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Technology

Why Batteries Haven't Kept Up 446

Posted by Hemos from the problems-of-base-levels dept.
TimWeigel writes "Ever wonder why we can cram ever more computer power into smaller and smaller devices, but we're still (mostly) slaves to the almighty AA? This article on CNN touches on this very important facet of our lives - why the power sources for our Palm Pilots and Gameboys haven't matched the advances in computing power. In a word: physics." I had an interesting conversation with a person who's been doing a lot of research into batteries. Batteries have grown at standard normal industrial rates - which are much slower then Moore's Law, and hence, the source of our problem.
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Why Batteries Haven't Kept Up More

Why Batteries Haven't Kept Up

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  • Calculus Has Kept Up (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:00AM (#3104855)
    Calculus has! Everyone needs integration!

  • Actually (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Heem ( 448667 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:07AM (#3104876) Homepage Journal
    Batteries have come a long way - at least lets say, more devices use rechageable battery packs now then before. Remember when everything, and i mean, everything that did not plug directly into the wall, used an alkaline? At least now many things just go back on their base and charge back up.

    • Rechargable (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TechnoLust ( 528463 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <tsulonhcet.iak>> on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:34AM (#3104956) Homepage Journal
      True, but I wish the rechargeable batteries were more standardized. I know they need different sizes for different devices, but there could be SOME standardization. Most devices that use a Lithium Ion battery uses a proprietary size, shape, voltage, current, etc. This is partly because they design the battery around the device, rather than vice-versa, but more than likely is also a marketing decision, because they can charge you out the nose for their special batteries. Unfortunately, if they stop making those batteries for whatever reason, your equipment may soon become unusable. Even rechargables die eventually. I would be more likely buy products that use standard rechargeables, than a proprietary one.
      • No kidding. Have you priced laptop batteries yet? Most of them seem to run about $100US these days. In some cases that's 15% of the entire cost of the laptop!
        • my battery died for my aging laptop, it still is useable with blackbox and such for editing code. but the replacement battery, $180. probably what i could get for the laptop itself
        • I was one of the Dell laptop users whose batteries had a chance of catching on fire. Under Dell's replacement plan, they sent me a new battery immediately, and whenever I send back the defective one I get a second battery. That's a hell of a deal... I hardly use my batteries, it's mostly a desktop replacement, but I'm worried about the batteries dying completely someday and making the laptop plug-in only. I'm planning on saving the second battery until the first one dies. Thanks, Dell!

    • Re:Actually (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bergie ( 29834 )

      However, if you're traveling it is a bother to carry all the chargers around.

      Also, finding a power plug might be an issue.

      It would be so much easier if the devices could use a standardized charger.

      /Bergie

    • Re:Actually (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Score Whore ( 32328 )
      Batteries have come a long way


      Not that far they haven't. The reason more devices run on rechargables is because the devices have reduced their power usage. It's not because the batteries are massively better.

  • more power than a tactical nuke (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beckett ( 27524 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:07AM (#3104877) Homepage Journal
    perhaps it's good that efforts have been made to design around energy limitations. while i'm all for better power supplies, designing circuits that use as little power as possible to do a given task means that less is wasted. just look at the amount of excess processing power we have in our computers and how much unnecessary code there is in a standard application.

    engineering around power limitations means smart, efficent designs, not wasteful products that just suck up energy. i think these limitations helped designers innovate.

  • Nuclear paranoia (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:08AM (#3104880) Homepage
    We could have better batteries, if people weren't so paranoid about nuclear technology. It's quite possible to create safe, long-lived, batteries based on nuclear decay -- many smoke detectors are powered by americium decay, and about a decade ago there were plans to use plutonium to power pacemakers -- but there is too much of an anti-nuclear lobby to allow anything of the sort to happen now.
    • Smoke detectors aren't powered by nuclear decay. The americium is only a source of ionizing radiation, knocking electrons off of oxygen and nitrogen. When smoke enters the chamber of the detector, the drop in current between the upper and lower plates (supplied by a battery or house current) triggers the alarm.

    • americium decay (Score:3, Informative)

      by wiredog ( 43288 )
      No. Americium decay doesn't power the smoke detector, it's part of the detection circuitry. It provides neutrons that are used in a sort of single purpose mass spectrometer. The power is provided by batteries or the mains.

      • Re:americium decay (Score:2, Informative)

        by Darwin_Frog ( 232520 )
        It produces alpha particles, actually. High mass, low energy - just enough to knock electrons away.

      • Re:americium decay (Score:3, Informative)

        by david.given ( 6740 )
        Americium decay doesn't power the smoke detector, it's part of the detection circuitry. It provides neutrons that are used in a sort of single purpose mass spectrometer.

        It's even simpler than that, actually --- the alpha particles emitted by the americium ionise the air inside the detector cell, making it slightly conductive. When smoke enters the cell, the conductivity changes and the alarm goes off.

