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Stanford Researchers Invent Everlasting Battery Material
judgecorp writes "Researchers at Stanford University have invented a battery material that could allow batteries to go through 400,000 charging cycles instead of the 400 or so which today's Li-ion batteries can manage. Among the uses could be storing energy to even out the availability of renewable sources such as sun and wind." Adds a story at ExtremeTech, "The only problem is, a high-voltage cathode (-) requires a very low-voltage anode (+) — and the Stanford researchers haven’t found the right one yet; and so they haven’t actually made a battery with this new discovery."
Comrades in Christ,
I object to the term 'everlasting' as used in any form other than describing God Himself. When we interject powerful, all-reaching words such as this into casual, everyday conversation, we dilute the meaning so that our minds can no longer comprehend the intended meaning. Everlasting should mean forever, not 400,000. God is everlasting; these batteries, however, are not.
Your friend,
Jake
Nice to hear the phrase "renewable sources" being used.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
From TFA:
Stanford, however, has developed a new battery electrode that can survive 40,000 charge/discharge cycles — enough for 30 years of use on the grid.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
So how do we recycle them exactly?
the only everlasting thing that I am interested in is erection and orgasm.
and the Stanford researchers haven’t found the right one yet; and so they haven’t actually made a battery with this new discovery
They have hypothesized an ideal, microscopic unit device that might be mass produced. They are just starting the applied research phase and may need some additional basic research
All that electricity they want to "store" comes from COAL so this sucks! Idiots! This is why all government funding to idiot-factories like MIT needs to be CUT IMMEDIATELY.
In electricity, that which allows current to flow easily (as the material does from the article) has a name ... it's called a "conductor."
Maybe these batteries can be charged lots of times, but I'll bet they leak like sieves. I'll bet the won't hold a charge for very long.
Company explains they have come up with an unlimited source of free clean energy with no negative drawbacks.... though the company admits it still needs to find the element that will allow it to be made.
This is nothing new. Many battery technologies can last for decades. It's only the Cobalt based lithium ones that have the abysmal 2-3 year shelf-life.
Ni-Iron batteries have demonstrated more than 50 year life, with no noticeable degradation following deep discharge.
LiFePO has demonstrated less than 20% capacity loss over 15 years and many thousands of cycles.
Ni-Hydrogen has been in service without maintenance on satellites for many many years. The batteries on the Hubble went 19 years without servicing.
Lead-Acid requires a bit of servicing and maintenance, but they can also last more than a decade when properly cared for.
Now when it comes to energy storage to deal with renewables the problem is the shear amount of energy storage needed as well as energy lost to inefficiency. The technology exists, but the cost would be prohibitive.
where has he been any ways?
It's free (as in gratis) and abundant.
Renewable only helps those idiots who deal with oil or uranium.
I say "idiots" because I'm not sure they are all evil.
Researchers at Stanford University have invented ONE HALF OF A BATTERY....
It is to be commercially released in an infinite number of years from now, for an infinite price per unit.
Meanwhile manufacturers of consumer electronics can continue using 90's Li-Ion technology that has the huge advantage of dieing after a couple of years keeping the upgrade cycle going
>The only problem is, a high-voltage cathode (-) requires a very low-voltage anode (+)
I know technology has been moving fast, but have they repeated Kirchhoff's laws now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#List_of_countries_with_Source_of_Electricity_2008
Because this chart in the wiki doesn't have any that aren't getting power from coal, gas, or nuclear.
Anyone remember the Shipstones from Heinlein's "Friday"?
Because, a long-lasting battery will not make it to retail due to planned obsolescence.
Nothing personal, it is just business as usual.
It happened with nylon, light bulbs and inkjet printers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5DCwN28y8o
Can we please try to use language accurately?
Hopefully they can get started on the Gobstopper next.
Bhutan - 99.9% hydro power (2001), I heard the current figure is 99.6%. And they also export to India. The remainder of Bhutan's generation is currently diesel - not coal, gas, or nuclear - but they are considering adding some wind generation which could reduce that.
