Green living is great, but wind and solar are fickle. A constant problem facing energy designers is how to store enough energy to get through the times with no wind or sun. Add in the dilemma of green transportation, and you end up with a lot of problems looking for the same solution; a great battery.
It looks like the battery breakthrough we've been waiting for has arrived. You can read the press release for more details or shell out $18 for the whole article, but here's the gist of it. A Stanford scientist called Yi Cui with a team of researchers has discovered how to get 10 times more energy density in lithium-ion batteries. The main advance was to figure out that the normally fragile silicon that would degrade after a few cycles would survive very well in the form of nanowires, just 1/1000 the thickness of a sheet of paper. They swell up to four times their normal size when they absorb the lithium (being charged), but survive the discharge process without breaking.
This isn't commercial technology yet, but according to Dr. Cui the processes are all well understood and it should scale to commercial levels easily. Some of the implications:
Electric plug-in car with a range of 500 miles or more and ample power are now a very feasible product. They're cheaper to make than hybrids with many fewer moving parts.
Off-grid homes powered by solar are much easier to design and finance. Nanosolar's first shipments of thin film photovoltaics began this week (sorry, the first year is already sold out), and they are aiming for $1 per watt manufactured cost. Combine low PV prices with high density batteries and your home in the boonies just has to be solar powered.
Electric tools, laptops, ipods, etc. are all going to run up to ten times longer on the denser battery power. Remember, this isn't something you're going to rush out and buy for a few Christmases, but it's on the way.
I installed my first solar system nearly thirty years ago for my parent's swimming pool in Tucson. This is almost the best news since then from an energy point of view.
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