        That's why you can stop smoke alarms by blowing at them --- you're blowing the smoke out of the detector cell.

    • Hmmm. What would happen if you filled a truck with nuclear batteries, plastic explosive, mixed well, and lit the fuse?

      As for your smoke detector example, IIRC the americium is used as the smoke sensor itself, not as a power source.

      I'm all for the use of nuclear technology where appropriate, but having substantial quantities of radioactive material in everybody's Game Boy doesn't strike me as appropriate.

      • What happened when Timothy McVey filled a truck full of commonly available fertilizer, kerosene, mixed well, and lit the fuse?

        Damned near anything can be turned in to a weapon, and most household products, when mixed the right (or wrong, depending on your perspective) way can level a large office building. Are we going to ban everything that can cause harm when used in the wrong way? Name me a product that CAN'T be used to cause harm.

        So no, I don't think your fear is reasonable. If it were, we'd all stay locked in our homes, never venturing out, and the Attorney General of the United States would make damned near everything illegal just out of paranoia. Wait a minute...that's already happening...
        • The difference is that after they moved away the wreckage, they were able to build another building there without having to wait decades for the radition contamination to be cleaned up.

          I'm as big an advocate for nuclear power as you'll find, but if such things are to be commercially available then they need to be protected in a way that makes them impractical for such terrorist activities, and that precludes them being small enough to be portable.
      • To achieve sufficient level of supercriticality to trigger a nuclear explosion you'll need:
        1. Clean fissile material. At least avoid everything that captures neutrons without producing more neutrons.
        2. High explosives. Not your average TNT.
        3. Special configuration of the device. If you want to reach supercriticality by implosion, you should make sure that the pressure is highly uniform. Gun assembly requires making a target and a gun.
        4. You may need a neutron source to ignite the reaction in some configurations.

    • Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:2, Informative)

      by Thng ( 457255 )
      many smoke detectors are powered by americium decay
      not quite.. the americium is merely a source of ionizing radiation that makes it easier to detect small amounts of smoke. batteries are still required
      http://www.howstuffworks.com/smoke2.htm

  • Standardisation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sircus ( 16869 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:08AM (#3104885) Homepage
    What's most interesting to me is not the lack of progress in battery technology - it's not Moore's law, but with NiCad, NiMH, LiIon and so forth, there's clearly progress. What interests me is the lack of standardisation in battery sizes. We've had AA (and AAA, and A, and so forth) forever. Why don't we see more standardisation for things like digital camera batteries, laptop batteries and so forth? I understand that there are a bunch of issues such as form factor and suitability for design, but wouldn't standard sizes and capabilities for batteries help everyone out?

    There's the argument that the laptop makers (and so forth) would lose their revenue streams from replacement batteries, but they also wouldn't have to pay a premium on putting the things into the laptops in the first place, if we had newer battery standards which specified the characteristics of a set of 'standard' laptop batteries.

    Perhaps I'm over-optimistic, but I'm certainly hoping that commoditisation eventually leads to not having to buy the 'special' AA rechargeables for my camera, or being able to walk into any computer store and get a new XX for my laptop...

    • Re:Standardisation (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:10AM (#3104889)
      D, C, B, A, AA, AAA etc. are standards, you silly man. Different sizes for different uses, see?

      Why not standarise on one size of paper too? I say we go with B2. That should suit everyone, right?

    • Re:Standardisation (Score:3, Insightful)

      by phunhippy ( 86447 )
      One of the interesting things is that back in the 50's-60's and 70's was that devices were generally made to fit the batteries. Now a days batteries are designed to fit the devices offering more flexibillity in design. I think thats a fair trade off to have have 100's of battery types and sizes vs have a few desgins of battery shape that everything has to be designed around.

      • If it were only hundreds, there'd be a chance your local (largish) computer store could stock them all. My problem is with the fact that between my cordless headphones, my Visor Prism, my VisorPhone, cordless mouse/keyboard, camera, and all of the laptops I use, there's not one single common battery (granted, both the camera and the keyboard use AA, but whereas the keyboard will take any old AA, the camera insists on having Fuji's AAs - it kills anything else in less than two pictures).

        • Re:Standardisation (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jedrek ( 79264 )
          FujiFilm cameras don't really kill non-Fuji batteries as they kill everything but 1600mA Ni-MH batteries, 1800mA dealies are even better. Anything you can get 'on the street' -- alkalines or the like, are pretty much only for emergency use.

    • Standard Cells (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:23AM (#3104923)
      Granted, batteries come in all shapes and sizes and can a lot for a well equipped geek to keep track of. We have to remember that, technically, a battery is a collection of cells that have been wired together. Since batteries are made from cells there are far fewer types of cells than batteries.

      How is this helpful? I had a 486 laptop that I could not find a replacement battery for but Batteries Plus was able to replace the cells in the old battery. When I used to be an instrumentation tech, we recelled batteries all of the time. It was often far cheaper to rebuild a battery than to buy one new. This works for laptops too. If you want to do it yourself, Dremel tools, epoxy and superglue are your friends. Even after paying a Batteries Plus tech it can still be cheaper if you recoil at the thought of wielding the Dremel yourself.

