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If even 10% of the battery 'breakthroughs' we've seen on these pages in the past 5 years had come to fruition, we'd have 20Kw batteries that charge in 10 minute

If even 10% of the battery 'breakthroughs' we've seen on these pages in the past 5 years had come to fruition, we'd have 20Kw batteries that charge in 10 minutes on our phones. Oh, and they'd be 100% recyclable but that wouldn't matter because they'd last for 100k cycles.

jacquesm 9y ago
It's the exact same thing with solar panel technologies. But then if you look at the long term, 10 or 20 years, you see that there really is an underlying current (...) of steady improvements that eventually make it to the market or that reduce cost. But the vast majority are hype.
- mark-r 9y ago
  "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." - Bill Gates
  - njarboe 9y ago
    Most humans seem to understand linear growth pretty well. It is hard to get an intuitive feel for exponential growth.
    - wickawic 9y ago
      "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” - Al Bartlett
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        It's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth. If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them. Hypervolume grows exponentially. One way to get a really rough idea is to try and control each and every joint individually. Close your eyes and try to imagine that each joint, each muscle is a dimension along which you can move (by moving it), and your posture at any given moment is a point in that space. When you move, you make a line through it. Don't picture it, just feel it. What is the shape of that space? You can get an idea of what exponential growth is like by exploring how the shape of that space changes as you add more and more things you're controlling.
        flatfilefan 9y ago
        An interesting way to look at human thinking patterns. Is there any book on it? I never completely figured out Aikido with it’s joint locks and levers. Maybe talented aikidokas have a grater capacity to visualize/fill this type of activity?
        SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        Honestly, it's just a mash-up of a few Buddhist ideas and a few math ideas: You can model what you're doing as a phase space, which is the product space of the state of each thing you control. This generally has a lot more dimensions than three. (You see this in robotics; a 5-axis CNC has a 5 dimensional phase space for position (5 axes of motion), plus a few more dimensions for things like speed and coolant flow.) That mashed up with the meditation idea of starting with your focus on something really small -- the soles of your feet, for instance -- and drawing it up your body until you can feel all of it. If you do the two, you can slowly draw yourself into awareness of higher and higher dimensional phase spaces, which shows you a curve of exponential growth. Well, okay -- I also followed Terry Tao's excellent advice on dealing with higher dimensions, to stop trying to picture math and start trying to find systems that expressed it in what they did. You can often get a feel for a system doing something more complex than what you can directly picture.
        Pamar 9y ago
        (Aikido SanDan, ~28 years of practice, still going to the dojo 3 times a week). Interesting point, but I don’t think Aikidoka have any special talent for that: we use a small number of techniques and what changes is the way you use them in response to different attacks/holds. Also, you tend to work on your specific Ryu (school) technicsl curriculum and nobody goes around “inventing” new locks. (Some argue that Aikido is not really adapting to modern world nor cross-pollinating with other martial arts due to -arguably excessive - reverence for tradition).
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        baddox 9y ago
      - lovemenot 9y ago
        That was a powerful observation in 1999 when he said it: thousands of times more so now.
        marblar 9y ago
        At this rate, in 2025 it will be at least 10 times more powerful.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  There can also be a very long lag between initial research and industrialization. PERC cell technology for high efficiency solar has been growing rapidly to multiple gigawatts of manufacturing capacity over the past couple of years. It's expected to account for over half of all monocrystalline cell manufacturing within the next few years. 10 years ago PERC cells weren't available on an industrial scale, even though the technological basics were discovered, explored at the lab scale, and published in the 1980s. It took a lot of manufacturing advances and market evolution before PERC technology was both practical and profitable to manufacture for large scale use. http://www.aleo-solar.com/perc-cell-technology-explained/ http://www.aleo-solar.com/perc-cell-technology-explained/ Likewise, I expect that some battery ideas that are published and "go nowhere" will eventually reach industrial scale, but only much later.
ngold 9y ago
And you would be able to stab and cut them without exploding. The tech exists but I would imagine patents are doing their magic lawyering.
- fmihaila 9y ago
  If the absence of vastly superior batteries were only due to patents, someone would be producing them right now and enjoy the exclusivity. While there are numerous promising approaches, usually announced with great fanfare, they tend to only work in the lab. The hard step is scaling them up to mass production such that the economics make sense.
make3 9y ago
Well at least it's not a Wired article, so the chances are much better
userbinator 9y ago
but that wouldn't matter because they'd last for 100k cycles. That's precisely the sort of thing that most manufacturers don't want, because a battery designed to last effectively forever means less recurring revenue on replacements. "100% recyclable" is good for them (and "biodegradable" even better), because they can act "green" while continuously making products that don't last and have to be recycled, expending even more energy and creating profit in the process. "The best kind of planned obolescence is environmentally friendly planned obolescence."
- aphextron 9y ago
  >That's precisely the sort of thing that most manufacturers don't want, because a battery designed to last effectively forever means less recurring revenue on replacements. That's ridiculous, tinfoil hat thinking. Longer cycle life = cheaper battery = higher profit + happier consumer.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    In an ideal world with infinite competition and perfect knowledge about competing products, perhaps you'd be right. But in the real world where we live, it happens all the time. Start by reading about the Phoebus cartel: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/t... I remember my first electric razor. It failed after a couple of years, so I took it apart to find out why. I discovered that the electrical contacts to the motor were just little pieces of graphite, and when they wore down to nothing the razor was finished. Definitely planned obsolescence in action!
    - kqr 9y ago
      Are you saying there are reasonably priced long-lasting equivalents to graphite brushes? I'm asking out of ignorance. Because that would be really good to know when buying any appliance that has a rotating part. My impression is that they all use graphite brushes.
jp555 9y ago
You mean if journalist’s versions of research come to fuition? Those breakthroughs, when applied to scaled up battery manufacturing give us the 5%-10% compounding annual improvement we see. A doubling at least every 15 years is pretty good!
madengr 9y ago
Yep, solar cells are similar. So many 20% efficiency increases, they should be at 200% by now.
- icebraining 9y ago
  If every year you lose 20% of your money, how long does it take until you're in the negative?
  - madengr 9y ago
    If you have a solar cell that starts with 20% efficiency, how many years of “20% increase claims” does it take to reach 200% ?
BurningFrog 9y ago
Part of it is that even if 100% of them come to fruition, it takes a few years at least for the tech to be in batteries you carry around. We have been spoiled by the web to expect a whole other time scale, but physical technology still takes the time it has to take. My - not very informed - impression is that battery technology actually is moving very fast, considering the timescale constraints.

