Stanford Researchers Invent Everlasting Battery Material 180
judgecorp writes "Researchers at Stanford University have invented a battery material that could allow batteries to go through 400,000 charging cycles instead of the 400 or so which today's Li-ion batteries can manage. Among the uses could be storing energy to even out the availability of renewable sources such as sun and wind." Adds a story at ExtremeTech, "The only problem is, a high-voltage cathode (-) requires a very low-voltage anode (+) — and the Stanford researchers haven’t found the right one yet; and so they haven’t actually made a battery with this new discovery."
"Renewable sources" (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice to hear the phrase "renewable sources" being used.
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That article was quite stupid, read my comment on it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2542980&cid=38159130 [slashdot.org]
Summary is out by an order of magnitude (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
Stanford, however, has developed a new battery electrode that can survive 40,000 charge/discharge cycles — enough for 30 years of use on the grid.
Re:Summary is out by an order of magnitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, nice to see even more evidence that there's a menu of options for improving battery energy density, cycle life, and calendar life. Now if we could just make an educated guess and pick a suite of them to develop into large scale production instead of constantly dithering waiting for the next grad student to up the bar and never actually opening a factory.
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From TFA . .
>> "The only problem is, a high-voltage cathode (-) requires a very low-voltage anode (+) — and the
>> Stanford researchers haven’t found the right one yet; and so they haven’t actually made a battery
>> with this new discovery."
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Standard batteries in use today (say in laptops or smartphones) typically don't last longer than 300-500, and that's with greater capacity loss than 20%... then again, people really beat their batteries into submission - charging a smartphone during GPS navigation while the sun shines on the damn thing, constantly charging to 100% and keeping it charged all day while the phone's on the desk, running it down to 0% regularly (usually other people than the constantly charged ones - the memory effect still live
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Batteries used in phones and laptops, and the charge controllers that babysit them, are not designed for battery longevity. Manufacturer firmware does keep some charge in the battery, but the amount it keeps in there is picked by the manufacturer, and so balanced in such a way as to minimize customer complaint about how long the device can go without a charge while making it unlikely that anyone will complain about having to replace the battery too often before they have gone on to start selling a new mode
Re:Summary is out by an order of magnitude (Score:5, Informative)
Well, in all fairness, that's a binary order of magnitude. :)
- I know, that's weak. But this is slashdot.
Other orders of magnitude may be calculated using bases other than 10. The ancient Greeks ranked the nighttime brightness of celestial bodies by 6 levels in which each level was the fifth root of one hundred (about 2.512) as bright as the nearest weaker level of brightness, so that the brightest level is 5 orders of magnitude brighter than the weakest, which can also be stated as a factor of 100 times brighter.
- Order of Magnitude [wikipedia.org]
And see, now you know how star magnitude is computed! :D
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yours,
- admiral ackbar
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In general usage, it means (as my PhD supervisor would say) 'big-huge'.
I assume your PhD was in something like Pre-School Child care?
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Except I made no claims as to "order of magnitude", that was you putting the GP's words in my mouth. I just said they played it loose with that figure, whereas the GP complained about the mismatch between the OP and the FA on the other figure.
just starting.... (Score:5, Informative)
They have hypothesized an ideal, microscopic unit device that might be mass produced. They are just starting the applied research phase and may need some additional basic research
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I don't think that's as big a deal as you seem to indicate. It took that Manhattan project about five years to go from theoretical to practical. Of course, they put in a lot of effort and resources. On the other hand, they didn't have anything like the computer modeling that we have today to help them.
It might take a few years to get to a battery that could make renewable sources practical, and it might take a l
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Sure, Solyndra didn't work out as advertised, and maybe they got the money for reasons other than them having a really good idea. But I'd rather see an effort and a failure at something like solar rather than just spending the same 500 mil convincing people that tar sands and a really long pipe is going to be anything like the answer.
Solyndra was one part bad PR move, and one part fraud. By the time the Federal government invested, it was no longer viable (and the White House was informed as much).