      I'll also point out that the cells in the battery are often held together by metal straps that are sort of punched into the terminals of the cell. If you want to try your hand at battery rebuilding , then you will want to run down a supply of the strips and the punch tool.
    • If you look around, you can often times find electronics like digital cameras that use standard sized (AA) batteries. In fact most mid range digital cameras seem to opt for the AA route, it's only the exceptionally fancy ones like the Sony Elph series that use custom batteries. The best part about getting one that uses AAs is that the rechargeable AA batteries (like the Rayovac NiMH batteires) have come down in price recently and really do last a long time. Finally, if you get something that uses AAs and you forget your charger on vacation somewhere, you can buy standard Alkaline batteries to hold you over until you can recharge the NiMHs.
    • > Why don't we see more standardisation for things like digital camera batteries, laptop batteries and
      > so forth?

      BTW: When you break up such batteries you'll see that they are usually a bunch of standard cells soldered together with some kind of temperature triggered fuse...

    • Re:Standardisation (Score:3, Informative)

      by Rogerborg ( 306625 )
      • Why don't we see more standardisation for things like digital camera batteries, laptop batteries and so forth?

      I think you sum it up nicely. It's the revenue from spares and replacements. I bought a used laptop with a dead NiMh from eBay for about $270. The battery manufacturer (Solomon) isn't even selling these batteries any more, but there's a generic Duracell equivelant, ranging from $105 for the dumb battery to $150 for the smart version.

      Consider that this pack is pretty much equivelant to 10 x 1.5 (actually 1.2)V MiMh AA's, costing $50 or less for ten good cells. The dumb pack is charging a 100% markup for the form factor and contacts, and (no doubt) a very cheap recharger. The NiMh in my other laptop gets very hot while charging, which is about the last thing you want to happen.

      An interesting how-to on making up an external power pack for a digital camera using 5 x 7Ah F cell NiCd's (totalling about ten times a typical laptop battery's capacity) can be found here [dansdata.com].

      To power a 12V laptop, you need 10 x 1.5v cells (which actually deliver about 1.2V each). Using various types of (e.g.) Sanyo NiCd's (although I'd prefer NiMh's, as cadmium is nasty-nasty), you could use:

      • KR-1100AAU : 12 Ah, 240g
      • KR-5000DEL : 54 Ah, 1.5kg
      • KR-7000F : 75 Ah, 2.3 kg
      • KR-20000M : 240 Ah, 6.4 kg

      Compare and contrast with my 3.5Ah pack at about 250g. Even with stock AA's, I'd get over three times the capacity and life. If I wanted to lug a lump of battery around, I could run the thing for days off of battery power. Actually, my laptop expects 19v DC in through the power jack (to recharge the 12v internal battery), so you could multiply all these figures by up to 1.5, if you felt like (realistically) powering a laptop for a working week off of a 7 lbs F cell pack.

  • NiMH (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lostchicken ( 226656 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:09AM (#3104886)
    Prices have kept up, though.
    I have quite a few Accu-Recharge NiMH batteries that cost me about $10 for four.
    It used to (about 2 years ago) cost 4 times that.
    I'd say that's progress...
    • too bad... I got 5 packs of 4 AA's of the Accu-rechargable's Ni-Mh 's from home depot on closeout for $1.00 a pack.... yup ONE DOLLAR a pack.

      the $10.00 pricetag is too high for joe-schmoe to pay, while people like me snag everything off of the display when they clearance them.

      Take a look at your local homey-center.

  • Another reason... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Indras ( 515472 )
    Ever wonder why we can cram ever more computer power into smaller and smaller devices, but we're still (mostly) slaves to the almighty AA?

    Another reason not touched by the article: compatibility. How many people here would replace all their AA-weilding devices if new batteries wouldn't work in them? Actually, knowing the slashdot crowd, all of them would. But hey, that's the whole point! There's a market for a newer, better battery.

    I always hated my TI-85, fresh batteries at the start of a school year would run out just days before the final exam. My last calculus exam was a whole lot of squinting at the screen with the contrast turned up to 9 :o).
    • I always hated my TI-85, fresh batteries at the start of a school year would run out just days before the final exam. My last calculus exam was a whole lot of squinting at the screen with the contrast turned up to 9 :o).

      Yeah, Tetris really sucked up the batteries in High School Calculus.

  • Why would the battery companies want to improve themselves out of so many repeat sales?

    Make your product a bit better than the next guy, but make it so good that your customer only needs half as much of your product as they did in the past, and you have lost sales.

  • I know a lot of us are hoping that fuel cells will replace batteries, but how big does a fuel cell have to be to produce enough power for, say, a laptop computer? Would it be comparable in size to the batteries we have now? What about the generated heat?
    • I'm no expert and electricity has always been something misteroius for me but...

