife's Saturn it turned a $2000 collission into a totla wreck. in addition the charge broke the bones controlling the thumb in her right hand resulting in a monster medical bill and 8 weeks in a cast

Re:We have extremely safe cars

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf are you talking about? Is this your way of renaming airbags?

Hmm...

[vegiVamp]

Silicone-based batteries, eh ?

*clamps starter cables on wife's nipples*

Erm... Why does it suddenly say 'silicon' ? *starts running, HARD*

Correct - a bit of amplification

[Kupfernigk]

The whole principle of operation of storage batteries is to separate charge by oxidising at one pole and reducing at the other, thus the larger the electrical storage per unit volume, the greater the available chemical energy. When the poles are connected, the oxidiser is reduced and the reducer is oxidised back again, in such a way that the exchanged electrons pass along a wire outside the battery rather than directly between the reagents internally. Replying to the GP, the lower the internal resistance, the closer the reagents must be together and the more rapid their reaction, since this is how the battery discharges. Any internal short will allow a potentially more catastrophic reaction, since more current will be generated. It is true as per the GP that butter has a high energy density but is quite safe. Now mix that butter with the correct quantity of powdered oxidiser - say powdered potassium chlorate - and you have, basically, home made blasting explosive. You are not comparing like with like. I wonder who the GP works for?(It's probably illegal to write this posting from the UK, but, Gordon, are you going to lock up everybody who knows a bit of basic chemistry?)

Re:Correct - a bit of amplification

[BlueParrot]

Any internal short will allow a potentially more catastrophic reaction, since more current will be generated.

Not if the heat from that current is insufficient to cause further energy release. Thus the activation energy of the reaction is also important. Also, it is NOT the Lithium that is being oxidized/reduced during normal operation in a LiCoO2 cell, but the Co ions. The argument about energy density vs damage potential would be true if it was only the ions being reduced/oxidized present, and if their reaction with the atmosphere released negliable energy. However, you also have to take structural materials into consideration as well as the operating environment. If I would make a Li-ion battery with the same chemistry as before, but used metallic sodium alloyed with mercury for the casing, and operated the thing under water, then I think you would agree that the energy stored in the battery isn't necessarily the main problem?

When you discuss battery safety you need to consider not just the redox reaction, but other possible reactions that can occur between the electrolyte, andode/cathode, what happens if the battery leaks, how does the electrolyte react with air, how easily heat is dissipated through the material etc ... There isn't any particular reason why you couldn't make a perfectly safe battery with very high energy density, and in fact, many developments of Li based batteries are substantially safer while simultaneously having higher power density. Li-polymer is one example. Nano Titanate is another.

As for butter, sure if you TRY to make an explosive out of it, you can get one, that doesn't stop our bodies from recovering the energy in a far more benign manner. If anything this just proves my point. The same energy storage system ( fat ) can have vastly different safety performance depending on HOW you oxidize it. Mix it with sodium nitrate and set it on fire in an oxygen rich atmosphere and you get a spectacular fire. If you instead use some organic enzymes to dissolve it in a salt solution and send it through an advanced cascade of reactions to produce ATP, then you would have difficulties to burn yourself with it if you tried.

Interview with Dr. Cui

[Twinbee]

Interview with Dr. Cui, here.

Used batteries

[mdsolar]

I think your point about continued use of batteries after they are no longer transportation grade is very important. This model is already being commercialized using Tesla Motors' batteries. I estimate here that these used batteries would provide storage of about a half a day's worth of our total generation if our transporation sector were converted to plug in hybrids. With a 45% wind, 45% solar and 10% hydro grid, this would be most or all of the storage we would need. This would allow us to concentrate on the power sources with the highest EROEI and thus increase prosperity as oil depletes.

Sure you can make electric filling stations.

[hey!]

But you don't use "filling stations" under an electric scenario the way you use them with gas. The only reason I'd ever set out on road trip with less than a full tank of gas is because it's more convenient to gas up on the highway than before I get on the highway. If the opposite were true, I'd always started gassed up. If, for example, I had a gas pump at my house, I'd always start full.

If my "gas" is electricity I do have pump at my house. True, if I were completely discharged it might take me ten hours to top off, but that's only going to happen if I'm taking a cross country trip, where I run into problems if I want to travel more than the maximum range of the battery before plugging in. Supposing the range of my vehicle is 350 miles, I could easily make it from New York to Washington DC (230 miles), but I'd just miss being able to go from LA to San Francico (381).