But what you should be looking for is a pathway to less dependence on fossil fuels. Renewables with efficient storage have to be part of that pathway. Less ill-informed defeatism is also necessary.
Bottom line, there's little hope of human civilization lasting more than 10^20th years.
Unless we find a way to escape the solar system 5*10^9 years is our rough life expectancy and if we develop a good enough understanding of science to do that then who knows? Heat death is just the result of probability and statistics and we've already seen systems which can spontaneously decrease in entropy for short periods of time.
Bhutan also has 1/20th the energy consumption PER CAPITA and 1/500th the population. It is also has a land area 1/200th of the US.
In other words, thats great for Bhutan, good luck scaling it to 10,000 times the energy consumption over a 200x larger land mass.
Incidentally, this (warning, PDF) indicates that you are incorrect-- it seems to say that a very large portion of the energy produced comes from firewood / biomass. This seems to indicate that their annual energy consumption is around 23,000 MW, and their hydro generation capacity is around 1,000 MW. So that really doesnt paint a good picture for hoping to scale hydro up to the US.
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Bhutan does not use firewood/biomass for electricity generation. Check your own facts.
The rest of your post is just... pointless. Of course Bhutan isn't a model for the US. Why even suggest it?
Of course hydro power doesn't arbitrarily scale. It is dependent on the availability of the resource, and there aren't a whole lot of good hydro resources available on the planet that haven't already been exploited.
But it is true, as your post suggests, that Western society is hideously wasteful and we need to start doing things differently.
You don't put solar panels on a V8. You start by redesigning the car first. And then you can do 3000km averaging over 90km/h.
It's the same cost analysis that makes off peak metering beneficial. Everyone should look into that if it's available to you. From my understanding, the energy companies pay their electric rates from the plants based on their peak load of the day. If they can even out the load so there is less of a spike it benefits their bottom line so they offer off peak metering. Around here that means any electricity used from 7pm to 7am, holidays, and weekends electricity is drastically reduced in cost. Peak usage is the same normal rate. It just takes a smart meter upgrade which is free. I've seen monthly costs drop by over 50%. The electric company doesn't advertise this so if it is offered it may take a few repeat calls to get it. Saying you're thinking about installing some electric hog like an electric oven, or electric baseboard heat seems to get them moving faster. I know even a local electric company VP hadn't heard of their own program . The family plumbing shop used to have a contract with the local electric company to install monster 120 gallon electric water heaters. They were designed to heat at night - off peak - and they were insulated so well they would retain their heat all day. The local power company stopped that after a number of years and went to more smart metered conventional heaters.
The most intriguing application here is distributed storage with individual houses or groups of houses having local renewable generation with local storage using this battery technology to balance supply and demand. This removes the losses associated with power transmission / voltage conversion when transferring electricity from large centralised generation facilities (average about 7% in the U.S.). Maybe not as efficient as pump-storage, but if you can replace fossil-fuel generation with renewable generation then do efficiencies really matter that much ?
It might also help that Bhutan has 38 passenger cars per 1000 people.
You are right about lowering consumption, no arguments. My beef is with any attempt to compare first world countries with developing countries when it comes to energy consumption and generation.
Yeah I agree on that too, and I didn't ever attempt to compare developing countries with first world countries. I only named Bhutan because of the parent post's challenge.
For developed countries - at the moment New Zealand is pretty hard to beat. I think they are around 75% renewables / 25% fossil fuels / no nukes.
If you're ok with nuclear, Switzerland looks pretty good - 53% hydro, 42% nuclear, 1.4% fossil fuels.
Note that all the stats I've mentioned are for electricity generation - so transport is not counted. Again, this is because I was responding to the parent post which linked to wiki article on electricity only.
As the article says, there is no such battery yet, because it still needs an appropriate anode. So, the suitable words right now are still - would and could. If that was what you meant.
...in the long run.
Only about 15-20% of all of it's (100% renewable) power demand by 2050.
Construction of the first solar farm in that system is to start in Morocco next year.
It's amazing how those plans from about a decade ago coincided with recent regime changes in the region, isn't it?