      I think the problem of power cells (the ones that already exist and existed for a long time (non-commercial)) is that they hold a big charge (mAh) but it's difficult to reach a given voltage.

      Hence, to duplicate an AA battery you will need a LOT of full cells chained together, and thus the device will be really big (impractical).

      Also, if the fuel cells are not really a BIG improvemt over batteries, they are niche. Because refilling a Metal hidride cell is free. If you Palm can live a month and recharge for free, why would you need a fuel cell?

      So fuel cells will be a niche before becoming widly adopted. Yet, another technologies (atomic batteries, etc) may obsolete them before they see the light.

  • lame article, ignores fuel cells, atomic batteries (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:20AM (#3104918)
    lame article: It ignores fuel cells, atomic batteries and the fact that some people do not seem to care about battery weight / power.

    Example : In 1987 Apple asked potential portable computer consumers to rate, in numerical order 10 different attributes of a system they cared about most.

    Battery longevity came in LAT place... even so apple demanded a pure CMOS system, including CMOS cpu for its portable mac and a non backlit screen resulting in a staggering 10 hour battery life.

    10 hours of use.

    Humorously with no more low power general purpose cpus in existence in 1998 comsumers rated battery duration MOST IMPORTANT, first place above performance.

    Hilarious.

    Apple tried to do the impossible and the "Wallstreet" 300 Mhz G3 Powermac laptop used a low power dvd decoder and dvd drive so that the entire system could do someting no ibm pc could do, or still can do nowadays as far as i know.... play an entire two hour (120 minute) dvd movie at full brightness without swapping batteries once. Just one Lithium ion battery.

    non stop dvd playback.

    now its 2002 and no apple laptop can do that, and i think no comperable highend PeeCee (Wintell) laptop sporting dvd, firewire, fast cpu, etc can play a movie on one battery.

    We are going backwards.

    Example : a Palm Pilot, even the 8 megabyte (yes 8 MB) Palm 3x, lasts almost 30 days of usage on a pair of AA "1100 milliamp-hour" standard alkaline batteries.

    But the color palm eats up batteries because it uses a backlit design, unlike the ingenious Gameboy Advance low poer color screen which requires sunlight but last a long time on its batteries.

    But that article is not very techie. It ignores radioactive batteries, fuel cell designs and other energy sources.

  • If I recall correctly, batteries are basically chemical capacitors. (Two surfaces of different electric potential separated by a resistor) Is anyone out there aware of efforts to make batteries using mechanical capacitors? We make memory chips using microscopic capacitors. What limitations keep us from packing a bunch of those together to make a more powerful battery?

    • Even the highest energy density capacitors are easily out stripped by the lowest energy density batteries. Granted thay have made huge strides in the past years with the Ultra capacitors and at some point break even with batteries. You can now get multiple Farad capacitors but that is still peanuts in comparison to an AA battery. On the other hand research may at some point allow them to catch up or surpass batteries.

    • Capacitors are used for energy storage in industrial applications, but normally for situations requiring high output current and high peak power, since their internal resistance is usually much lower than batteries. I'm under the impression that capacitors are not as stable as chemical batteries ... besides, have you ever seen a 1-farad capacitor? It's about the size of a pint glass.
    • If I recall correctly, batteries are basically chemical capacitors. (Two surfaces of different electric potential separated by a resistor)

      Batteries and capacitors are quite different. Batteries use electrochemical reactions that produce a near-constant potential (voltage) across the terminals, until the reactants are used up.

      Capacitors work by polarizing a dielectric material [a physical change, not a chemical one] between two closely-spaced plates. The terminal voltage is proportional to the amount of charge (time integral of current) the capacitor is holding.

      Modern capacitors are approaching the energy capacity of batteries. A 50F 2.3V capacitor holds 132 J of energy, which is equivalent to 120 Amp-seconds (or 33 mA-hours) at 1.1 Volts. This capacitor costs CDN$17.88, compared to $2.17 for a 250 mAh AAA NiCd cell. (prices are from Digikey in quantities of 1000)

      So the capacitor's about 8x the cost for 1/8 the capacity of the NiCd.

      We make memory chips using microscopic capacitors. What limitations keep us from packing a bunch of those together to make a more powerful battery?

      One big limitation is that we only make our memory chips one layer thick (vs. multi-layer capacitors), and that these capacitors are optimized for storing information, not energy. The more energy stored per cell, the more heat is wasted every time that cell switches state.
  • "They're holding us back big time," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, "a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke."

    sombody slap this guy silly(ooh, someone already did). bateries have evolved big time. the battery in the old 386 laptop in my closet couldn't power a modern lalptop thru' the bios(okay, it probably would, but not much longer).

    The real problem with recarable bateries is people. of you leave the battery fully charged, lat say over the summer, it's broken. the cemical compunds have reacted and formed stable elements(wich won't produce power). I hate to see poeple who leave their cell phones plugged in the wall so it's full when they take it with them once a week.

    ---

  • A good and bad example (Score:4, Informative)

    by mikeboone ( 163222 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:29AM (#3104936) Homepage Journal
    I have a Canon Powershot G1 digital camera. It uses a proprietary lithium-ion battery, about the size of a C or D battery, but more square in shape. This battery is fantastic. The camera can run for hundreds of photos, you can leave the viewscreen on, and use the flash a lot before you have to recharge. Through many charges it seems to have no degradations in performance.

    On the other hand, I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop which has a lame battery. It is also lithium-ion. When I first got my laptop the battery would last about 3 hours before having to recharge. About a year later, it would last barely 1 hour. Dell knows their batteries don't last very long and only warrant them one year (despite the 3 years I have on the rest of the machine!). I found this out when I contacted them 1 year + 1 week after I bought the laptop. I ended up writing a small windows app called BatteryLog [boonedocks.net] to help track your battery performance. You may want to give it a try on your laptop before your year-warranty runs out.

    So basically, it's more than just the technology of the battery, it's also the design and manufacturer. There are some good ones out there!

    • Apples to Oranges (Score:3, Informative)

      by plover ( 150551 )
      Sorry, but your analogy is very flawed.

      They're two different tools, used for different tasks and designed differently as a result. It's like you're trying to compare how many miles per gallon you get in a motorcycle vs. a chainsaw. One of those measurements won't make much sense.

      Your G1 draws far less current at a far lower rate than your laptop. Your laptop has a hard drive that's probably constantly spinning while you're using it, while your camera's only motor is in the zoom lens. (OK, you might have a microdrive, but that doesn't stay spinning nearly as long as the drive in your PC.) Your camera's backlit screen has about 5 in^2 of illuminated area, but your laptop's screen is closer to 180 in^2, a 36 times larger screen that draws close to 36 times as much power. Flashes are also not a constant power draw. Finally, its off to your CPU to check current draw. Camera CPUs are more closely related to dedicated microcontrollers than they are to the general purpose CPUs found in your laptop. Microcontrollers are designed for minimal current draw, they power themselves down nicely (and frequently. While your Pentium was designed with low power laptops in mind, it still draws a frightfully large amount of current in comparison to the little processor inside your camera.

      If you were able to wire up your camera's battery to power your laptop, you'd find you'd get maybe ten minutes of battery life. There's not magic inside that battery, and that's basically the point of the whole article.

      John

      • I fully understand that my G1 battery would not power my laptop. It wasn't my intention to compare the two batteries directly. What I was more interested in was that they were both lithium-ion batteries, but the laptop's battery has experienced a significant performance degradation, while the camera's has not. I have read that my laptop battery was supposed to be good for around 500 charges. Besides leaving it in a powered laptop 99% of the time, I have had to fully charge it maybe 50 times. The camera battery seems as if it was a better design. It might not scale, I don't know. My point was that there's more to it than just the chemicals involved.
    • Do some looking into how long rechargable batteries last.

      They aren't really rated in months or years, though that's how the warranties are written.

      Rechargable batteries are rated in charge cycles. Charge cycle == discharge and recharge the battery, doesn't matter if it is a partial or a complete discharge.

      NiCd batteries are rated for about 400-500 charge cycles.
      NiMH batteries are rated for about 400 charge cycles.
      Lithium and Lithium Ion batteries are rated for about 300 charge cycles.

      Battery charge capacity falls off as a function of charge cycle lifetime. The closer to the end of your 400 charge cycles, the less capacity you'll see in your batteries.

      How many times have you recharged the battery in your laptop? How many times in your digital camera?

      Yes, the batteries in your digital camera will start sucking after about 250 or 300 charge cycles. Expect to have to buy new ones about that time. Or buy a new camera, which will come with new batteries, whichever.

      • How many times have you recharged the battery in your laptop? How many times in your digital camera?

        That's sort of hard to answer, since the battery is in the laptop constantly, and the laptop is socket-powered 99.9% of the time I use it. But I estimate that I fully used and charged it no more than 50 times. More like about 30. The camera has had probably 30 or more charges too. I know they're not the same and I don't expect my G1 battery to run my Dell. Maybe I just got a bad laptop battery, but it's too late for me to have it fixed free now. :(

  • The Way of the Fuel Cell (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jeppe Salvesen ( 101622 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:30AM (#3104942)
    With Methane-powered fuel cells coming out, why bother about batteries? With methane-powered fuel cells, you can eat beans, stick a hose up your butt and surf pr0n 'till you collapse into a puddle of.. something.
  • Towards the end of the article:

    The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car.

    Would somebody please stick a note to that author's forehead - you recharge your exhaust-free car by plugging it into a radioactive and/or hot'n'smoky power station...

    I'm still hanging out for that orbiting solar collector/microwave beam thingie [spacefuture.com]!!