Now, for the LA to San Francisco trip, I don't really need to top off all the way to full to get there. If electricity is available everywhere, in homes, motels, even parking garages, I don't drive around with one eye on the gas tank and the other looking for a gas station. If I can get to my destination, I can plug in. Even parking meters could be "pumps", simultaneously charging you for you fill up and parking time. In short, you'd never really think about where the next gas station is in city driving.

So on my LA to SF trip of 381 miles, when I pull into a highway "filling station" I'm not looking to charge up from 50 miles of range to 350; I only need to go from 50 to 100 (to be conservative). Furthermore, since this is a six hour drive, let's say that adding fifteen minutes for a fill up and a cup of coffee is not unreasonable. Using your figures, we're talking 1/7 the energy in five times the time, so 85 amps at 500v would do.

Of course, what I'd like to see is rapid "recharging" by simply swapping batteries. This could be done robotically in seconds, if batteries were designed to be quick swapped like cassettes.

The reason I'd like to see this is that it makes worrying about the state of your battery, particularly recycling the battery, a non-issue. The trick is that the batteries would have to be, in essence, leased, probably from a single entity. When you roll up to a filling station, it's either because you're on a long trip, or the battery you have is getting flaky. The robot pops the old battery cassette out, puts a fresh on in, and puts the old battery in the recharge queue. The battery has a computer on it, so you get a credit for the remaining energy. If the battery's performance has been decaying, the energy in the battery is extracted an its kicked out into a recycling queue. The battery is picked up by the owner, taken apart and reconditioned into a "like new" battery.

The main problem with this scenario is that battery technology is going to be an important focus of innovation for the next couple of decades. But in the long run this creates a system that is not just more convenient than gasoline in most situations (which a charge anywhere scenario would be), but nearly completely hassle free.

Why don't you make hydrogen instead?

[Joce640k]

The main problem right now isn't batteries, it's making clean electricity. If we can solve that, all the rest is just a technicality.

Maybe it'll be batteries, maybe it'll be hydrogen, maybe even both (hydrogen/battery hybrid). Who cares, so long as it runs?

Re:Why don't you make hydrogen instead?

[hey!]

Actually, the main problem IS batteries; but its not technological, it's legal: battery patents that are being used to slow technology adoption rather than make money from it.

Yes, making cleaner electricity would be better than making dirtier electricity. But cars are very, very dirty.

We're using old breakthroughs

[AlpineR]

I think your parent poster doesn't realize how long it takes to turn a basic scientific discovery into a consumer product. There is a ton of work to do: understanding the phenomenon, optimizing conditions, designing a device, patenting, building a manufacturing plant, working out failures and inefficiencies, licensing, marketing, and getting the cost low enough to be affordable outside of military and space applications.

Before I became a scientist and engineer myself I would have thought a couple years would be plenty. Now I see that ten years is more realistic, and the basic research that I do could be twenty years or more from a consumer device.

The result is that we are using big scientific breakthroughs, but the science part was done a decade ago. Current processors use strained silicon on germanium, a development similar in scope to silicon nanowire anodes. I think Slashdot even discussed it several years back.

Sometimes Slashdot discusses Apple announcements about a new laptop available today. Sometimes Slashdot talks about solid state hard drives expected in a few months. And sometimes we hear about discoveries right at the beginning of the development process, and that's just fine for science-oriented people like me.

Re:We're using old breakthroughs

[russotto]

I think your parent poster doesn't realize how long it takes to turn a basic scientific discovery into a consumer product.

Example: GMR, discovered 1988, in products in 1997. Probably one of the shorter ones. This use of silicon nanowires isn't nearly so basic a scientific discovery, though.

Re:We're using old breakthroughs

[eyenot]

Here's a great counter-example: Tilden, the roboticist who made analogue-"brain" robots that displayed impressively realistic "lifelike" behaviours. That's not bad, and he threw it together with his own bits and pieces of things.

Nanotech is being talked about in a few comments here like it's next to impossible to build. But we've all seen photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after electron-scanned PHOTOGRAPH, of the various miniscule parts and so on that would theoretically one day be used inside of a nanomachine.

You could build one today: if it were feasible. It's obviously not feasible. We wouldn't be reading about the spare parts that are sitting around waiting for the actual thing to break down like a bunch of Taiwanese warehouse owners who jumped into the future from before SAABS and Jaguars were made. It makes no sense.

And all the while the claims get more and more ridiculous. That's just not indicative of real science going on, you have to admit that much. You can go on, and on and on about how things today were unimaginable twenty years ago, or what have you, but let's not get caught up in the imaginative aspect of it, when the real argument IS that this junk -is- imagination!

What's real? When you never, ever thought you'd have so much wireless around, but one year the products are on the shelves and the next year they're everwhere and the towers are going up. Or you never thought you'd be heating up ice-cubes of spaghetti straight from the freezer to the countertop in four minutes but ta-da, here's the microwave. Or you never thought you'd be accepted by the smart kids because you don't have the common sense to tie a knot in your shoes, but ta-da, here's velcro for you.

This bullcrap, going on and on about something that's just around the corner, would smell a hell of a lot less like bullcrap if there wasn't real money being pumped into it and if it wasn't already being considered a seperate "field". It stinks, and anybody with any common sense has to admit it.

And you know what, most of us don't listen to our intuitions, but I'm sure our intuitions are telling all of us, either side of the argument, that this technology is never going to arrive, period. So who cares what the argument is? We know better. Whatever happened to just plain knowing better than to get suckered?

Which Is It?

[Nom du Keyboard]

researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold...said the increased battery capacity

So which is it, life, or capacity? As I know those terms:

Life: the number of times the battery can be recharged to some approximation of its original capacity.

Capacity: The amount of energy, think amp/hours at the rated voltage, that the battery can deliver.

So does this battery provide 10X as many recharge cycles in service as normal batteries, or does it deliver 10X as much energy per volume or weight as normal batteries?

Of course, I want both, but don't expect to get it.

Re:Which Is It?

[cgraves]

It is capacity, not battery life. The news.com article mis-reported the results. See my other post further down which I just posted.

TSA battery limits and this new technology...

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this mean that we'll only soon be able to carry 1/10th of a gram of lithium with us when we fly?

The Slashdot summary and news.com are incorrect

[cgraves]

The Slashdot summary correctly draws from the news.com article, but the news.com article is mis-reporting this news. It is not battery life that is being discussed but rather energy density. Capacity has never referred to battery life. The Nature Nanotechnology journal article in question (abstract, fulltext, pdf - for some reason they are all freely downloadable) reports that their Si nanowire anode has a little more than 10 times the capacity of common graphite anodes, and they have achieved that in charging and 75% of that in discharging.

In terms of cycles, they have data in their supporting info document that shows they have only tested a cell with this electrode up to 30 cycles! So no discussion of battery life can even be made.

Energy density can be found by knowing the capacity of each electrode, the electrolyte properties and volume, and the cell voltage (which is usually about 4 V for Li-ion batteries). They claim to have reached their theoretical maximum 4200 mAh/g capacity for a Si electrode. This is indeed ~10x the capacity of graphite anodes, which are the lowest capacity anodes used in Li-ion batteries (300-400 mAh/g). More common carbon (C6) anodes are about twice that. And, in fact, Li metal anodes have about the same capacity, 3800 to 4000 mAh/g, as these Si nanowires. So the capacity is hardly a breakthrough. However, they may be more safe than Li metal: "Li metal" batteries are Li-ion batteries with Li metal electrodes, which have had safety issues due to Li dendrites (trees) growing between electrodes and shorting out the cell. This article (needs subscription) from years back explains the details of electrode choices and other challenges regarding Li-ion and Li metal batteries. It seems these Si nanowire electrodes may yield similar energy density to Li metal, or several times that of the Li-ion batteries that are in common use.

Somebody call Gardner Dozois!

[eyenot]

Why would anybody these days bother writing sci-fi when they could be making real money and real job security in "citing" their own theoretical papers in order to sell "breakthroughs" in the furtherance of "nanotechnology" grant-seeking? It's been this same process since the term hit the mainstream and it's been gobbling up oodles of research grants ever since. All you have to do is lay down some bologne about how you can paint your house with a bunch of ants and it'll light itself up for you when scheduled on Christmas and you've got it made. Especially if you get to ditch the batchelor's life of grant-seeking for "corporate r&d". Who'd ever want to go back to the hustle and bustle of phone calls to publishers and the back-and-forth of editing manuscripts?

Gas cable thicker than my wrist?

[Alt_Cognito]

Where are you getting your gas from?!?!?!

What good is a 40 hour battery...

