New Batteries: It’s Not All Hype

have you noticed that I don't talk about new battery technologies anymore it's not because there's nothing happening there's like two dozen press releases each week they're all great breakthroughs then you never hear of them again that's why I stopped talking about it but just the other day I came across a study about the hype cycle of Battery Technology and that really helped me put things into context let's have a look the hype cycle is not just a word it's a semi-scientific technology assessment tool that was introduced by the American it firm Gartner in 1995 the idea is to look at how much attention a technology attracts the visibility as a function of time the early visibility of a technology is driven by excitement that will fade away unless the technology is sufficiently mature to make it into application the hype cycle then combines both the initial excitement and the maturation it has five distinct phases there's the initial trigger the peak of excitement the trough of disillusionment the slope of Enlightenment and the plateau of productivity sounds like my journey through New Year's resolutions Peak excitement in January truff off disillusionment by February and if I'm lucky a plateau of productivity by December a technology can see several peaks of excitement before it it matures artificial intelligence for example just passed its fourth peak of excitement and made it into productivity with only little disillusionment mostly concerning the number of fingers on a hand nuclear fusion has also seen at least two peaks of excitement previously after the initial one there was the C Fusion enthusiasm in the 1990s the third Fusion hype cycle hasn't yet peaked because it'll take a few more years to see whether any of the new Fusion startups deliver I hope we'll finally make it to productivity okay so this is how the hype cycle works now what about those batteries Battery Technology is getting more important by the day because we're all supposed to drive electric and we need them to store renewable energy from intermittent sources the most widely used batteries at the moment are lithium iron batteries their major problem is that they're quite heavy or to be more precise they don't store as much energy per mass as say fossil fuels they have as we say a lower energy density so one of the major things we want from new batteries is a higher energy density but this isn't the only thing we want because besides energy density we also want them to be able to deliver energy quickly that's the power density we want them to reliably recharge thousands of times they should be environmentally friendly robust and durable safe and last but not least cheap that's a long list and that's why you see so many battery headlines that then vanish in the junkyard of Science News because you might have found a way to improve one thing and then you fail on another it's like looking for a unicorn that can also do your taxes to make the battery hype even more confusing scientists aren't just on the lookout for new compounds but also for new technology or new methods of manufacturing this is why Battery Technology is a mixed bag that contains everything from sodium iron batteries to Silicon anodes solid state batteries to production methods like high-speed stacking though that sounds like world league Jenga to me in the new paper now they have classified all those batteries according to their potential and the expected time to Market this is their summary you can see that they think we have several transformative Technologies coming up in the next couple of years first there are silicon anodes for lithium ion batteries some estimates say that they could increase energy density by up to 50% over the currently used graphite anodes then we have two improvements to the manufacturing process that should bring down battery prices then in 5 years or so we might finally see solid state batteries and then there are sodium lithium and lithium air batteries maybe in 10 years from now they also put these Technologies on the hyp cycle which looks like this to understand this graph you have to read the horizontal axis as the time past invention for each item and not a year for example they say that sodium ion batteries are at Peak excitement but they yet have to go through the trough of disillusionment before hitting the consumer Market solid state batteries are currently in the valley of disillusionment because so much's been talked about them and yet they haven't become reality you could see this disillusionment clearly in a recent announcement from the Japanese company TDK that said they'd made a big breakthrough with solid state batteries and everyone was like sure whatever but those will come eventually and we also have a couple of improvements that are basically ready to go though none of those were in the transformative category it could be of course that those people are just wrong however they made some effort and I think they know what they're talking about or at least more than I do then again who knows maybe in 5 years we'll all have cars with nuclear fusion reactors did you know there's a free and easy way to learn more about the science behind all the videos that you've been watching yes there is have a look at brilliant.org brilliant.org offers courses on a large variety of topics in science Computer Science and Mathematics all their courses have interactive visualizations and come with follow-up questions some even have executable Python scripts or videos with little demonstration experiments whether you want to know more about large language models or Quantum Computing want to learn coding in python or know how computer memory Works brilliant has you covered and there reading new courses each month sounds good I hope it does you can try brilliant yourself for free if you use my link brilliant.org Saina that way you'll get to try out everything brilliant has to offer for full 30 days and you'll 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Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 20,297

Keywords: science without the gobbledygoook, hossenfelder, science news sabine, science news, science humor, hype cycle, battery, battery technology, technology, energy, innovation, energy storage, solid state battery, technology hype cycle, tech hype cycle, new battery technology, sodium ion battery, sodium air battery, tech news, tech news 2024

Id: 2eIPHX-NpMM

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 14 2024