    • Re:clean electric cars = oxymoron (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Fenris2001 ( 210117 ) <fenris@nmt. e d u> on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:46AM (#3104987)
      The point of electric cars is to move the polluting emissions from the cars to the generating plants, where it can be controlled more closely. There are already very tight limits on how much sulphur, etc. can go out the chimney at your average coal/oil/natural gas generating plant.

      Nuclear plants are another story. It may very well be possible to design a reactor that produces no waste - that is an engineering matter. Building the thing is a political matter, and thus not subject to the dictates of reason.

      Solar (terrestrial or space-based), wind, and hydroelectric power aren't being built fast enough to keep up with demand, mainly due to their low output and high cost.

      One thing the article ignores is the development of small fuel cells that can use methanol as fuel directly. Methanol (or ethanol) can easily be made from corn, soybeans, or industrial hemp. Such fuel cells could power small devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops for days instead of hours on a few deciliters of alcohol, without noxious ozone and nitrous oxide emmissions.
    • Hmmm, I guess all the hydroelectric and thermo-electric plants out there are not generating electricity then? How about the massive solar plants out in arizona and new mexico? those dont exist either? or how about a HOME solar plant? easy and cheap nowdays.

      Please, Please also note that Nuke power plants produce a miniscule amount of waste compared to the early 80's and Coal and natural gas power plants also produce very little "evil-toxic-gasses"(tm) than they did in the early 80's (which by the way is when they got the numbers for all the tree-hugger propaganda you read today.)

      yes they put out some bad stuff, but not a whole lot anymore.. and the clean-freaks are making the big corperations afraid of even trying to make new types of power supplies.

      Oh and please dont mention the horrible toxic by-products from solar cell manufacture, rechargeable batteries, etc...
    • Several studies were done by various organizations in the late 80s and early 90s (and its your job to look them up for specific examples) to determine if electric cars were really "green" if you took the emissions from the production of electricy to recharge them in to account.

      The results...even when energy production for recharging is taken in to account, electric cars were found to be MASSIVELY less of an impact on the environment than their internal combustion brothers.
    • A word about hot'n'smoky power station.

      The coal power plant has much better energy efficiency and makes much less pollution per kWh of energy produced then the small automotive internal combustion engine. By ?plugging? your electric car to the said hot'n'smoky power station you ARE actually making significantly less pollution.
      I am not advocating fossil fuel energy production and would actually like to see it phased out. Electric vehicles are the step in right direction.

  • Flywheels (Score:5, Interesting)

    by suitti ( 447395 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:45AM (#3104983) Homepage
    I'm surprised the article didn't mention flywheel
    batteries. One company reports a 50:1 energy to
    weight advantage over lead acid batteries. (How
    does that compare to Lithium?). You add energy
    electrically - a motor spins up the flywheel.
    You get it out electrically - a generator takes
    energy from the flywheel. To reduce friction, the
    flywheel sits in a vacuum, and uses a magnetic
    bearing. 17,000 RPM. They claim a 5% loss per day. It would
    be nice to be able to add energy at a high rate -
    like at a kilowatt. No memory. When the device
    no longer functions, there are no toxic chemicals.


    I'd like a laptop that runs for 100 hours between
    charges, and charges in a minute. I'd like to
    be able to add energy by hand crank, solar cell,
    car plug or house plug without funky adapters
    to lug around.


    There is talk of putting flywheel batteries on
    the space station. Twin counter rotating flywheels
    reduce torque on the station.

    • Re:Flywheels (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Morphine007 ( 207082 )
      They claim a 5% loss per day.

      Isn't that a little high? I'm no expert on batteries but it would seem to me that this idea would be useful only for something along the lines of continually adding energy to these things (until just before the material would reach its breaking point) and then do a large deceleration to capacitors to store up a shizerload of charge for burst transmission, like say to a lazer.... hmmm...

    • Re:Flywheels (Score:2, Insightful)

      by hcdejong ( 561314 )
      Flywheels in portable devices have several drawbacks, the biggest of which is the angular momentum. You can't have a laptop that does a backflip every time it's jostled. And think about the noise and vibration a big, heavy rotor would cause.

  • Why rechargeable batteries can't keep up (Score:5, Informative)

    by valentyn ( 248783 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @09:50AM (#3104995) Homepage
    A must read about rechargeable batteries is the NiCd Battery FAQ from sci.electronics, to be found at members.aol.com/ralph234/cb-page/f_nicd_b.htm [aol.com]. You'll see why NiCd batteries for consumers are merely fool proof instead of high capacity.

    Dump those $15 battery chargers, get a good one, and you'll only need one Set of batteries for every appliance for the rest of your life.

  • In a word: physics

    If physics can't compete, let's see how many people will want to generate their own energy anywhere by winding up their electronics! [freeplay.net]

  • Bloat hurts Batteries, not process shrinks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @10:00AM (#3105022) Homepage
    Moore's law, especially the process shrink should _help batteries, not put higher demands on them.

