Unlike batteries, which rely on materials in limited supply, the technology could be produced cheaply using materials that are readily available. Possible to charge electric cars while they are travelling across it.
From the article, it seems more like a capacitor than an actual battery. While it would still have its uses, such as smoothing out surges and dips in power demand, you won’t see anything powered by these any tume soon.
Plus I’m curious as to the energy density. High energy density capacitors can already be made via other cheap materials.
There has been a “new breakthrough in battery technology that will change everything!” every 3 months for every one of the 30+ years of my life
And everything is very different from when NiCd was the dominant technology. You’re welcome.
But the real changes have been constant incremental progress rather than breakthroughs. If all the hype was to be believed, we would have been off lithium batteries at last a decade ago.
Each breakthrough had elements that were messy and complicated and once you break through the hype and look at what the breakthrough actually was, you can see they’re in hearing aids, and single use applications and many of them (even ones not originating in lithium batteries) are now in lithium batteries.
Hence why they went from barely more than lead acid in energy density with abysmal lifetimes to at around 90Wh/kg and <200 cycles to 500Wh/kg for pilot-scale (still larger than the total scale of lithium in the early 2000s) commercial batteries that do 1000s of cycles, charge ten times as fast and cost a tenth as much using no precious or rare earth metals and a 20th of the lithium. 2015-2020’s breakthroughs are gearing up to give us 700Wh/kg expensive batteries and 160Wh/kg dirt cheap sodium batteries.
The breakthroughs happened and are in mass production, just because the charge carrier is the same (with good reason) doesn’t make the other parts the same. Stop focusing on a single word as if that defines the entire thing.
That saie, this 'breakthrough" is pure hype. The concept is interesting, but the suggested application of residential energy storage is worse than a sodium ion battery by every metric.
It took some digging, but here’s a link to the actual paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2304318120
That is fucking huge if true.
Completely changing the construction method of the foundation of a whole house, making it out of 90% cement/10% electrolyte (releasing 200 extra tonnes of CO2) rather than 20% cement/80% gravel and increasing costs by tens of thousands for the same effect as a 70kg $2.5k rrp battery (which will be a 50kg $500 battery in two years)?
Doesn’t seem huge other than in the literal size sense.
As soon as some new energy storage invention article mentions electric cars I know it’s bullshit. Electric cars are not green and they are not a solution to anything. Where an electric car is best to use, a car shouldn’t be used at all.