DOE Wants 5X Improvement In Batteries In 5 Years 305
dcblogs writes "The U.S. Dept. of Energy has set a goal to develop battery and energy storage technologies that are five times more powerful and five times cheaper within five years. DOE is creating a new center at Argonne National Laboratory, at a cost of $120 million over five years, that's intended to reproduce development environments that were successfully used by Bell Laboratories and World War II's Manhattan Project. 'When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,' said U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, on Friday. The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research isn't designed to seek incremental improvements in existing technologies. This technology hub, according to DOE's solicitation (PDF), 'should foster new energy storage designs that begin with a "clean sheet of paper" — overcoming current manufacturing limitations through innovation to reduce complexity and cost.' Other research labs, universities and private companies are participating in the effort."
Chu! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's so refreshing having a Secretary of Energy that actually knows something about energy and physics, rather than somebody who just knows how to dig carbon out of the ground.
Re:Chu! (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. 5 years to develop 5X cheaper and 5X more energy dense? How gullible are you?
The free market doesn't solve all problems, but any company that could deliver this would make hundreds of billions of dollars. Why aren't they doing it? Because nobody knows how!
This $120 million is good research, but it isn't going to deliver. Dr. Chu will certainly be glad that the deadline is past the time that he will be out of office.
Re:Chu! (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. 5 years to develop 5X cheaper and 5X more energy dense? How gullible are you?
AC in 1962: "Right. 10 years to develop develop a rocket ship to land a man on the moon and return him? How gullible are you?"
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Your assurance means nothing to me. This guy on the other hand seems to know what he's talking about:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3286503&cid=42150187 [slashdot.org]
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The free market works well at driving down costs and rewarding short to medium term risks but long term is heavily frowned upon because it kills the bottom line.
There's some batteries near completion (Score:5, Insightful)
So to sum up, putting a bit of extra effort into some promising designs could produce results very quickly.
Molten Salt Batteries (Score:5, Informative)
The idea of molten salt batteries [wikipedia.org] sounds quite intriguing to me, especially for bulk utility level energy storage. In this TED talk [ted.com], MIT professor Donald Sadoway details his designs and describes the models he has already built. In short, the idea is to have two liquid metals, one less dense and one more dense. In the middle is a layer of molten salt. The less dense molten metal floats on the top. In the middle is the molten salt, and at the bottom is the more dense molten metal. The molten salt acts as the electrolyte in the cell, and the two different metals pass electrons around due to their different electron affinities.
When building these cells, they would use common cheap materials, so that the cost of this type of battery would be trivial compared with the amount of energy it can store. The fact that the cell is molten is actually an advantage. We spend huge effort in our current electrochemical cells trying to keep them cool. This type of cell would thrive on heat...indeed the energy used in charging and discharging it would help keep the metals and the salt molten.
Clearly this type of cell would not be used to power your laptop or cellphone directly, but it could be used to store energy from solar panels on your rooftop, or to store energy from large solar power plants for use in the night. As always, I am sure there are bugs to work out, but really, this sounds incredibly promising.
Re:Molten Salt Batteries (Score:4, Insightful)
We need portable energy, and molten anything is not an answer.
Its easy to give a Ted Talk, its a lot harder to offer up a practical idea. (Just look at how many TED talks are nothing but TED Talks).
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We need portable energy, and molten anything is not an answer.
Its easy to give a Ted Talk, its a lot harder to offer up a practical idea. (Just look at how many TED talks are nothing but TED Talks).
You didn't watch the TED talk, did you. If you had, you would realize that they have already built several working prototypes, around the size of a pizza dish, plus or minus. You also disregarded the implied or stated purpose, that is to store electricity generated from daytime solar electricity generation, be it in a single house or more likely on a utility scale.
Re:Molten Salt Batteries (Score:4, Informative)
We need portable energy, and molten anything is not an answer.
We need portable energy, but we also need cheap bulk energy storage.
There are lots of wind farms and solar farms out there, and the times they produce power don't always correspond with the times power is needed. This results in excess power being wasted, and also in power not being available sometimes when it is required (e.g. at night or when the wind stops).
