Tag: images

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.

Asteroid mining

A 0.5km diameter asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion in nickel, iron and platinum-group metals.

a few quintillion worth of elements up for grabs
This is what worthwhile start ups look like: solving hard problems, not trivial toys.

Great to see Planetary Resources — a company I invested in launch officially today. Their first mission: to mine asteroids for the benefit of humanity! Check out the video below. What could you do with a huge amount of currently rare materials on earth? Or a lot of raw material for building things in space?

this goes into considerable detail about the plans for asteroid mining.

why we need asteroids as gas stations. that is, until we can switch away from chemical propulsion.

Planetary Resources has shifted the company’s focus to a more mundane space resource: water. Water found on or near asteroids could be processed into fuel to extend the useful lives of aging commercial satellites. “I still consider that mining. We’re going to take the resources of space and turn them into a usable material.”

100x faster human evolution?

On top you can see human population growth over time on a log scale, so the increase really is much sharper than what you see. Below is a chart which displays the number of selected variants which began to rise in frequency particular time in the past for 2 populations. There seems to be a concomitant rise in adaptive mutations which began to be selected along with increased population size.

has evolution sped up 100x for humanity? Up to 10% of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.

Africa powering Europe

Not a bad start. With DC all the way to Norway, they could of course play a colossal game of battery charging across the continent.

Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5b on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East. More than 100 of the generators, each fitted with 1000s of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.

2017-06-19: Off-grid solar is making inroads in Africa.

Many Western entrepreneurs see solar power in Africa as a chance to reach a large market and make a substantial profit. This is a nascent industry, which, at the moment, represents a small % of the electrification in the region, and is mostly in rural areas. There’s plenty of uncertainty about its future, and no guarantee that it will spread at the pace of cell phones. Still, in the past 18 months, these businesses have brought electricity to 100Ks of consumers—many of them in places that the grid failed to reach, despite a 100-year head start.

2018-09-10: It would also green the Sahara

Canada sized Solar and wind farms could make the Sahara Desert green again with 2x the rain. With enough solar panels, albedo increases enough to cause lots of extra rain.

2023-05-13: If solar is so cheap, why hasn’t it scaled in Sub-Saharan Africa? Because do-gooders are lying.

Scaling Solar continues to be paraded as an example that the MDBs can use billions of dollars of ODA to catalyze trillions of private sector investments needed to fund sustainability goals. The facts tell a different story. Every $1 of concessional financing catalyzed only 28 cents of private sector financing. Scaling Solar’s official messaging masqueraded a heavily subsidized development finance program as a private sector driven solution. Governments canceled existing solar contracts citing Zambia’s purportedly unsubsidized low tariffs. Developers left the space because the deal economics no longer made sense.Beyond distorting market signals, the messaging perpetuated the myth that solar can be funded by the private sector in lower-income countries. Solar isn’t scaling in poor countries. The cost of capital is too high.

The IFC could take 3 actionable steps to return to the original vision of the Scaling Solar initiative:

  1. Acknowledge that expanding clean power access will continue to rely heavily on concessional DFI lending and guarantees to reduce the cost of capital.
  2. Transparently report explicit and implicit subsidies.
  3. Innovate to enhance power contract transparency, empowering market participants to scrutinize pricing drivers and prevent the accumulation of large undisclosed public debts.