New NanoTech May Provide Power Storage in Cables, Clothes

The biggest concern I have with this is that, should it ever become viable, many energy storage devices have a failure mode where they release all their stored energy very quickly in a rather exciting way.

Ok, so a new approach for making nanostructured supercaps, great. So what's the energy density they saw? Breakdown voltage? What's the whisker manufacturing process?

There's lots of work on devices like this, and this article doesn't answer any of the points that you need to see where this tech stands relative to its competitors. The nature article is better, as well as the actual paper:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v509/n7502/full/509568a...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201400440/pd... (Paywall?)

TLDR: Whiskers grow by heat-treatment - seems pretty scalable to me.

0.55 mWh cm^−3 and 413 mW cm^−3 energy and power densities. LiPos hit 300 mWh cm^-3, for reference, so it's pretty pointless to put this in clothing. Power density is decent, as it's a super cap. It might be interesting to consider electrical grids built with the stuff, but for the moment it looks like the only real applications are for so called "dual-use" applications where you're putting in a boatload of cable anyway. PV solar farms perhaps? IDK if even that's enough to be worthwhile.

Growing whiskers on copper wires to use as capacitors is a very interesting idea. A few thoughts:

(1) Is avoiding shorts in the insulating dielectric difficult? It seems like you'd need a very thin dielectric if you want benefits from the whiskers/nanowires, but a very thin layer could be hard from a reliability or voltage breakdown perspective.

(2) If you wanted to use these for power lines, would the capacitance be an issue? I remember from my electrical engineering classes that the transmission line propagation is strongly affected by the balance between capacitance and inductance. Would you need much higher current to voltage ratios? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line

(3) Even if this was built into power lines, I don't know if the capacitance boost would be very useful in terms of storing energy or smoothing out solar/wind power generation. You can only store power if you're willing to let your voltage vary significantly.

Am I the only one bothered by the repeated use of "storing powerful energy"?

Yes, this sounds great. I would love to literally be clothed in a powerful supercapacitor. What could go wrong.