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Permalink Reply by Brian (bsc) on January 18, 2013 at 10:00am

Compared to other areas of technological progress, our progress on batteries has been dismal. Here is an article looking at the progress in things like computational power density, display density and batteries. Batteries have made little relative progress.

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Permalink Reply by Zoe on January 18, 2013 at 10:27am

Very interesting article, Brian, thanks. (at least the parts I could understand!) It is interesting how some aspects of our culture remain at a lower tech level while others zoom by at exponential rates.

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Permalink Reply by pancreaswanted on January 18, 2013 at 10:35am

battery exhausted-i love personification!

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Permalink Reply by Zoe on January 18, 2013 at 10:39am

LOL...didn't even catch that one. But I already have way too much compassion for inanimate objects, don't need to feel I'm driving my batteries too hard! The camera battery is now enjoying a two hour nap in the charger...wonder where I put my human recharger?

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Permalink Reply by HPNpilot on January 18, 2013 at 10:59am

Yes, it's a big problem...so far there has been no magic invention to improve energy storage. Battery progress has been very slow, as Brian points out.

There are some other technologies - for example, there is Apple filed a patent on a fuel-cell powered laptop. It might run for days at a time, but then you would refuel it with liquid or gaseous fuel, much like an old-fashioned lighter. That has its own set of problems.

Slow progress in battery technology is also impeding the progress of electric cars.

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Permalink Reply by JohnG on January 18, 2013 at 12:57pm

I think in the end the machines will use carbon based critters like us for the batteries...Medtronic built nuclear pacemakers that would run longer than the recipient so when the person expired the undertaker had to ship the pacemaker back to Las Alamos to recover the nuclear stuff which was technically just on loan. I'm sure we are not ready
for that kind of power.

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Permalink Reply by Mocha on January 18, 2013 at 1:23pm

First of all, hi, new kitty! :D

The problem, in part, is that the problem of energy storage is a really tricky one. It's a problem, and it's something that the industry is trying to get their butts off the ground and work on (mainly because of wind turbines and trying to store the energy from those since they are intermittent and that does not interface well with the electrical grid).

All the energy has to be stored as potential energy, and there's the option of mechanical, chemical, and electrical storage. With mechanical, you could have a wound up spring that slowly unwinds or bladder full of gas that slowly releases the gas (and many other possibilities that I can't think of right now). With chemical, you can have chemical reactions that take place over a period of time (like in a battery) or have a fuel, like in a car. With electrical...it's a bit harder. Electromagnetic waves kinda do whatever they want to do, so it's easier to store that energy as chemical or mechanical potential energy and then convert it in to electrical.

Take light for example. We can't (easily) tell the light where to go or where to stop, and we can't store light itself, but that light can be transform into a different form of energy with plants and solar panels and the like. It's an energy conversion game, and right now, batteries are the best we've come up with, unfortunately.

(And hopefully that all made sense).

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