It's just they don't want to mine it until the price is much higher.
Kind of like oil vs gas prices.
But I am curious to see what the next level beyond lithium is for compact power storage. Lithium can't be the end of the line.
You would have thought it would be a priority for Musk to research next-gen batteries in a really serious way.
It's not as flashy as some magical new tech that comes along and doubles battery capacities overnight, but on the flip side li-ion is already good enough for most applications. We'll need some pretty big improvements before we can have electric passenger jets, but other than that we're already in pretty good shape.
I wonder if the delay has as much or more to do with economics than actual research and development. It might not be in the best interest of a lot of players, whether that's battery manufacturers, or device manufacturers, to produce something that has improved longevity if that means fewer sales due to batteries wearing out.
I wish I could live in scientist land XD
Also a bunch of the developments don't pan out for various reasons, like not being able to get the yield high enough to be worth while, requires large amounts of unobtainium, have very restrictive operating requirements not mentioned in press release (such as a 140F auto-ignition temperature), etc.
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/130380-future-batteries-comi...
The comment about protecting commercial interests isn't wrong, but there is indeed a threshold coming where that won't be a valid reason to hold the technology back.
http://www.amjtj.com/en/projekty/vysokokapacitni-li-akumulat...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/a-firs...
Chains of hydrocarbons are a better storage form for compactness, but creating that chain and deconstructing that chain are hugely inefficient processes. We've only used them up until now because the planet had saved a huge amount of its previous solar energy in that form.
There are some interesting lithium flow batteries coming out that decouple the power of the battery from the amount of storage, so that should be fairly interesting to see.
Other flow batteries will also be quite interesting for stationary uses.
We'll need lots and lots of storage for both stationary and mobile applications. For mobile applications, I can't see anything beating lithium ion without a major breakthrough. That type of breakthrough is not what those seeming breakthroughs "every 5 years" are; those are university press releases. It's rare that the real breakthrough will get the press, because the disconnect between what's happening in the field and what's actually important is enormous (this goes for most forms of science, not just energy).
Coupled with more efficient electronics and what is cheap hardware today would have been difficult/impossible to even build in 2002.
My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress?
I think it comes in slow increments and noticing a 5% year on year increase in battery life is lost in the noise of devices that can consume half or double the amount of energy.
As for how easy it is to lose the battery gains in noise. Many stock cell phones can have their battery life extended by half again by removing all the vendor bloatware.
Why do you think your cell phone consumes more power now? I remember my iPhone 3G getting really physically hot while web browsing.
We measure battery tech progress in energy density, not how long your device will last (since a ton of other tech goes into your device using less power, like transistor shrinking for example. Or a javascript jit).
Good question.
The ratings I read before I buy them. At the time of purchase I knew that exact mAh it consumed and compared to previous phones.
I blame the 7 inch screen, 3 different antennas and 3 extra processors that my older phone didn't have.
EDIT - Grammar and wording.
Also most prog-tech goes into not doing anything at all, if we can not avoid it. Send it to the server, sleep over it, reuse allready constructed objects of the same type- there is a whole world dancing to this tune.
Finding another hundred tons is a 100% increase in one case and about 0.0% in the other, because the other case has already gone through a lot of scaling-up.
Like oil and gas in the sense that if prices are low it stays in the ground.