If we had an economic way to store lots of power, we could supplement these places with battery banks to temporarily store a few hours (or days) worth of excess power, and presto -- they'd become as reliable as coal or nuclear plants. That would make renewable energy much more usable.
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That's all fine and dandy, but that is not what Cho and his program are all about.
He wants wide applicability, tolerance of abuse, safety.
You want to put a 700 degree C device composed of corrosive salts in the hands, with a shock hazard of gargantuan proportions in the hands of people who's video recorder is still blinking midnight?
That kind of installation can already be built today, but nobody wants to do it on an industrial scale. (And industrial scale is the only way it makes any sense). Because when t
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Which reminds me of a joke:
How many Border Collies does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one, and he's rewired the house to code.
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Its easy to give a Ted Talk, its a lot harder to offer up a practical idea. (Just look at how many TED talks are nothing but TED Talks).
I've watched most of them, and very few of them "are nothing but TED Talks". Most are talks about stuff that's already happening in the real world. Though typically on a scale that's still small enough that most people haven't heard about it.
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The loss of heat makes molten salt batteries impractical for house use. The bare minimum size that makes sense is probably somewhere like the size of the average house, but you really want them much much larger.
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Meh, molten is for the birds, where's my UltraCapacitors?
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Re:Chu! (Score:5, Funny)
Chu is just as one dimensional ...
Nonsense. In addition to his many accomplishments in physics, he has contributed to several other fields, and even invented the Scroll Lock Key [explainxkcd.com], which was a major advance for personal computers of the time.
Re:Chu! (Score:5, Insightful)
What's so ridiculous about this? There's dozens of potential battery chemistries which could do this - sodium ion, lithium air, nickel lithium, lithium sulfur, and on and on. The payoff for all fields could be incredible. Why not have an organized program to work on it? High cost, high risk, high reward - the kind of basic research that's perfect for government programs (leaving the incremental tweaking, production optimization, marketing, etc to private industry).
To give an example let's pick one field - transportation. What does "5x energy density and 1/5th the price" mean for transportation?
Current energy densities generally provide EV ranges between 100 and 250 miles. 5x - 500 to 1250 miles driving per charge. Which means a single charge provides a full day of charging. Which means that it doesn't matter how fast you can charge, so long as you can get a full charge when you sleep.
Let's go with 800 miles range. Which would be extended if you plugged in during meals and/or breaks. A car with prius-level streamlining will use about 250 watt hours per mile on the highway. That's a 125kWh pack. With 80% net wall-to-wheel efficiency, you need to provide about 156kWh. Over 8 hours, that's 20kW, or about 80A. Most new homes have in the ballpark of 200A boxes and worst case, you upgrade.
In short, these kind of batteries would entirely eliminate the main two complaint about EVs: range and charge time.
What about price? Li-ions are roughly $200 per kWh nowadays, which would make that pack. That's $25k just for your pack's cells - pretty darned pricey! Now, contrary to popular myth, these packs are generally rated for a decade or so to get down to 80% capacity, and the bigger your pack, the less you stress your cells, so they're not a high-replacement item (there's even a potential aftermarket for used packs). But that's a ton of money. However, $5k for the cells would be a *dramatic* improvement, and quite realistic when you consider how much it simplifies the rest of your vehicle.
All of this would come with a whole range of other benefits. You'd never have to go to a gas station again. Your fuel would cost a small fraction as much as gasoline. Your maintenance would be way lower. Even your brakes would wear down slower (regen). If smart grid features take off, you could make money by simply leaving your vehicle plugged in. Increasing vehicle power is comparatively very cheap versus gasoline and actually *increases* your vehicle's efficiency slightly (fatter conductors to handle the higher peaks = lower losses at under normal driving conditions). On and on and on.
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As an employee of the DOE, I have to say I find your optimism concerning this boondoggle is quite, quite amusing.
Re:Chu! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Chu! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cars could be much more efficient if they didn't weigh 2 tons. Reduce the weight to something sensible and your problem is solved.
I know it's a radical idea but why not have separate roads for light and efficient vehicles - bicycles, low cc motorbikes and ultra-efficient, light cars, and then high taxes and the absurdly heavy cars can go on the roads with the trucks etc.
