Re: Why Do Batteries Suck So Much And When Is It Going To Stop?
- From: Roy Smith <roy@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2005 17:01:58 -0400
Tom Watson <notme@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Batteries Suck.
They certainly do. Unlike digital electronics, which are improving so fast
it makes your head spin, technology for storing electricity hasn't improved
much in over 100 years. There's some history at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_%28electricity%29
On the wet side of the house, the modern lead-acid cell isn't much
different from a lead-acid cell from the Civil War era. The glass tank
gave way to bakelite and then to plastic, and we've got gel cells now, but
all those are minor details.
In dry cells, we've gone from carbon-zinc to alkaline for primary cells and
from NiCd to NiMH for rechargables, but again, these are incremental
improvements. Fuel cells work, but despite the occasional blather out of
Detroit and Washington, remain uneconomical for all but the most high-end
applications (i.e. space flight).
If you could invent a way to store electrical energy which gave a 2x
performance improvement in any of:
Energy per unit volume
Energy per unit weight
Manufacturing cost
Useful lifetime (recharge cycles)
Environmental impact
while holding the line on all the other factors, you would become a very
rich man in short order.
.
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