    It is the users/marketers insistance on cramming more "functionality" [aka bloatware] in that gobbles battery life. Quit whining -- we do this to ourselves. The technology is an innocent bystander.


    • Hmm... lame ass example. I would like to have my cake and eat it too, and as technology has proved we can. Look at low output chips such as the transmeta, PPC and ARM processors..

      next thing you will say, use TWM instead of KDE or Gnome because they run better on your 486. Doesn't matter how efficient you try to make KDE, it's not going to ever be as efficient as TWM, because KDE can simply do more for you.

      Imagine if we kept that mindset, geezus, none of us would of ever left dos.

  • Maybe it's not so bad... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by muffen ( 321442 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @10:11AM (#3105054)
    I think that batteries have improved significantly over the last few years. I remember buying my first minidisk (Sony MZ-50) a few years back. I could get about 20hours playtime out of it. Recently I bought the new sony minidisk (still MZ series, don't remember the model), and I can easily get over 50 hours playtime with a battery that weights less.

    There are a lot of examples on how batteries have improved. Just look at mobile phones. I had 6 or so batteries for my Ericsson 337 mobile. For the Nokia 8310 that I have now, I have one battery. I think that this one battery easily beats the time I used to get out of the 6 batteries I had for the 337.

    I am aware of the fact that the electronics in these devices have improved such that it uses less power. However, the batteries HAVE improved aswell (they are all Li-ion now, so they can be recharged without beeing decharged completly).

    I think it would be very hard for batteries to follow moore's law. The reason is that batteries have been around for a lot longer, and there is no real driving-force for getting better batteries than the ones we have.

    I mean, it would be nice to get 200hours workingtime on the laptop, but really, what difference does it make? I mean, just buy more batteries. Is anyone willing to pay a lot of extra money for a battery with 200hours instead of 10?

  • OK, but do your own research (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @10:12AM (#3105064) Homepage

    Consider the "need to know" shortcuts in this article. For example "1859, when the first lead acid battery was made in France". This was the first cell using Planté type plates which are still in use today, but the history of lead acid and other [hepi.com] cells goes back a bit further than that. [accuoerlikon.com] It's a reasonable shortcut, but it does illustrate that this kind of article only skims the very surface. If you want insights, you have to go and do your own research.

    On the other hand, they do make an important point: "Of the billions [of cells and batteries] sold each year, most wind up in landfills and incinerators". Well, that's pretty much true of AA type alkalines and carbon-zincs, but actually clunky old automotive lead acids are now recycled 95% of the time. NiCad's though are death in a tube: nobody wants to touch the bloody things. NiMh's and Lithium Ions are a little nicer, if you can find a local recycler who will handle them. Power Express [powerexpress.com] used to accept small amounts of NiMh's and LiIons by mail, but they've changed their site and I can't find any mention of it now, which perhaps indicates the volatility (ha ha) of the recycling market. If you want some sleepless nights, have a look here [obviously.com] for a decent overview of what you can and should be recycling.

    Oops, but then we slip into the land of delusions again: "Batteries, which have long been derided for polluting the environment, will soon do their part to clean it up, MIT's Sadoway said. The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car."

    Uh huh. Like the T Zero [acpropulsion.com]? Again, the site has changed, and I now can't find mention of the technologies, but from memory, it's either 300kg of lead acids (shorter range or quicker death from deep discharges) or nickel metal hydrides (landfill ahoy) with quoted replacement costs and times of $3000 and 3 years for the lead-acids. Yes, that's 100kg of lead, acid and plastic to be recycled every year for every vehicle, or about half a pound (and $2.75) a day. OK, it can be recycled, and the problem is concentrated rather than distributed. But it's a lot of nastiness to deal with, and remember that rules only apply to nice middle income people. Scurrilous low income types are just going to abandon their twenty year old wrecks (complete with 200kg of lead) in the nearest ditch, street corner, or even front yard. We'd better be prepared to treat these things as environmental time bombs and have policies in place to collect and recycle them, with or without the owner's consent. Designing in a large recycling burden just makes less sense than investing in a clean and long lived internal power source.

    I think that the intro sums it up: the problem is chemistry. There's only so much energy you can store in a sealed unit. If we want significant energy density from a renewable source and no ongoing recycling nightmare, then we have to go to hydrogen cells or even good old fashioned alcohol burners. Sealed cell technology is not the long term answer to our energy needs, and we can't just blame the manufacturers for that, seeing as how it's us that keeps buying their products by the billion then (mostly) throwing them in the trash.

    • Re:OK, but do your own research (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fferreres ( 525414 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @12:23PM (#3105646)
      "The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car."

      Gone offtopic, but i think the air-powered car is a better solution than a battery powered car. The air-powered cars in production in Spain are a nice example: you charge the car with a home-compressor, and it gives you 200 miles autonomy (present model).