Most cars are only carrying one person most of the time anyway, 2000 kilos to carry 80 kilos strikes me as daft.
Re:Chu! (Score:5, Insightful)
Batteries are green, because they get rid of lots of tiny pollution sources (and demand shifting). The political motivation behind this is probably make work for a national laboratory. Since the end of the cold war, they've been desperately trying to find something to do beyond new ways to kill people.
Not all Batteries are green when you consider the total life cycle.
But given that a rechargeable battery allows energy portability, which is worth a great deal, they may be greener than schemes that
rely on continuous.
But what is missing with this 5 in 5 plan is practicality.
The best minds in the world have been laboring on this for years, and progress is pretty slow. Results are proprietary, patented, secret.
If Chou things he can pry these secrets out of the hands of the corporate overlords, or he things he can field any new tech that won't be
instantly assaulted by patent lawyers and trolls he is crazy.
Anything developed here will, to the extent it sees the light of day, not be marketed without huge patent encumbrances tacked on by
dodgy players who will take any research discoveries, and plaster them with patents, and sue any others that try the same thing.
(Rambus ring any bells?) Unless the Government is going into the battery business,
DARPA's success isn't likely to be replicated in the world of patent trolls.
Re:Chu! (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if fossil fuel prices don't spike, as global warming gains more and more acceptance, there is more and more political capital in anything that moves us off of oil.
Re:Chu! (Score:4, Interesting)
If the oil doom sayers are correct, then there would be enough political pressure to adjust patent law to free up the tech.
From your lips to God's ears.
Patent law is so entrenched it can probably never be fixed.
Only a policy of Nationalizing Patents the way that some countries nationalize industrial segments, refineries, mines, etc has any hope of success. And as long as there is even one congress critter with his hand out that will never happen.
(There is another meaning to "Nationalizing Patents" which simply takes a foreign patents and gets a US patent to cover the same thing. That's not what I mean here. I mean a "taking".)
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Re:Chu! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not true. Ask the makers of viagra.
Patented for years. Only recently was it revealed they didn't disclose every detail in their patent. So virtually on the eve of the patent expiration, their patent was revoked.
But the don't have to give back the billions they made.
But I never said they were all those things in every case. It was a list of possibilities.
post EMP nuclear war (Score:3)
Well, its better if every house and person has some power, even if its a small amount after a massive nuke attack. Your grid is toast.
But if I was Leader#1, I would tell the banks to Foff, give back the 5 trillion $, and make every single house and office building 100% solar powered, use excess power to suck water out of the air to make fresh water locally. Use extra power to suck N from air and H from water to make liquid fuels (amonia)
I mean really, for the benefit of 300m people is better, than some stup
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Re:Chu! (Score:4, Insightful)
All that's needed is something as energy dense as gasoline. And whilst that can and occasionally does release it's energy all at once in a catastrophic way, it's been more than worth it up to now.
A battery as energy dense as gasoline probably won't be any more dangerous than gasoline. And may very well be less so.
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"A battery as energy dense as gasoline" is called a nuclear reactor.
Seriously, there's a lot of research going on for batteries, and we're still 2 orders of magnitude away from gasoline density.
What's more, the biggest obstacles aren't engineering ones, but physical ones.
Forget it.
Wrong direction (Score:2)
Re:Wrong direction (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't the Apollo program bring us the 8-bit microprocessor?
No, it didn't. Intel did in 1971 with the 8008.
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Well energy storage is a general problem, it does not make sense to add on a specific goal to such a general need.
Re:Wrong direction (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't the Apollo program bring us the 8-bit microprocessor?,
Nope. Not even the 4-bit.
The Apollo guidance computer didn't use a microprocessor at all. It was built from thousands of individual RTL 3-imput NOR gates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer [wikipedia.org]
all in the engines (Score:2)
Those big mofo engines did the trick.
The design is all public, why cant china just dupe it with 10x the work force, and be on the moon in 2013.
A couple of iPads and an i7 server is all you need ;)
So...? (Score:5, Insightful)
. ...I want a pony. Betcha I get my wish first.
To think that there is not a HUGE amount of academic and commercial research in this area already is absurd. The previous 5 years has produced results that directly made a 10 hour iPad possible. If you want to spend tax dollars on this, make it an X-Prize like contest.
This plan, as laid out, smells like "Workfare for Scientists".
.
Re:So...? (Score:4, Funny)
I want a pony that flies. I bet I'll get *my* wish first.
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This plan, as laid out, smells like "Workfare for Scientists".
Public money spent on having scientists do science is money well spent.
Pocket change (Score:5, Interesting)
Industry has been pouring billions into research. How is $120 million over five years going to do anything?
Anyone who invents a technology ( and production process to keep it cheap ) to get a 5x improvement will be a billionaire over night. If you are going to do this, do it right and spend some real money. How about 250 million a year over 5 years? btw. The if the US government pays for it, the US government should patent everything and get a 5x return for the taxpayers.
US government should patent everything? (Score:2)
Then the patent belongs to the people, which includes American business.
Everything the government develops, that isn't classified, is in the public domain, as it should be as *I* paid for it.
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Industry has been pouring billions into research. How is $120 million over five years going to do anything?
Anyone who invents a technology ( and production process to keep it cheap ) to get a 5x improvement will be a billionaire over night. If you are going to do this, do it right and spend some real money. How about 250 million a year over 5 years? btw. The if the US government pays for it, the US government should patent everything and get a 5x return for the taxpayers.
The consumer/taxpayer gets money taken out of their paycheck for federal income taxes for R&D. The government would spend the money on research and development. Once developed and patented, the government would collect royalties on the patent from the corporations who would pass the cost on to the consumer in the cost of products and services.
Once again, the consumer takes it in the rear. I say let industry continue to pour money into research and leave out the government middle-man.
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Industry has been pouring billions into research. How is $120 million over five years going to do anything?
Anyone who invents a technology ( and production process to keep it cheap ) to get a 5x improvement will be a billionaire over night. If you are going to do this, do it right and spend some real money. How about 250 million a year over 5 years? btw. The if the US government pays for it, the US government should patent everything and get a 5x return for the taxpayers.
While I agree more money would be awesome (and surely if they're doing good things it will come), you don't seem to get the premise. The industry isn't pouring all of their "billions" into a collective research environment with the aim of brand new tech. It is fragmented with the majority of players focused on iterative improvements to the existing technology which they're already heavily invested in. It's not easy to sell R&D costs to shareholders when there is nothing other than a goal, investors wan
Re:Pocket change (Score:5, Insightful)
Industry only pours money into research they think they will help their own company exclusively and/or which they can turn around into a profit in under X business quarters.
These national labs do the basic research that industry fails to fund.
It's about time! (Score:2)
I hate power cords with a passion!
It would be great to see something like the microfusion cells, or small energy cells from the Fallout games. When I played FO1 and ran across those for the first time, I was intrigued and fascinated.
Technology deliberately stifled (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry for a wiki link, too lazy to look up more sources. Basically we'd have better battery technology if Oil & Car companies didn't deliberately stifle technology
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Or cheaper, inferior NiMH batteries would have stifled the research into lithium batteries.
Enough $? (Score:5, Insightful)
$120 million really doesn't sound like enough money to me to solve a problem that has been the bane of thousands of electronics companies for many decades....
Still, this is a VERY worthy cause. Batteries have improved a lot over the years, but not nearly fast enough to keep up with what we need. Especially important as we move ever closer to electric cars (I would just LOVE to have one).
And it isn't just the capacity and price that is important- safety and component scarcity and disposal concerns should be addressed too.
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I believe magnets are the biggest issue or more specifically rare earth magnets. Batteries are great but we'll need efficient motors to go with them and that requires rare earth minerals which are in heavy demand and tightly controlled.
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Switched variable reluctance motors [wikipedia.org] need very little in the way of rare earth elements. If rare earth magnets become too pricey before they figure out a nanostructure that doesn't need these elements to be a good magnet, then we could always use those. I'm inclined to bet on the latter, though the former will probably crop up from place to place.