The problem with the Federal Government investing in science and tech isn't the investment, it's the criteria they use to decide where and how. They're not interested in picking something that might work years from now, they're interested in things that make good photo ops today. (And yes, I can see room for federal investment in science...
Re:just starting.... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I worked in a research lab, another methodology used was to use this year's funding to pay for the research for which funding had not been requested yet, to assure that the results of THAT were likely to be confirmed. Then, once they were pretty confident that the research would pan out, they could apply for the grant to do the research. This way they always had successful research, and a continuous stream of grants. The continuously successful labs all worked this way to my knowledge. If they applied for a grant to do 'X', you could be 90% sure that they had already proved that 'X' would work, and probably had already been done. This might have been less true for 'pure' research as opposed to applied research.
Of course at the big Uni's the Uni took 50% to 60% off the top to cover operational expenses, so every grant application had to include a justification for double the amount of money actually needed (since the grants rarely paid for operational expenses), hidden in the cost structure.
And you thought corporations and government agencies were the only ones doing shenanigans. Ask anyone who is likely to know at Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc.
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When I worked at CMU in the early 1990s their marketing department wanted to drop the word 'University' from their logo. That was vetoed. But 1/2 of the faculty did not teach and only did research, and most of the research was applied research. So yes, in many ways it was more analogous to a diversified corporate research lab company than a classical university (IMHO).
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Of course at the big Uni's the Uni took 50% to 60% off the top to cover operational expenses, so every grant application had to include a justification for double the amount of money actually needed (since the grants rarely paid for operational expenses), hidden in the cost structure.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the major granting agencies know that the institution is going to take 50% and just assume your actual research budget is half of what you are asking for. The NIH grants make it explicit, so no guessing needed. Also, I wouldn't really call it shenanigans. The funding climate is extremely conservative right now. You have to have a track record to get funding, and that means lots of preliminary data. And, since that requires actual experiments to be done, that means using a portion o
Nothing special (Score:5, Informative)
This is nothing new. Many battery technologies can last for decades. It's only the Cobalt based lithium ones that have the abysmal 2-3 year shelf-life.
Ni-Iron batteries have demonstrated more than 50 year life, with no noticeable degradation following deep discharge.
LiFePO has demonstrated less than 20% capacity loss over 15 years and many thousands of cycles.
Ni-Hydrogen has been in service without maintenance on satellites for many many years. The batteries on the Hubble went 19 years without servicing.
Lead-Acid requires a bit of servicing and maintenance, but they can also last more than a decade when properly cared for.
Now when it comes to energy storage to deal with renewables the problem is the shear amount of energy storage needed as well as energy lost to inefficiency. The technology exists, but the cost would be prohibitive.
Re:Nothing special (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA and all that. The interesting thing about this is the electrolyte is supposedly cheap as hell. Thus the idea is making some long lasting batteries the size of a house on the cheap.
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Pumped storage (making use of huge lakes) has efficiency in the area of 90%
Bull Fucking Shit. The full load efficiency of a large electric motor isn't often over 92-95% on its own--a lot of that is lost in frictional losses to windage and bearings, you see, not forgetting losses through conductors and eddy currents. In other words: you're already dangerously close to your 90% threshold right in the motor. Then you have the frictional losses of a turbine to pump the water up, and friction head losses due to
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I just commented on the parent, but just so you know, there are at least two such systems in operation in the US. I forget where ... They use excess power (night time?) to pump water up to a lake, then use that water to generate power during peak demand.
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Re:Nothing special (Score:5, Informative)
Then once you get the water up to a lake: if it's an open body of water, you're going to have evaporation. That reduces the net efficiency all the same.
A tiny amount of evaporation.. so tiny it isn't really worth caring about. Also, if you're going to start calculating such minor things, rain will improve your efficiency a tiny amount.
Even if you went to heroic efforts in turbine mechanics and used hydrogen cooled motors and generators to reduce loss to air friction, I'd bet net efficiency over 70% would be very, very difficult to achieve, even in the best and most optimistic scenario involving an open body of water.
Dinorwig Power Station averages 74-75% efficiency with open bodies of water. (No where near the 90% that the grand parent suggested, but still better than what you claim would be optimistic).
Not to say that's a bad thing, but whether or not that would be useful is entirely dependent on the needs of the grid and the type of power supply on that grid. If you've got a nuclear station that needs to run at 90%+ 100% of the time (or whatever the case may be), hydro storage might make a lot of sense; use the surplus to store energy during the low demand times.
It makes sense just to cope with demand peaks. The aforementioned Dinorwig power station can hit peak capacity in 6 seconds if they have presynchronised the generators (75 seconds if not). There aren't many "traditional" power stations that can do that (I suspect even gas turbines would struggle to hit the 6 second mark).
Re:Nothing special (Score:5, Interesting)
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Both systems are pathetic.
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It's been done. I forget where, but here in the US there are at least two such systems used by power companies. They use excess power to pump the water to higher elevation lakes (such as the middle of the night), and use that water to generate electricity during peak periods (3PM on a hot day). It does require everything to be in the right places.
Off Peak metering (Score:2)
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Then why am I not hearing proposals to build giant cylinders of water on the coast/out on the water? During the day, you pump sea water into the giant column then let it out at night through the turbine. Is there a cost analysis that says anything like this is a good idea? It seems unintuitive.
I suppose you could build giant pipelines to natural inland lakes/rivers and stick a not-so Dam wall at the bottom just before the delta, during the day you pump water through the pipeline a long way upriver then shut off the pumps at night (solar) or low wind. Still sounds expensive, and less convenient since you can't put them where you actually need them (like batteries).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_mountain [wikipedia.org]
Pumps water from Llyn Peris to Marchlyn Mawr during off-peak periods and then lets it flow back through turbines as required. Lots of advantages over traditional power stations - for example, so long as know a high demand period is coming up (and demand periods are quite rigorously planned), they pre-synchronise the generators and can go from 0 to 1800MW generating capacity in only 6 seconds. If the high demand isn't expected, they can synchronise and hit ful
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there's no proposals to build artificial lakes to store energy because all the good spots have been taken and there's hell to pay for environmentalists for even suggesting them.. that doesn't mean that they wouldn't exist, calculating some calculations related to them is basic highschool physics(at least in finland.. ).
it's storing potential energy. it works. provided you have the energy source to begin with. like nuclear during off-peak or whatever.
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Thanks. Somebody mod parent up.
Utilities also won't want that new battery because it will be way more expensive than any molten salt design, and they can deal quite well with all limitations of molten salt batteries (like size, weight, and temperature).
Re:Nothing special (Score:5, Insightful)
There are three ways to rate battery life: "calendar life" (actual age deterioration), "shelf life" (how long it retains a charge), and "cycle life" (number of cycles of some depth that may be processed). While there are some chemistries with very high cycle life, this is higher than anything in production, save of course for ultra-capacitors. So yes, it is new.
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I just heard that solar has recently passed below the magic $1 per peak watt that has long been considered the point where it was really cost effective on a large scale.
make it energizer bunny size (Score:2)
where has he been any ways?
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where has he been any ways?
Going and going... and gone.
Revised article (Score:4, Funny)
Researchers at Stanford University have invented ONE HALF OF A BATTERY....
Everlasting but.. (Score:2)
Meanwhile manufacturers of consumer electronics can continue using 90's Li-Ion technology that has the huge advantage of dieing after a couple of years keeping the upgrade cycle going
What? (Score:3)
>The only problem is, a high-voltage cathode (-) requires a very low-voltage anode (+)
I know technology has been moving fast, but have they repeated Kirchhoff's laws now?
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"Repealed", not "repeated". Sorry.
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400,000 cycles is NOT "everlasting." (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we please try to use language accurately?
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No. Do or do not. There is no try.
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If you charge/discharge once per day, then it'll last for ~1000 years. From a practical standpoint, that's everlasting. It'll probably age to bits before the cycles run out, and it will probably be superceeded before it ages to bits.
Yeah, strictly speaking "everlasting" means "lasts forever". But nothing lasts forever, so it's an acceptable approximation.
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The battery gives unlimited cycles*
--
*fair use policy applies.
40,000 cycles not 400,000 (Score:2)
Still impressive, but not nearly as impressive as it would've been if it had actually been 400,000.
Yes, it is just a simple typo... but it would be nice if people could at least get key details like this right when submitting stories...
High vs low voltage? (Score:2)
it is good (Score:2)
Re:Impossible! (Score:5, Insightful)
And better battery technology might help to store energies produced by other means, like solar or wind.
Re:Impossible! Really ? can you name 1 ? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#List_of_countries_with_Source_of_Electricity_2008 [wikipedia.org]
Because this chart in the wiki doesn't have any that aren't getting power from coal, gas, or nuclear.
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Bhutan also has 1/20th the energy consumption PER CAPITA and 1/500th the population. It is also has a land area 1/200th of the US.
In other words, thats great for Bhutan, good luck scaling it to 10,000 times the energy consumption over a 200x larger land mass.
Incidentally, this [sari-energy.org] (warning, PDF) indicates that you are incorrect-- it seems to say that a very large portion of the energy produced comes from firewood / biomass. This [asiatradehub.com] seems to indicate that their annual energy consumption is around 23,000 MW, and t
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It might also help that Bhutan has 38 passenger cars per 1000 people [worldbank.org].
You are right about lowering consumption, no arguments. My beef is with any attempt to compare first world countries with developing countries when it comes to energy consumption and generation.
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All that electricity they want to "store" comes from COAL so this sucks! Idiots! This is why all government funding to idiot-factories like MIT needs to be CUT IMMEDIATELY.
Precisely. Even if you rolled out enough solar and wind power generation capacity to run the whole world, it would still only work while the sun was shining and/or the wind was blowing... you'd still need coal or nuclear or some other fuel burning source to generate power during the times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
Unless you had some sort of everlasting battery to store the energy during the sunny or windy days to use during the dark still nights...
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I'm sure there are lots of places where you can't get enough sun or wind during winter to meet your energy requirements, but there are plenty of places where you can, and even if only 50% of the worlds energy needs could be met with zero emission electricity, we could stop worrying so much about CO2 emissions and peak oil for a little bit longer.
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Re:Impossible! (Score:5, Interesting)
About 10 years ago I did an analysis of the economics and related topics on a hypothetical large-scale solar project in the northern Sahara. It wasn't specific to Libya but today Libya is a good potential platform. If you build a 100- or 200-square mile solar farm, putting the solar panels about 20 feet or more above the ground (higher is better due to better breeze), two of the beneficial side effects are cooling the space underneath, and (closely related) shade. If you think about it, in that area shade is a significant resource!
This solar installation then provides a large area where greenhouses can be built, shaded (between 70% and 95%) by the solar panels, and partly roofed so it's relatively cheaper to complete the enclosure. this not only provides power but also creates a huge plant-growing area. The result - Libya could become the produce capital of the Mediterranean. Some of the power could be used to provide desalinization, and the greenhouses would minimize water loss so the impact on the Mediterranean could be minimized. So Libya can export power AND food, and hire thousands of farm workers to work in long term, skilled jobs, without any need for migration so they will have a stake in improving where they live. This is a very synergistic approach so the total cost of the system does not have to be amortized purely with power sales. And it could be expanded across hundreds or thousands of square miles of rock and sand.
The analysis also showed that such a large installation would have a significant effect on the weather patterns, increasing local rainfall similarly to how a forest tends to increase rainfall, thereby to some extent ameliorating the present tendency of the Sahara to expand itself. It's a very complicated system, and I did not do the detailed computer analysis necessary to really prove this hypothesis out, but it's certainly one worth exploring.
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I neglected to mention that the greenhouse roofs could also be constructed as solar stills, also synergistically generating one resource (irrigation water) while reducing the total heat influx on the greenhouse interiors.
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I saw a study once that showed all you have to do is keep the goats out of an area in Israel and in a year it's completely green.
Sounds like a good business plan.
1) Buy a huge piece of worthless land.
2) Build a fence around it.
3) Wait...
4) Sell it as farm land.
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It's a very complicated system, and I did not do the detailed computer analysis necessary to really prove this hypothesis out, but it's certainly one worth exploring.
And we're back in square one. Humans don't always choose the best solution to a problem (see Betamax or Windows, just for two). Don't get me wrong, I think it's a really good idea and few enthusiastic people could probably pull it off. Problem is, it haven't been done before, not to mention the scale, so the chance for unforeseen problems is huge. Depending on its success would be very poor planning. Fossil fuels are running out now, not in 200 years.
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I tend to be a long-term optimist. Humans don't always (or even often) make the right decision right off. But IMHO societies are bottom-up decision systems, just like ecosystems, evolutionary systems, and neural networks - living systems in general (AKA 'complex adaptive systems'). The secret of all such systems is basically 'muddling through', always slowly converging toward the optimal energy /minimum error given the environment of the system. One of the characteristics of such systems is that no indi
Nah! Europeans would NEVER do that... (Score:2)
...in the long run.
Only about 15-20% [wikipedia.org] of all of it's (100% renewable) power demand by 2050. [supersmartgrid.net]
Construction of the first solar farm in that system is to start in Morocco next year. [guardian.co.uk]
It's amazing how those plans from about a decade ago coincided with recent regime changes in the region, isn't it?
Just one of those lucky coincidences I guess. [rechargenews.com]
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Of course, in addition to renewables, there are other routes to addressing those concerns -- most significantly, the expansion of nuclear power and the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) from the burning of fossil fuels. Our exclusion of these routes from this report is not intended as any comment on their merit. Our goal is to examine what it would take to shift even further to a 100% renewable electricity supply.
So they just ignore the nuclear completely. And they also note:
Achieving security, with flows of power from North Africa into Europe, in turn required the integration of Europe and North Africa into a single, well-functioning market,
At the time where the stability of whole EU is in question and there are problems adding Turkey to EU they are proposing to add Egypt, Libya, Marocco, Algeria and Tunisia to EU... It's a nice thought, but somehow I don't see it happening quickly enough to meet the 2050 goal.
Even they say that the electricity produced in North Africa will be from 3 to 6 times as expensive as nuclear! Calling it cheap i
The map. (Score:2)
Click on it.
You should notice that a great deal of that map is covered with "wind" icons. Lots of them in Europe.
Nobody's ignoring winter. More like counting on it.
As for the night... note how very few of those icons are for photovoltaic solar plants? Again, nobody's ignoring the night. [wikipedia.org]
And I believe that you've misunderstood the bit about the "well-functioning market" as "North Africa will be a part of EU".
Are USA and China a part of some kind of a political union just because they are trading with each oth
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Everlasting should mean forever, not 400,000
I'm going to have to agree with the Pastor on this one. 400k isn't really "everlasting", it's got a finite limit to the lasting.
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But everything is eventually going to fail in 10^13 years when proton decay catches up with us. How about we define a reasonable target for everlasting for our technology, like maybe a human lifetime.
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Well, even so, heat death will render all our technologies inoperable before then anyway.
Bottom line, there's little hope of human civilization lasting more than 10^20th years.
Sooner than that... (Score:2)
Bottom line, there's little hope of human civilization lasting more than 10^20th years.
Unless we find a way to escape the solar system 5*10^9 years is our rough life expectancy and if we develop a good enough understanding of science to do that then who knows? Heat death is just the result of probability and statistics and we've already seen systems which can spontaneously decrease in entropy for short periods of time.
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We already have the technology to escape our solar system if we put our minds and money to it (granted at this point it would be ridiculously expensive). But, barring something like civilization collapse, it will only get cheaper and easier. I cannot imagine that it will take us more than 200 years to escape the solar system at this point (even 100 years would surprise me).
I'd be interested in a cite for systems spontaneously decreasing in entropy. I've never heard of that, and it would clearly change th
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there's little hope of human civilization lasting more than 10^20th years.
Thank goodness -- I was terrified that it would only be 10^15 years!
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How about we define a reasonable target for everlasting for our technology, like maybe a human lifetime.
I see what you mean, anything that lasts until after I die is everlasting from my point of view. I asssume that is how climate change deniers justify their inaction.
Re:I object to this (Score:5, Funny)
400k isn't really "everlasting"
400k ought to be enough for anybody.
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At one charge cycle per day, that's 1,000 years. Not everlasting, but certainly lasting longer than anyone is likely to care - if we're still trying to use the same battery technology in 1,000 years then civilisation has probably collapsed completely at least once in the interim. Even if it's backed by a wind turbine and is doing ten discharge cycles a day it's 100 years.
The 400 cycles quoted for LiIon seems a bit low though. Newer ones are rated for 3,000.
Re:I object to this (Score:4, Insightful)
Everlasting battery - apparently this means not everlasting (400,000 cycles) and not a battery (since they don't know how to actually build one yet)
I have a perpetual motion machine, except it's not a machine and isn't perpetually in motion ....
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I have a perpetual motion machine, except it's not a machine and isn't perpetually in motion ....
Patent it anyway, you never know.
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But if someone could say "This battery could last for a thousand years.", is cool
At one discharge cycle per day, it will.
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The intended meaning is the same as "infinite" - which is not "beyond comprehension" but "beyond practicality". If I only have to buy two sets of batteries for my devices (one for use, the other sit on the charger for swapping) for life, that's infinite for all practical purposes. Maybe these batteries won't become heirlooms. But if their price is merely 10-20 times the cost of regular batteries, it's close enough.
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It's the Stupidity . . .
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Do you really think so? At 10-20 times the cost of a regular battery, your phone battery would be $400-$800, and you want to buy two of them? And how long do you keep a phone for anyway? Certainly not for life....
The technology is good for some things, for sure. I'm thinking hybrids/EVs and power plant stations.
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I was thinking AAA/AA/C/D batteries. With the sheer quantity of these that are embedded in items around the house, with three kids under 6, I can't be plugging everything over night. Cell phones, no, I wouldn't need two. But at a cost of $400 for a battery, I think there'd be some impetus in the industry to go with standard sizes to allow the batteries to be separate from the phones, so you could continue to re-use the same battery for life. So, yes, I think that'd be fine.
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Imaginary friends aren't necessarily "everlasting".
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IA! IA! CTHULHU FTAGHN!
Re:I object to this (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not sure if troll.
There is little practical difference between someone saying something really fucking stupid that they believe in, and someone saying something really fucking stupid to provoke a response, other than in terms of the stupidity or otherwise of the person saying it, and on the internet, who cares?
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Can we assume you also have a problem with the movie The NeverEnding Story?
As I can't imagine anyone's ever consciously sat through that film until the end, maybe it is genuinely never-ending.
If a leaf falls to the ground in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
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Yeah, and when you are at a level of detail that you starts to count your charge carriers, the process you are used to call "conduction" starts to be called "diffusion". And saying that "diffusion is easy" is equivalent to say that "it is a good conductor". Anyway, that is a pretty rare property on things that absorb ions.
How long it holds charge, tough, is more associated to a property called "selectivity". And the article didn't mention it. It probably even couldn't because the ions/molecules being select
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We radiate the excess into space, then get a new batch the next day. The cycle continues!
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Hmm. I think that wind energy is in part derived as drag on the rotation of the Earth - the atmosphere is being dragged around the Earth along with the hard part of the planet, but since it is farther from the center or rotation it wants to move a bit slower (just as artificial satellites have slower rotation rates as their elevation increases). That explains why the net wind is from east to west. Of course a bunch of related effects related to sherical shape, coriolis force, thermal gradients in both el
Re:Wind and sun are renewable? (Score:4, Informative)
Wind is generated only in part by the earth's rotation. Some of it also comes from solar energy, which heats parts of the atmosphere, causing it to rise, which then causes a low pressure zone which causes inrushing air currents.
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the only everlasting thing that I am interested in is erection and orgasm.
An everlasting erection would get annoying the first time you needed a piss and had to do a handstand.
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Erections lasting over 4 hours are not healthy.