      The exhaust is obviously pure AIR. I'd enjoy the day people put their faces near an exhaust tube to refresh themselves :)
  • Battery distributers make profit from selling batteries at a large markup. Why would they fix that?
  • There is some "new" technology in batteries out there. I read about this 2 years ago (I think right here on /.) and I haven't heard a thing since. NEC published this [nec.co.jp] press release about an AMAZING "Polymer Proton" battery. This indole/quinoxaline polymer electrode technology looks like it would blow lithium ion out of the water. The article says they were planning commerical availibility for October 2000. Anybody hear anything more on this?
    • Lithium-Polymer technology exists and is widely used in devices like Sony's MiniDisc portables and (better) laptop computers, such as Apple's Titanium PowerBook G4 which gets a staggering 8-hour battery life. The economics of the commodity market of the Wintel universe do not allow for this level of engineering and premium battery technology, so people settle for higher power consumption and lesser batteries that run for about 3 hours.

  • Efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Decimal ( 154606 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @11:34AM (#3105404) Homepage Journal
    What, are you kidding me? Game Boy Advance goes for 14 hours on it's AA batteries. This is due to advances in efficiency, not batteries. Isn't that what we should be more concerned about?

  • Wireless energy nets for mobile phones/gadgets (Score:3, Insightful)

    by goyena ( 513679 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @11:54AM (#3105505)
    How feasible is it to use electromagnetic waves to transport energy? IANAP (P=Physicist), but a science fiction fan, who once read a short story how solar energy was collected and "beamed" from an orbital to the earth...und woe to any airplane that flew through that beam.

    I was only thinking that since batteries are a problem (because of size and durability) why not take them out of the gadget. Actually, even without being a PhD in Physics I could probably think of many reasons why not, but could anyone tell me how and if this could be feasible?

    Naturally if such a energy transport system were to be possible, it would only be feasible in mostly urban areas with infrastructure resembling that of cell phone networks.

    - Is it possible to transport _enough_ energy (and not lose too much in the conversion?
    - Would a direct line-of-sight be necessary, and would crossing it be hazardous?
    - Would it be possible to "encrypt" this energy to make it possible to subscribe and protect from freeloaders?
    - What types of waves (and/or photon beams?) are best suited for this application?
    - How long would it be before we all die with brain cancer because of the free energy being transmitted around?
  • I don't know. The battery in my Sony Clie is pretty spiffy. Also I am getting longer burn times with a lighter battery with the nightrider digital pro I bought last year. Batteries are getting better, you just have to find companies that actually care enough to use them in their products.

  • This is something that has bothered me for a while (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Galvatron ( 115029 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @12:12PM (#3105587)
    With the computer technology we have, we ought to be able to make exceptionally low power laptops. Fuck the color screen, and the high processing power, just give me enough to do word processing, spreadsheets, and view course material in PDF format and make the batteries last 8+ hours. There's nothing more frustrating than getting on a 6 hour flight and knowing that you're laptop's going to be out of power half way through the flight.


    This is one of the things that really excited me about Transmeta. Here was a company that seemed to be saying "no, it's not top of the line performance, it won't run Quake, but it can do all your work and keep your laptop running a long, long time." Unfortunately, all the OEMs seem to be stuck in a bigger/better/faster mindset, and don't realize that some of us actually miss the early days of laptops.


    Now you've got the same damn thing with palmtops. I'm hearing about iPaqs now that only last 8 hours before they need to be recharged? Fuck that, give me a black and white Palm any day.

    • Transmeta hedged their entire business model on getting partners early on after the release of the Crusoe and hope Intel or AMD didn't eat their lunch. Intel and AMD did just that, not only did they eat their lunch but they kicked their ass for their lunch money. Duh. I mean come on did Transmeta SERIOUSLY think AMD and Intel weren't working on really low power chips and probably had prototypes working already? Shit yes. They just didn't have a reason to release them as there was no third party competition for the lower power x86 chip market until Transmeta came along.

      You're also forgetting that the display is far more inefficient than the electronics spitting data out to it. A reflective LCD display doesn't use as much power as a backlit display but that comes as a cost of usability. Reflective laptop displays would not work out very well. A small reflective screen works fine because enough incident radiation is hitting the focus of your eye. With a larger screen anything outside of your focus is going to be hard to see which means reduces periphrial vision on the screen. Backlit LCD screens are huge power wasters, only half the light emitted by the backlight even gets to your eye. This is why the iPaq has such shitty battery life, it is a backlit screen that is acutally pretty damn bright. The next big thing in portable electronics is going to be OLEDs. Since the light isn't passing through a filter the display is more efficient and thus consumes less power. As it is your LCD display sucks about a third of the power your laptop uses. Another third is being sucked up by your 5v periphrials like your hard drive and CD-ROM.

      You miss the early days of laptops where they weighed ten pounds and worked for about an hour? I certainly don't. You get ten times the work out of a modern 1GHz P3 laptop than you did out of that old 100MHz Pentium in a much lighter package and uses the same if not less power.

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