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Tesla uses plain boring AC motors without permanent magnets. Yes, the efficiency is a bit lower, but if we can get 5 times as much battery capacity, losing 5% on the motor without rare earth magnets doesn't seem all that bad.
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Making babies (Score:3, Interesting)
We all know that nine women can't make a baby in one month but Chu thinks that they can if they work for the government and he throws enough money at them.
Five years is conveniently after the current administration has left the building.
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-- Bruce Lee
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"A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at."
Indeed. Lets say this project made no improvement in capacity, and only acheived a 2 fold reduction in cost. That would be a HUGE improvement, and go a long way toward making electric/hybrid cars economically viable. That would be worth it even for ten times the investment of $120M.
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give me nine willing fertile nubile women and I'll show you nine months of one baby per month. the nubile part is so I'll be happy doing it.
about (Score:2)
fucking time.
Maybe they know something we don't.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps the DOE knows we're going to run out of cheap hydrocarbon fuel faster than we can manage. 5x improvement in current battery storage density (per weight) will make affordable and practical electric vehicles pretty much pop up over night.
We can improve electric infrastructure. Petrol fuel transportation and distribution is actually pretty expensive and energy consuming we just take it for granted because it's already here and we've been doing it for a long time. Did you know the cost of actually shipping and moving fuel is one of the biggest factors in it's price? Fuel prices are high because refineries are on coast lines and those endless millions of galons have to be trucked everywhere. It's also one of the biggest lies of omission when petrol fuel proponents talk about pollution. They conveniently ignore the total energy cost/emission cost of the fuel distribution infrastructure itself.
Yeah, you'd still have to generate the energy. Even if you burn things to make it think about this: What's more efficient? A few large plant-sized generators or millions of little generators you have to carry around in cars? Also, is it easier to sequester and capture emissions in a few large fixed locations, or millions of tiny moving ones?
Electric is the way to go. The only missing link is good batteries. Once they come, we can build power lines and power plants we're good at that. Personally, I can't wait until the gas station is a thing of the past. A story to tell your children when they see an old TV show or something.
Libertarian badmouthing aside this is what we're supposed to do with public funds. Research that benefits everyone. (Really, don't you guys have jobs during the day? How's that bootstrap factory coming along? The big bad govt still on a conspiracy to keep you from building it?)
I want teleportation too (Score:2)
But demanding it wont make it happen.
Oh, and i want a desktop sized chocolate chip cookie synthesizer machine too. mmmm cookies..
Re:I want teleportation too (Score:4, Insightful)
True, demanding something doesn't guarantee you get it. On the other hand, *not* demanding something *does* guarantee you won't get it.
If nobody in the government demanded a satellite based navigation system, there wouldn't be GPS. If nobody in the government demanded a robust, survivable way of transporting data packets between heterogeneous networks, there wouldn't be the Internet. If nobody in the government demanded a way of automating a wide variety of computations, the computer as we know it wouldn't exist. Same goes for the polio vaccine -- if you don't think that's a big deal ask someone brought up before the Salk vaccine was introduced.
Unlike the iPad or the filtered cigarette, these things were not going to be invented by the private sector (at least not soon) because once you discounted the probable profits by risk, uncertainty and delay, they weren't attractive private investments. On the other hand, the immense public need for these things justified the government investment in removing the initial uncertainties. Once the risky and uncertain parts of the problem are solved, then private investment is clearly a more efficient vehicle for making marginal improvements, which add up quickly. Kind of like shifting responsibility for low Earth orbit launches to private companies.
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You're ignoring the net present value of all the profit opportunities lost as technologies like GPS or the Internet take decades to emerge. It's beneficial to private industry for the government to take on high risk, long term payback applied research, and if you look at the *actual* budget data (instead of arguing from theoretical principles like a philosophe), you'll see that public applied R&D is *not* breaking the budget.
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What I object to is your repeated statements that that is the only way we could have gotten those technologies. That's not only unreasonable, it's historically wrong.
The problem isn't government, it's you and people like you.
I'll set aside the silly personal attack and address your point.