Just one of those lucky coincidences I guess.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Still impressive, but not nearly as impressive as it would've been if it had actually been 400,000.
Yes, it is just a simple typo... but it would be nice if people could at least get key details like this right when submitting stories...
WTF does "a high-voltage cathode requires a very low-voltage anode" even mean? I think ExtremeTech tried to paraphrase something technical, and something got lost in translation.
It looks like the scientology organization will be able to permanently imprison Xenu in a mountain for real once a low voltage anode is developed.
Hang onto your body thetans!
to see that battery technology is starting to reap the sort of advances that permeate other areas.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Click on it.
You should notice that a great deal of that map is covered with "wind" icons. Lots of them in Europe.
Nobody's ignoring winter. More like counting on it.
As for the night... note how very few of those icons are for photovoltaic solar plants? Again, nobody's ignoring the night.
And I believe that you've misunderstood the bit about the "well-functioning market" as "North Africa will be a part of EU".
Are USA and China a part of some kind of a political union just because they are trading with each other?
Also, notice how the political issues are being "addressed" at the moment (not 40 years down the road), with built-in safety measures in case of future political issues?
Those red lines on the map represent the power conduits - note the abundance of them connecting North Africa and Europe.
And then there is the fact that you can't really store excess electricity - so you must spend it all the time. Locally.
Which you do by creating industry which will spend that electricity. Creating jobs.
Which in turn create stability in the society.
As for economic issues...
Once you cover the expenses of building the system and its maintenance - it's the electricity that's essentially free for the supplier. But not for the customer.
Also, note that the investment by 2050 comes to about 400 billion Euros, with ~2 trillion Euros worth of electricity to be created by 2050.
And saying that "they just ignore the nuclear completely" when it's written in your quote that the goal of that report is to "examine what it would take to shift even further to a 100% renewable electricity supply" is not really an insightful discovery.
Or even of any kind of value.
As for "3 to 6 times as expensive as nuclear" - you are looking at the wrong page.
Tables in Appendix 3 use current costs of electricity to project future numbers - but without the increase in the number of solar and wind power plants.
Take a look at the Chapter 5.2 - Costs.
Wind generated electricity alone would cost as much as fossil fuel does today - should it reach the production numbers of nuclear.
Concentrated Solar Power becomes cheaper than nuclear once its production reaches about 32GW.
And that's with it being produced ~12 times less than nuclear power.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Is it just me or is the polarity wrong in the article? Cathode should be positive, right? Anode should be negative?
...with renewable sources of energy. What happened? Solar collector killed your dog or something?
Tossing those "after only 30 or 40 years of development" statements doesn't make you sound insightful but spiteful.
Yes! Technology takes time to develop and improve! Whodathunkit!?
Again. Look at the map. Read the map. Notice all the hydro, geothermal, and biomass - those are backups.
And I can't keep repeating myself over and over trying to explain how all those problems you list are already solved or are in the process of being solved - like the political situation.
And there is oil enough to last centuries. Problem is it will become more and more expensive to produce.
There is no danger of "energy crisis" or people starving to death for the lack of power to run the food making machines.
There is a prospect of everyone not independently rich having to change their lifestyle though.
You don't really need to own two or more cars, or take a car driving to the shop two blocks down, or eat prepackaged, precooked food, or use all those single-use-then-throw-away plastic materials.
As for "new, unproven technology" - so was nuclear. Still is, up to a point. Also, commercial HVDC predates nuclear reactors.
And nuclear does NOT limit country's dependence on foreign nations' stability - political, economic or as was the case with Japan recently - geological.
EU gets only about 3% of its uranium from its own sources.
NOT getting off of the foreing oil, uranium and gas tit is "playing with the devil" for EU.
As for Howard C. Hayden...
With all due respect, a man who equates South Pole with Antarctica is either deliberately trying to make a strawman, ignorant to the point that someone should take a look into how he got those diplomas and titles he holds, OR far too passionate about the topic he is arguing to be reasonable to any degree.
Either case, there is too much noise in his signal to be of any practical use to anyone but the people who want to debunk either him or science in general.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens