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The author addresses this in the article. The claim is that the battery chemistry itself hasn't improved, just our ability to keep it stable has which has allow
by deelowe 14y ago
The author addresses this in the article. The claim is that the battery chemistry itself hasn't improved, just our ability to keep it stable has which has allowed us to explore ideas that were previously not feasible due to a limitation with charging/discharging electronics. The assumption that there is little to no further progress to be made in this area (charging or chemistry). So, while battery technology may be improving, it will continue to improve slowly or not improve at all as there's a limit to how much more improvement we'll get from better charging/discharging circuits. Whether that's a valid claim is debatable, I guess, but I share the same opinion personally.
Now, we could see a super capacitor or something like that one day which may change things, but so far those have yet to materialize.
- ph0rque 14y agoClaiming that battery chemistry itself hasn't improved is like claiming that the physics constants haven't changed... scratch that, it is indirectly claiming that physics haven't changed. This seems like it's a few steps from a tautology. If you look at this graph ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg ), which is from a wikipedia section linked in the article, there are materials that hold more energy both per unit volume and unit mass than gasoline, we just haven't been able to exploit them yet. Isn't that the whole of materials engineering progress?
- mikeash 14y agoI like "Fat Metabolism" sitting up there near diesel and gasoline. Imagine a fat-powered fuel cell that can draw from our own bodies....
- stcredzero 14y agoSo long as it doesn't smell like ketonic B.O.