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DOE Wants 5X Improvement In Batteries In 5 Years
dcblogs writes "The U.S. Dept. of Energy has set a goal to develop battery and energy storage technologies that are five times more powerful and five times cheaper within five years. DOE is creating a new center at Argonne National Laboratory, at a cost of $120 million over five years, that's intended to reproduce development environments that were successfully used by Bell Laboratories and World War II's Manhattan Project. 'When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,' said U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, on Friday. The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research isn't designed to seek incremental improvements in existing technologies. This technology hub, according to DOE's solicitation (PDF), 'should foster new energy storage designs that begin with a "clean sheet of paper" — overcoming current manufacturing limitations through innovation to reduce complexity and cost.' Other research labs, universities and private companies are participating in the effort."
U mad bro?
For the record, I am cannibal, not gay...
This, too, will fail.
Wow, now we know how to do scientific and engineering advances. Just pile all the money from the extra taxes we will pay into the government's idea of what should work. Now that is going to be efficient use of capital, right?
Just as an aside. If you get a battery that is 5 times as powerful, you start to get to the point of having a nice little bomb in your pocket when something goes wrong. Ultra high energy densities is what makes batteries dangerous today when something goes wrong with a lithium ion and they smoke and ruin things.
With 5 times as much energy density, when they go poof, it might literally be a bang up mess.