Tag: energy

2025 innovation Areas

  1. Personalized medicine
  2. Distributed energy
  3. Pervasive computing
  4. Nanomaterials
  5. Biomarkers for health
  6. Biofuels
  7. Advanced manufacturing
  8. Universal water
  9. Carbon management
  10. Engineered agriculture
  11. Security and tracking
  12. Advanced transportation

i like universal water and distributed power. without those, the rest is pretty meaningless.

Aerocivic

I started this fuel economy project after the Hurricane Katrina-inspired gas price run up, as I have a long commute and, except for a few hybrids, the car companies were busy introducing models with ever poorer gas mileage.

if a guy can fix his car to 40 KML for $400 in his backyard, WTF is detroit’s problem?

Itemized Electricity

Imagine a little device that sits between the appliance’s plug and the wall socket, measures the power use, and reports that data over the AC network to a collector. Each device would be coded, you’d map the codes to appliances (TV, refrigerator, toaster, computer), and you’d wind up with a fully itemized accounting of where all the power goes. No guessing about the payback period for a new and more efficient refrigerator, you’d just know. A few years down the road, if your new Energy Star fridge starts to leak, you’ll be alerted to the fact and know to check the seals. In this scenario the network effects would get really interesting. When contemplating the purchase of that new fridge, for example, you could go beyond the rated performance to the actual performance as measured by other users of that model. And maybe even adjust for factors like the number of kids in the house who are likely to stand in front of the open fridge door pondering their options.

if you got a bill by device, that would reduce consumption pretty quickly

Batteries

This changes everything if it is not a mirage.

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices. The new technology produces 10x the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for 2 hours could operate for 20 hours

2011-08-16: The progress in battery energy density has been very slow.

2019-04-25: 1000 Wh / kg? Though see their roadmap from a few years later that is more like 300 Wh / kg.

Innolith have the world’s first 1000 Wh/kg rechargeable battery. This would 3x the range of electric cars. The Innolith Energy Battery would radically reduce costs by not using exotic and expensive materials.


2020-10-14: AI battery research

In a paper published in Nature in February, Chueh and his colleagues described an experiment in which an AI was able to discover the optimal method for 10-minute fast-charging a lithium-ion battery. Finding optimal solutions in a huge search space is exactly the type of problem AI was built to solve. But until recently, battery-building AIs were hampered by a lack of data. “Historically, battery data has been very difficult to acquire because it’s not shared between researchers and companies”

2020-11-07: Structural batteries

While structural batteries for vehicles are highly rigid, the cell developed by Kotov’s team is meant to be pliable to cope with the movements of the robots. They’re also incredibly energy-dense. As Kotov and his team detailed in a paper published earlier this year, their structural batteries have 72 times the energy capacity of a conventional lithium-ion cell of the same volume. For now, their batteries are being used to power robotic toys and small drones as a proof of concept. He expects they’ll be used in midsize robots as well as larger hobby drones in the not-so-distant future. “Drones and medium-size robots need to have new solutions for energy storage. I can guarantee you that structural batteries will be a part of that.”

2022-04-15: Future battery technologies

On a longer time horizon, we consider Lithium-oxygen batteries an intriguing possibility. This class of battery derives energy by oxidizing pure lithium metal with a source of oxygen, traditionally in the form of ambient air. Reacting pure lithium with ambient oxygen can result in an electrochemical cell with the highest possible energy density of any metal, yielding theoretical capacities of 11k Wh/kg (not counting the weight of the reacted oxygen). This is noteworthy when Li-ion is today topping out at 250 Wh/kg, and Li-metal will theoretically top out around 3k Wh/kg. And especially interesting when you consider that liquid gasoline has a maximum energy density of 13k Wh/kg, with only 1.7k Wh/kg delivered to the wheels after losses. But a lithium-air battery in this basic configuration is not rechargeable. And significant technological challenges remain before any appreciable cycle-life is expected from batteries built with this technology. These lithium-air or lithium-oxygen batteries are at least 5–10 years away from commercialization, but could disrupt the market with a 10x step-change in energy density, rivaling liquid gasoline in terms of raw energy density.


2023-03-12: Li-S battery startup. Zeta’s cathode is based on a sulfurized carbon material that offers high stability and superior sulfur content, outperforming current metal-based cathode materials. Their sulfur-based cathodes are inherently inexpensive, have effective cost-per-energy use no cobalt and have 0 dependency on precious metal cost volatility or foreign nations.