jacquesm 9y ago

It's the exact same thing with solar panel technologies. But then if you look at the long term, 10 or 20 years, you see that there really is an underlying current (...) of steady improvements that eventually make it to the market or that reduce cost. But the vast majority are hype.

mark-r 9y ago
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." - Bill Gates
- njarboe 9y ago
  Most humans seem to understand linear growth pretty well. It is hard to get an intuitive feel for exponential growth.
  - wickawic 9y ago
    "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” - Al Bartlett
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      It's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth. If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them. Hypervolume grows exponentially. One way to get a really rough idea is to try and control each and every joint individually. Close your eyes and try to imagine that each joint, each muscle is a dimension along which you can move (by moving it), and your posture at any given moment is a point in that space. When you move, you make a line through it. Don't picture it, just feel it. What is the shape of that space? You can get an idea of what exponential growth is like by exploring how the shape of that space changes as you add more and more things you're controlling.
      - flatfilefan 9y ago
        An interesting way to look at human thinking patterns. Is there any book on it? I never completely figured out Aikido with it’s joint locks and levers. Maybe talented aikidokas have a grater capacity to visualize/fill this type of activity?
        SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        Honestly, it's just a mash-up of a few Buddhist ideas and a few math ideas: You can model what you're doing as a phase space, which is the product space of the state of each thing you control. This generally has a lot more dimensions than three. (You see this in robotics; a 5-axis CNC has a 5 dimensional phase space for position (5 axes of motion), plus a few more dimensions for things like speed and coolant flow.) That mashed up with the meditation idea of starting with your focus on something really small -- the soles of your feet, for instance -- and drawing it up your body until you can feel all of it. If you do the two, you can slowly draw yourself into awareness of higher and higher dimensional phase spaces, which shows you a curve of exponential growth. Well, okay -- I also followed Terry Tao's excellent advice on dealing with higher dimensions, to stop trying to picture math and start trying to find systems that expressed it in what they did. You can often get a feel for a system doing something more complex than what you can directly picture.
        Pamar 9y ago
        (Aikido SanDan, ~28 years of practice, still going to the dojo 3 times a week). Interesting point, but I don’t think Aikidoka have any special talent for that: we use a small number of techniques and what changes is the way you use them in response to different attacks/holds. Also, you tend to work on your specific Ryu (school) technicsl curriculum and nobody goes around “inventing” new locks. (Some argue that Aikido is not really adapting to modern world nor cross-pollinating with other martial arts due to -arguably excessive - reverence for tradition).
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - baddox 9y ago
    - lovemenot 9y ago
      That was a powerful observation in 1999 when he said it: thousands of times more so now.
      - marblar 9y ago
        At this rate, in 2025 it will be at least 10 times more powerful.
philipkglass 9y ago
There can also be a very long lag between initial research and industrialization. PERC cell technology for high efficiency solar has been growing rapidly to multiple gigawatts of manufacturing capacity over the past couple of years. It's expected to account for over half of all monocrystalline cell manufacturing within the next few years. 10 years ago PERC cells weren't available on an industrial scale, even though the technological basics were discovered, explored at the lab scale, and published in the 1980s. It took a lot of manufacturing advances and market evolution before PERC technology was both practical and profitable to manufacture for large scale use. http://www.aleo-solar.com/perc-cell-technology-explained/ http://www.aleo-solar.com/perc-cell-technology-explained/ Likewise, I expect that some battery ideas that are published and "go nowhere" will eventually reach industrial scale, but only much later.