[Mr.Fork]

if it takes you 20-40 hours to charge it? Does this mean if I run my laptop dry, it could be days before I get a full charge - you know, in between whisking away my 'ltop to Starclucks for coffee, lunch at mickeedee's, and then on the bus home watching episodes of Battle Star Galactica.

How about a 4 hour battery that can charge in 4 minutes? That is a much better technology - not longer battery life. :)

Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this? (*no*)

[eyenot]

Nanotech, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, micro-scale fission power plants, exotic materials... whatever. You know what? I'm sick of reading stories about theoretically possible things that might (but probably won't) make it into an actual product some time in the near future.

Not just on Slashdot, but I'm sick and tired of reading about these subjects AT ALL. But I expect it out of the image-worshipping, idle-minded mainstream product audience. They'll believe anything they're told, and they'll pay for things that they'll never even receive, and they'll forget they paid for it, and one day they'll die, and somebody else who was on the receiving end of the moolah will be enjoying the only one positively influential thing which money can really brings, which is a more relaxed and stimulating lifestyle.

Prematurely published research isn't just navel-gazing, it's scientific fraud, and with as much money as the frauds who support the fields you listed are receiving first from universities, then from corporations, and then from government, it should be considered market fraud and consumer fraud as well.

1. -nanotech- I am not engineer enough to know all the arguments why this will never work, but you know something, I don't miss much, either, and one thing I've noticed is that actually breakthrough amazing things which are now part of our daily lives all held something in common: there was a product that blew our minds and it's been improved ever since. There is no actual product with nanotech. It's the most amazing thing any of us have ever bought (and a lot of taxpayer money goes into colleges, those research grants aren't 100% tuition) and it hasn't ever gotten here, yet. And yet it's always being improved! Yes, we're that stupid!

2. -nuclear fusion (power)- This has been worked at already, during a generation when scientific minds had brainpower, which has been in the current image-culture generation replaced by pure imagination and cleverness. Great minds have already pored over this and it's already been discarded as an impossible dream: the process of the very sun, and a decent explosion, but not sustainable for the purpose of producing power. It just begs for us to go back to the root of the problem and think a little harder about solar power. Solar power, at least, has made recent advances.

3. -genetic engineering- It's never going to work! Period! At first the sci-fi writing grant-seekers convinced everybody that somewhere down the line we'd be harvesting vat-grown, tailor-made body parts. Really? That grew up without the attached human? There are many, many ways to argue that this is absolutely unfeasible, but I'll offer my pet argument (because it also offers impressive visuals): take a look at the 'imprint' of the bodies of living things in Kirlian photography. Do you really think you can make a decent part of a body without growing the whole thing? You can't. Later, the same hucksters promoted these ideas of special abilities or features of the creature that could be produced by tweaking the genetic "code", though the half-wit "scientists" preferred evidently to "cut-and-paste" and more or less make monstrosities whose drawbacks seriously outweigh the perceived benefits. Then they tried to convince us cloning was somehow all new and different and the answer to everything, but they're still stuck with the fact that you just can't fudge something that complicated and force it into production. Granted, one day they might perfect artificial wombs and delivery systems, but with a culture that inhuman they will by necessity have to invent nanny-nursemaids and so on, due to the events of that foreseeable future.

4. -micro-scale fission power plants- at the very least this has always been understood to be quackary.

5. -exotic materials- I remember recently there was research being done on the creation of artificial electron shells by taking avantage of Heisenberg uncertainty in very thin silicon wafers. But they can't figure ou

A123 is already doing pretty well

[leighklotz]

A123 and Valence offer Lithium Nano Phosphate and Lithium Iron Phosphate cells that can source current at up to 60 times their total amp-hour rating and still deliver 100% of their energy rating, and have excellent safety compared to existing Li-Ion and LiPoly cells. A123 has $350M to spend, and deals with DeWalt/Black and Decker on sale now, and Chevy Volt on the table. It's going to be hard for Stanford to catch up.

Nevertheless, I'm quite excited about all these new Lithium battery technologies and have written a brief article about them for enthusiasts. I think there will be tremendous competitive pressure from these deals and developments, and 2008 will see a big change in batteries, relegating Lead Acid and Nickel Metal Hydride increasingly to niche application status.

Lets all sing...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got highhh hopes. I got highhh hopes.

Insensitive clod ...

[BenBoy]

Nuclear Fusion is widely available. Look up. (you have to go outside to see it - it's called the "sun")

You look at it ... I'm from Portland, you insensitive clod!