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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Talk to me when you can make 10,000 of them and sell them at a profit at only 10% more than equivalently sized LiPo chemistries.

Seriously battery breakthroughs have a reputation of being nice tricks in the lab that are infeasible in production. So before I get excited I really want to see a mass quantity of batteries made.

All that aside, I think finding a way to finesse the reaction one proton at a time like cells do would be a bigger win. I want a battery that runs on ATP.

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When I participated in the Local Motors LITECAR challenge I believe a good 50% of the entries said "USE GRAPHENE!" as a premise for their entries. Sure, graphene shows merit in a lab in perfect conditions, but when I suggested using organic based composites to rival aluminum for chassis &/or body panels / components I got jumped on for being impractical. Yes, I'll admit I'm still sore about the whole thing.

Sometimes those competitions (hackathons, science fairs, and grant proposals too) are more about picking the most popular buzzwords than they are about actual science and engineering. Next time just let a Markov chain write your submission for you.

Oh I feel you, I really put a lot of time and effort into watching and participating in all the Q&A sessions and what was claimed were not defining factors ended up being totally shot when the results came in. Places and prizes went, suspiciously IMO, to college teams and questionable rubric evaluations. I mentioned the body panels of my submission but it was 1 of 3 innovative approaches to make a holistic concept...as they required...

To wit: They said "just replacing the panels / bodywork for a vehicle is not innovative in the way we are evaluating things" and then one of the top 3 prize winners was just that - a type of sandwich material that was only beneficial if it replaced panels and bodywork. I'm still sore because I hate being lied to especially when there's money at stake. In hindsight the whole process was flawed but that don't change what was said versus what was done.

They might try to argue but I studied their TOC & shit so extensively that when they already had a fully developed winner announcement video that debuted on the date they said they would notify winners, I smelled something rotten. I can't prove anything but if I had forensic level access to their communications I certainly wouldn't hesitate to invest my time in finding out what the fuck actually happened.

I have also wondered why Duroplast (stamped panels made up of leftover cotton and resin) never made it outside of the Trabant to the wider automotive world.

If anything, the bodies lasted too long.

Whoa, I'd never even heard of that! This kind of learning is why I keep coming back and talking honest. Thanks for mentioning that.

There's something to be said for understanding manufacturer profit objectives, but in the context of the contest reaching for something "iffy" like what won didn't make sense when a reasonable alternative could show statistically significant benefits.

Basically I pointed out we could "grow our own" panels with further research and the judges picked an unproven but Uni backed submission instead. Made me feel like Galileo for a hot minute there.

Probably not happening within a decade, if ever.

"Most researches working in the field of Li-O2 batteries do not consider this technology as a good investment opportunity."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery#Fu...

"The possibility of buying off the shelf Li–air batteries within 10–20 years does not seem realistic at the moment."

- Balaish, Kraytsberg et al. 2014

"Dr Li hopes, within a year, to turn the prototype into something that might be manufactured. This is an ambitious goal but Dr Hardwick agrees that, from an engineering perspective, the challenges are similar to conventional lithium-ion batteries, so rapid development is possible."

Here's to hoping they succeed!

Yeah, it looks promising, I want to believe this.

> Dr Li

Nominative determinism in action!

That's a really high standard. Let's settle for making 10,000 and worry about the price later. There are plenty of people that will pay extra for batteries with better energy density.

Absolutely. I'm not sure how much higher density these get, but if it's something like 2x that'd be enough to warrant maybe a 100x price or more - for certain applications.

Apparently current experiments are at 5x if Wikipedia is to be believed. 5x! For something trivial like an ultrabook that's going from 8 hours to 40 hours of battery life! From workday to work week.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery

It is a standard I've heard from lots of people, it goes "How do I know if my breakthrough will be successful?" Answer, "When it has twice the performance and can be sold for only 10% more."

It speaks to the question of moving someone from a known good technology to an unknown technology. I believe the first place I heard it was in a talk by Geoffrey Moore on evaluating startups but since then I've heard it repeated again and again. What is more I've seen it in action (or inaction) where companies of "better" products which didn't move the price/performance needle enough, didn't get enough traction to succeed.

The price of new technology can be much higher than the conventional alternative. Products, where the higher energy density battery allows for the manufacturer to make the money back through higher volumes or price, will start switching over.

You are a battery that runs on ATP

Combined with a form of fusion, we have all the energy we would ever need

"Thermodynamics doesn't work that way!"

"Where did you learn physics, Neo?"

http://hpmor.com/chapter/64

No, YOU are a battery that runs on ATP.

Wait, what are we doing?

Soylent green

There's a reason slavery was* one of the most energy efficient tecnologies, until it was banned on obvious ethical grounds.

* although "Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 21 million-29 million to 46 million." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery

Battery, solar and windpower have a very bad ratio of technology announcements:products.

They seem to be doing better than nuclear fusion...

Not to mention perpetual motion...

In this forum, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Are you joking?

Batteries have improved like 100 times, solar like 10 times and windpower like 1000 times over time.

I have an amazing Ultrafire flashlight with lithium battery that last three months since last time I charged it. I use it every single day.

Solar tech are getting 40, 50% efficiency. The first one I got had like 2%.

Near my house in central Europe there is a 3MegaWatts wind turbine.

It looks people have difficulties understanding exponential growth. If some technology improves 10% each year like batteries have done and it looks more or less the same, in reality it makes enormous change over time.

I'm not denying there are real breakthroughs. But I am noting that for every 100 breakthrough press releases only a very very small number eventually make it to market. And that's besides the outright scams (solar panels made from human hair?).

This is certainly true of wind turbines where you see designs that lack an elemetary understanding of the physics involved. The real development happens at an industry level.

Yep. I've done a fair bit of community service on a renewable energy forum and the number of designs that are just laughably wrong is depressing. A number of them were clearly investor scams (windbelt, windtree).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windbelt

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2855155/Now-e...

Solar Roadways!!!

(Google it for some of the most entertaining debunking videos and articles)

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