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Researchers Working on Liquid Battery That Could Last For Over 10 Years (engadget.com)
Jon Fingas, writing for Engadget: If Harvard researchers have their way, you may not have to worry about replacing power backs quite so often. They've developed a flow battery (that is, a battery that stores energy in liquid solutions) which should last for over a decade. The trick was to modify the molecules in the electrolytes, ferrocene and viologen, so that they're stable, water-soluble and resistant to degradation. When they're dissolved in neutral water, the resulting solution only loses 1 percent of its capacity every 1,000 cycles. It could be several years before you even notice a slight dropoff in performance. The use of water is also great news for both the environment and your bank account. As it's not corrosive or toxic, you don't have to worry about wrecking your home if the battery leaks -- you might just need a mop.
It seems every 6 months I'm turning on the news to witness another "breakthrough" in energy storage that never seems to make it to the consumer market or anywhere else. Wake me when there's a product I can somehow use in my daily life.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
One more press release about a laboratory demonstration with an undefined time to market.
Just about zero technical details, why did I click on it?
Haven't we had enough of this stuff, Slashdot?
I think you're just ignoring the breakthroughs that have been happening.
It's only about 15 years since a laptop was 1.5" thick, weighed 5lb, and had an amazing 2 hour battery life. In only a decade and a half the amount of energy that's been packed into a laptop battery has increased enormously.
This is also hugely visible when you look at power tools. I cordless power drill from 15ish years ago would almost certainly us NiCd batteries, with a life of only an hour or two. Modern power drills will last a full day or more with a battery pack that's substantially smaller, and that charges in a far shorter amount of time.
And perhaps 130 years from now, someone will find a way to encapsulate or solidify the electrolyte to prevent spillage or evaporation. Maybe they'll call it a dry cell.
They don't make money if you're not replacing your batteries all the time.
These flow batteries are targeted for home and grid storage, which is a market that currently barely exists. No powerful incumbents are being threatened. Utilities would be affected, but in a good way, since more grid storage would diminish the need for unprofitable "peaker" generators.
"All" we have is 100GB quad-layer Blu-rays.
I bet they were once something in a lab, too.
You should look at gaming laptops, some of them are a bit thick, but they really are true desktop replacements.
Yep, I discovered the same thing. My 5 year old laptop is at the end of it's life and I will likely be replacing with with an alienware laptop not because I'm a gamer but because I actually want an upgrade not a downgrade.
They were once something amazing too. How long will it be before a 100 GB quad layer Blu ray disk only holds a dozen Word files, each containing the text "Hello World" ?
Similarly we need new batteries for our new toys. But new toys have outpaced batteries.
Fortunately new batteries don't have the backward compatibility constraints that optical disks have. If there are ten billion optical disks out there, it's a big deal to suddenly try to change to a new format. Not quite so much a problem with Tesla, or even Black & Decker switching to a different battery. Not totally trivial, but not nearly the problem either.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.