The Obama administration has dumped an electric truckload of money on car and battery companies, with hopes they’ll develop technology that’ll make plug-powered cars suitable for the mainstream. As you can imagine, this is way bigger than just cars.
Batteries have been a bottleneck in consumer electronics for years now, and it’s getting ridiculous. Think back ten years ago: You probably couldn’t have imagined all the wild stuff you can do with 2009′s smartphones, but you definitely wouldn’t have guessed that their batteries would last less than two days. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s slowing things down—imagine what our gadgets could do if manufacturers didn’t have to spend so much of their engineering efforts of reducing power consumption.
The problem is, truly new battery technologies require huge institutional investments, the likes of which most companies aren’t able—or willing—to make. As Wired explains, we’ve been stuck for years, but maybe, just maybe, this $US2.4 billion dollars will somehow transmute into a breakthrough battery technology that’ll trickle down to our gadgets, rendering out DC adapters obsolete once and for all. Or, it’ll just sink into some kind of giant corporate money hole, and we’ll just have to charge our iPhone 5GS Nanos six times a day. We’ll see! [WSJ]
matt
August 6, 2009 at 1:54 PM
I assume a much larger grant has already been given to R&D for renewable, enviormentally friendly power plants? it would be incredibly short sighted to invest in batteries when your still running on coal.
Report PermalinkRhys
August 6, 2009 at 3:16 PM
Excepting that the major problem with renewables is reliability of supply (clouds/wind/etc), and current battery technology just not capable of garenteeing that supply. Having a breakthrough in batteries would actually make renewables much more attractive.
Report Permalinkmatt
August 6, 2009 at 4:21 PM
Good point.
on another note, I assume they will look at making the production and recycling of batteries more enviromentally friendly as well.
I still like the solution where they used solar power to pump water up the top of a mountain during the day, then used the flow of the water back down at night to get power from hydro electricity :D obviously its horribly inefficient. still cool tho
Report Permalinkmatt
August 7, 2009 at 12:36 AM
Good point.
on another note, I assume they will look at making the production and recycling of batteries more enviromentally friendly as well.
I still like the solution where they used solar power to pump water up the top of a mountain during the day, then used the flow of the water back down at night to get power from hydro electricity :D obviously its horribly inefficient. still cool tho
Report PermalinkSorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!