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Will New Battery Technologies Smash The Old Order? (telegraph.co.uk)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the predicting-the-future dept.

"The world's next energy revolution is probably no more than five or ten years away," reports The Telegraph. "Cutting-edge research into cheap and clean forms of electricity storage is moving so fast that we may never again need to build 20th Century power plants in this country..." Slashdot reader mdsolar quotes their article: The US Energy Department is funding 75 projects developing electricity storage, mobilizing teams of scientists at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the elite Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge labs in a bid for what it calls the "Holy Grail" of energy policy. You can track what they are doing at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). There are plans for hydrogen bromide, or zinc-air batteries, or storage in molten glass, or next-generation flywheels, many claiming "drastic improvements" that can slash storage costs by 80pc to 90pc and reach the magical figure of $100 per kilowatt hour in relatively short order.

"Storage is a huge deal," says Ernest Moniz, the U,S. Energy Secretary and himself a nuclear physicist. He is now confident that the U.S. grid and power system will be completely "decarbonized" by the middle of the century.
One energy consultant predicts the energy storage market will be worth $90 billion in 2025 -- 100 times larger than it is today.

5 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Its a continuation by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Research into battery storage has been intense for 20 years. We've had promises of drastic improvements, and we have seen some significant improvements. Yes, R&D has picked up even more but improvements are more likely to be incremental than breakthrough.

    1. Re:Its a continuation by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Insightful

      *The world's next energy revolution is always more than five or ten years away.*

      How far "Beyond 2000" was all that stuff supposed to be?

      Tomorrow
      Tomorrow
      I love you, tomorrow
      You're always a day awaaaaaay...

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    2. Re:Its a continuation by rbrander · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Something can look incremental but actually be pretty dramatic. We're kind of spoiled by Moore's Law having a doubling time of just a few years.

      Increases in battery life have been "incremental" but also exponential - the increase has been something like 7% per year on the average, a ten-year doubling. And of course, we ate most of it with higher power consumption in most battery-powered devices: the phones, tablets and laptops. But look at how long something simpler like an iPod lasts now compared to 2001 and it's dramatic.

      Electric cars are going get much more serious after one more doubling, and while the car companies would pay billions to have it happen overnight, it's still going to happen in 10 years even with the "incremental" progress.

  2. Re:My own prediction by Arnold+Reinhold · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... Government subsidizing the development of new technologies has the universal effect of distorting competition and making any such projects fail. ...

    Like the railroads, airplanes, nuclear power, computers, the Internet, GPS, biotech, all of which had heavy US government subsidy in the beginning.

  3. Hello "EditorDavid"; please stop quoting "mdsolar" by Bearhouse · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As many have posted here, his lack of objectivity is annoying and unhelpful.
    Thanks.