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

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.