[Back to Energy]
Introduction
Storing electricity is one of the massive challenges we face. There are many projects working on alternatives to our familiar Lithium Ion batteries.
- Here is a video about liquid metal batteries now being produced.
- And another company thinks we should be using Aluminum-Air batteries.
- And another that is producing Aluminum-Ion batteries.
- And one about Rust-Air batteries.
- Here is news of a simple and cheap way to increase battery life by 10% and reduce self-discharge by up to 70%.
We need to see progress with many different types of battery. It's not a question of producing one really good battery and then the problem is solved: there are many different situations where batteries are needed, with very different constraints. For a given energy capacity, different types of battery will balance the following constraints in different ways:
- price,
- weight,
- size,
- longevity,
- number of charge-discharge cycles,
- charge rate,
- discharge rate,
- operating temperature range, and
- availability of raw materials.
The last point obviously relates to price in the long term, but we're not very good at recognizing the long term implications of our choices, which is why we have a climate crisis in the first place.
Not only do different types of battery balance these various considerations differently, we need them to be balanced differently in different situations: a battery for a phone or car must be small and light, while a battery for a plane must be light, but the physical size is less critical; a battery to store electricity produced by wind must be cheap, but can be as big and heavy as you like; and so on. There is a discussion of the progress and some anticipated progress in the engineering of batteries in this article by Ars Technica.
Raw Materials
In the "it sounds too good to be true" category, there are reports of a potential cost-effective method of extracting Lithium from seawater.
Comments