You are arguing against a strawman position. My point is that the government invested in the technologies I mentioned because there was a significant public need that would have been unmet. I don't deny that in most of these cases (excepting the Internet because of net neutrality) the technology might have eventually emerged, but the problems they addressed would have gone unsolved, probably for decades. The people working on those problems w
Don't forget... (Score:2)
Don't forget overcoming the patents own by big oil and reducing legal fees.
My prediction (Score:2)
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Even if that is so, it will likely save private companies a lot of money by telling them what doesn't work. That is a lot of knowledge they do not have to each research and try to keep secret from each other.
"I want" doesn't get (Score:2)
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I want a freakin' dinosaur but nobody'll give me $120m/year to make it happen.
You've got it backwards. If you want something, you are the person to give somebody else for that thing. If you really wanted a "freakin' dinosaur", you have to give somebody $120m/yr to make it happen.
anti-science slashdot? Get a clue, guys. (Score:4, Insightful)
Argonne has been a center for battery research and testing going back to 1976 . They have teams of materials scientists, chemists and physicists who have been working on various aspects of improving battery systems for many years, with a lot of published researched and patents. They also has one of the top 5 supercomputers in the world on-site, an entire center devoted to nanotechnology research, the biggest x-ray source around (for materials property research), and all sorts of other resources that make this more than "just another place" to do this work.
This grant is all about combining and focusing the efforts of all sorts of other public institutions and private manufacturers, with leadership from what is truly a "critical mass" of smart folks who work at the Argonne campus.
It is not likely to be any one "magic bullet" but lots of little improvements in each aspect of battery technology, gaining a percent or two here, a few more percent there, that when combined together will result in impressive gains. You know, like... science.
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This is not a problem (Score:2)
Everybody knows that the laws of physics are written in Washington DC, right? Pass a law, and reality must bend.
Well, everyone in Washington DC thinks so, anyway.
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5 x energy density of current commercial batteries is not at all in conflict with the laws of physics.
Hmmm (Score:2)
Tell them we will want two things for this increase: 1.) A lot more money than is ordinarily awarded in times past (I mean, a paltry $1 million for this kind of increase? That wouldn't cover one fiftieth of the materials cost alone for all the experiments needed to be run to achieve such a thing), and 2.) A lot of people of kind of wary of giving the military what they want when we've been involved in some, how do I put this lightly, questionable wars in recent years? That's a moral thing, as well as a mone
Will a non life or death manhattan project work? (Score:4, Interesting)
In WW2 it was advance technology fast or the other guys could kill everyone you love. That's a pretty big motivator to cut the red tape and bullshit, and pull as a team. His will they recreate that here?
Everything I know about management (Score:3)
When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,
Everything I know about management, I learned from X-Com (UFO)
That an easy one (Score:2)
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I must have missed the part where the government is requiring these new, powerful batteries to be used in wrist watches.
Re:Just Dictate & it will Happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, wait...
Re:Just Dictate & it will Happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny story... coming back from a photo assignment, I discovered while on the freeway why you do not put fully charged high current rechargeable batteries in the same pocket as a handfull of change. (sniff ... "What's that... OH MY GOD." And then try to pull off the road safely while your pants are literally on fire.)
Well, I can see the humor *now*. It wasn't funny at the time.
But seriously, a lot of current systems (your car's gas tank, for instance) have a significant amount of stored up energy. The companies that don't put adequate safeguards in place will pay out in the courts and perhaps go out of business. I don't see this as a valid concern. The pants on fire thing, that was me being an idiot. I got a good lesson out of the experience. And a small scar.
The problem is a bit complex (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay so you create a battery that can be made cheaply and outputs X amount of Volts and Y amount of Amperage per gram of weight.
1 what does the discharge curve look like?? (how quick does it drop voltage/amperage)
2 exactly how toxic is the stuff inside?
3 what happens if it gets shorted??
4 how easy is it to recharge SAFELY??
5 what about heat??
it does no good to create a ZPM if dropping it causes an explosion in the C4 range or having a battery that has a sloped power curve (so that half power = half voltage).
