The search for better ways of storing electricity is hotting up | Hacker News Reader

The search for better ways of storing electricity is hotting up

economist.com

59 pointsfrrp25 comments

The article doesn't mention it, but HNers may be interested to know that a lot of the materials research behind batteries is done computationally. Numerical models are used to vet materials for desired properties, before having to physically test them.

The "Ceder Group" mentioned in the article has a cleverly-chosen name. While Dr. Ceder runs the group, its name also is an acronym for "Computational and Experimental Design of Emerging materials Research".

The article points out that gasoline has sioux times the energy density of current batteries, but doesn't also mention that internal combustion engines are only about half as energy efficient as electric motors. By the time batteries are five times more energy dense, they will outperform gasoline in cars.

"hotting up" hmm is this correct in British english? I swear I've never heard this in place of "heating up"

As I interpret it, "hotting up" is purely metaphorical, and "heating up" is usually literal (though not always). You might heat up your cup of tea by putting it on the stove, for example, but you would hot it up by tipping in some cocaine, adding a little umbrella, and drinking it from a pyrex glass covered in glitter.

Love the explanation, thanks!

Yes, "hotting up" is correct English, "heating up"is not wrong though.

Interesting! It would not be correct in American english generally speaking.

There's a poster with the slogan "Maths hots up" that I was sure was incorrect the first few times I saw it.

It must be a British-ism. This is the first time I've ever heard it.

Yet another obscure Economist diagram! I really like the Economist -- indeed, I'm a subscriber -- but they do need someone like Tufte to give them advice on making decent understandable diagrams.

I don't think it's obscure - it's essentially a phase-shift diagram, which are very effective when you need to understand how two variables impact a system.

The very best diagrams in Visual Display require you to spend a bit of time understanding them, but once you do they are highly effective (for example the train schedule that's on the cover of the book, or the diagram of Napoleon's invasion)

Personally I think it's an awful diagram, it'll either confuse or mislead the vast majority of people who see it.

The "best" is a personal opinion, but I think the best diagrams are ones that make something that's hard to express in words easy to comprehend. This one fails massively at that, which is a shame in an otherwise excellent article.

There's work at University of Nottingham in the UK on using bags of air under water to store energy as compressed air.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UkY2bmBUito

Now why didn't I think of that? This might be perfect for storing coastal windpower.

Energy density of that solution must be ridiculously low. It's pretty much equivalent to raising water to a certain height.

> Energy density of that solution must be ridiculously low. It's pretty much equivalent to raising water to a certain height.

I really hope you aren't representative of the typical HN reader in terms of evaluation of engineering. That may be true in some pedantic sense, but the practical economics of this is more like what you get from compressed air. The pressures you can achieve wouldn't be as large as in steel tanks, but really large units could be made cheaply and in large numbers. Also, with his weighting scheme, they could be really cheap to deploy, especially for offshore wind, where they already have the mooring rights.

http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...

MIT prof. Donald Sadoway here explains his large scale cheap "battery" - capturing the output of whole power stations if you like.

But that's not why you should watch it. Watch it because it is far and away the best demonstration for why you need universities, tenure and opinionated professors.

If you aren't whooping at the end of the talk, you have not spent long enough in and around academia.

#oldskool

I came here to post about Sadoway's grid-scale liquid metal batteries. These, or others like it, have the potential to be absolutely world-changing, IMO.

I am fascinated by the number of "disruptive technologies" That are appearing on my limited radar - if you know of any others dump them here - we can tidy them up and may e start a thread - it would be fascinating to see what HN thinks are disruptive within the next five years

Me:

Military:

- directed energy weapons. Real life trials of 25kw weapons Have shown ability to instantly deliver plastic explosive levels of energy (1g PETN ~ 1kj). Link this to optical targeting and you have ability to cut the wings off an entire airforce, stop any human walking a Ross miles of ground and plain old assassination from a drone.

The US has more aircraft carriers than most of the res of the world. What now?

Transport:

- driverless car - natch - electric cars - storage batteries could supply off line grid level storage too

Energy

- solar power from desert to city - grid level storage from LmBC

Medical

Err - need to dig out my notebook but its a start

Thoughts?

I think one of the most important disruptive technologies I've noticed over the years is the production of electrostatically controlled nano-valves. This (in my limited opinion) is on par with the "trick" life got involved with many billions of years ago when it chanced on lipid bi-layers with embedded protein gates. It promises a level of material science that is ultimately a phase transition in complexity for life. With the Nokia/Graphene news recently I am confidently hopeful that this technology will produce huge advances.

I was thinking of disruptive in 5 years and disruptive in 50. This I assume is a 50year scale technology?

However, with apologies to Drexler, hasn't nano-technology just failed to deliver over past twenty years? What makes this trick so different?

yeah I can dig that, there's a hell of a lead-in for any nano-tech.

I guess this trick is different because it's a process or function - similar in vein to those used in the nano-tech drug delivery systems. Which, if you think about it, are very similar (in kind) to viruses in the way they work. Whereas the nano-valve allows the (directed/conscious/intelligent) production of controlled environments - which are similar to cellular structures.

When I first read about it I figured it would be jumped on straight away by the big material science players like Intel or IBM for the production of VERY highly controlled doping for instance. Which is why I think it could be accelerated in it's development in comparison to other nano-tech. But I'm no expert in this area. I'm just interested in the intersection between technological solutions and biological solutions and nano-tech is a big ping on my radar in that respect.

To me it represents a phase-transition in the development of life. First we had utilisation of latent energy, self replication, environmental stabilisation (cellular), multi-cellular structure, agent based systems, environmental stabilisation (social), meta-agency ("knowledge" and "culture") and now meta-matter. But as I say, this is not the considered analysis of an expert, just something I find intriguing. In my wildest dreams this new phase will attain stability and the descendents will look back on our current phase like we now do with mitochondria. (Suffice to say I'm a fan of "Deep Time").

This is what I like about the world focusing more and more on renewable energy. You get more billions of dollars being invested in the technologies to make them better and cheaper, and you get more scientists focusing on the problems, and coming up with more and more unique ways to solve the problems.

I'm surprised they don't mention vanadium, with its 5 oxidation states. It's already used in commercially-available flow batteries for grid energy storage (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worlds-largest-vanad...).

We can easily produce enough energy, it's storing enough for a month that is the issue !

The US prices listed on that diagram are at the pump (i.e. they include taxes). If that diagram is accurate, why isn't Europe, where typical pump prices reliably exceed $8/gallon, already running on hybrid cars?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com