ngold 9y ago

And you would be able to stab and cut them without exploding. The tech exists but I would imagine patents are doing their magic lawyering.

fmihaila 9y ago
If the absence of vastly superior batteries were only due to patents, someone would be producing them right now and enjoy the exclusivity. While there are numerous promising approaches, usually announced with great fanfare, they tend to only work in the lab. The hard step is scaling them up to mass production such that the economics make sense.

make3 9y ago

Well at least it's not a Wired article, so the chances are much better

userbinator 9y ago

but that wouldn't matter because they'd last for 100k cycles. That's precisely the sort of thing that most manufacturers don't want, because a battery designed to last effectively forever means less recurring revenue on replacements. "100% recyclable" is good for them (and "biodegradable" even better), because they can act "green" while continuously making products that don't last and have to be recycled, expending even more energy and creating profit in the process. "The best kind of planned obolescence is environmentally friendly planned obolescence."

aphextron 9y ago
>That's precisely the sort of thing that most manufacturers don't want, because a battery designed to last effectively forever means less recurring revenue on replacements. That's ridiculous, tinfoil hat thinking. Longer cycle life = cheaper battery = higher profit + happier consumer.
- mark-r 9y ago
  In an ideal world with infinite competition and perfect knowledge about competing products, perhaps you'd be right. But in the real world where we live, it happens all the time. Start by reading about the Phoebus cartel: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/t... I remember my first electric razor. It failed after a couple of years, so I took it apart to find out why. I discovered that the electrical contacts to the motor were just little pieces of graphite, and when they wore down to nothing the razor was finished. Definitely planned obsolescence in action!
  - kqr 9y ago
    Are you saying there are reasonably priced long-lasting equivalents to graphite brushes? I'm asking out of ignorance. Because that would be really good to know when buying any appliance that has a rotating part. My impression is that they all use graphite brushes.

jp555 9y ago

You mean if journalist’s versions of research come to fuition? Those breakthroughs, when applied to scaled up battery manufacturing give us the 5%-10% compounding annual improvement we see. A doubling at least every 15 years is pretty good!

madengr 9y ago

Yep, solar cells are similar. So many 20% efficiency increases, they should be at 200% by now.

icebraining 9y ago
If every year you lose 20% of your money, how long does it take until you're in the negative?
- madengr 9y ago
  If you have a solar cell that starts with 20% efficiency, how many years of “20% increase claims” does it take to reach 200% ?

BurningFrog 9y ago

Part of it is that even if 100% of them come to fruition, it takes a few years at least for the tech to be in batteries you carry around. We have been spoiled by the web to expect a whole other time scale, but physical technology still takes the time it has to take. My - not very informed - impression is that battery technology actually is moving very fast, considering the timescale constraints.