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If they mean 5 x energy density, that only seems realistic with a lithium-based chemistry. Anything seriously toxic you would want to use with lithium is heavy, so not likely for this project. It is unlikely that you would end up with a crappy power curve with lithium, but who knows.
As for shorting and ease of recharge and heat, those are rarely problems which need fundamental new thinking. A typical battery company research team should be able to handle those. It seems unlikely that the US government will
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No, they're somewhat orthogonal improvements. So, it's really more like a 7x improvement...
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I hope it "fails" just like solar research [scientificamerican.com] has - about a 90% cost reduction in 30 years.
But the cost fell too quickly, leaving politically connected manufacturers with stranded costs. So now we have government action [nytimes.com] to raise the cost again.
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Oh wait
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Even if they double battery power and keep the price the same in five years time this project will be a massive win.
Many companies have spent more than $120M and not achieved a doubling in capacity. With government efficiency at play, this appears to be nothing more than a feel-good program for politicians to talk about. They'd be better off spending the $120M on ponies for fifty thousand little girls for all the good it will do.
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Many companies have spent more than $120M and not achieved a doubling in capacity.
If the private sector has failed, that's a good reason to do public sector research.
Public sector money gave us the internet. Private sector gave us AOL and MSN. Whatever happened to those?
Public sector gave us a man on the moon. Now 40 years later, it's seen as an achievement for a private company to get into space.
The public sector is far better at the big multi-year stuff than the private sector.
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Public sector gave us a man on the moon
At what, 4.5% of GDP? Sure, if you spent $675B on batteries, you'd get good improvements. But not $125M.
BTW, AOL provided nearly all the Internet access for normal people for many years, something government never addressed. Frankly, most of the development was a function of Moore's Law, but if Xandu had won instead of ARPANET, we probably would have been using hypertext on our Commodore 64's.
Re:There they go again! (Score:4, Informative)
The free market should solve this problem ...
Free markets can solve many problems, but they don't solve everything. There are plenty of examples of market failures [wikipedia.org], and this is one of them. If someone invents a battery that is 5x cheaper and better, they will make a lot of money. But the benefits to society at large will be MUCH larger. We will save hundreds of billions on oil we will no longer need to import, hundreds of billions more on defense spending cuts since we no longer have to protect oil shipping lanes, many billions more from time-shifting baseload electricity, and even more billions from reduced AGW. But very few of these savings will flow into the pocket of the innovator. So government intervention in the market is justified.
But there are still important free market principles that can be applied here. If the government just hands out grant money, little is likely to be achieved. It is much better to set this up as a competition, and offer specific monetary prizes for meeting certain milestones. Look at the Ansari X-Prize and the DARPA Grand Challange as models. They were able to accomplish a lot by drawing in diverse talents and rewarding success.
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The free market should solve this problem ...
Of course it could. The only problem is that we don't have free markets today. The markets (and information flow) are dominated by a small group of organizations with political influence.
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at the same time though everyone else's batteries would last a week or more
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Ah, but you are being to rational in asking for a better battery charging source, from say a Thorium reactor or Tri Alpha Energy's Boron-Gas Plasma fusion generator.
That would be too easy when we could just pile hundreds of millions a year into what existing university and corporations are already spending in 100s of places worldwide already.
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The free market is pretty crap at research. In the past, the large US corporations had proper research labs. Remember Xerox? Bell? IBM? Even HP?
Nowadays private companies have a very short horizon for returns on research. Anything which is at all speculative has no chance.
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"The free market is pretty crap at research." I disagree based on the discussions of innovations here on Slashdot and similar sites.
VCs are funding all sorts of new ground breaking technologies. "Research" can be actually categorized into theoretical and practical and then the practical gets to single function innovations versus large system innovations. It is a wild world out there in research/innovations.
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Cho wants practical solutions
Shorterterm impact should include progress towards bench-top prototype devices that exploit
radically new concepts for electrochemical storage utilizing materials that are abundant
and have low manufacturing cost, high energy densities, long cycle life, and high safety
and abuse tolerance for a broad range of energy storage applications.
Something running at 700c is hardly long life, high safety, and abuse tolerant for a broad range of applications.
Its at best a single point storage scheme, not much more portable than pumping water up hill.