The AP article, however, is an excellent example of the overhyped future technology trope. Often a dramatic new technology, like flying cars, requires that several different component technologies all work sufficiently so that the application is feasible. Skyscrapers could not be built until the elevator was invented. It didn’t matter if engineers had perfected ways of supporting really tall buildings if no one could get to the upper floors.
I have discussed this idea with batteries many times. A useful battery has to simultaneously have multiple properties: good energy density and capacity, stability, sufficiently rapid charge and discharge rates, many charge-discharge cycles, and be made of material that is not too expensive, heavy, rare, or toxic. There also has to be a way to economically mass produce them. Missing even one property can be a deal-killer.
After reading score of news items on battery technology, there is a very common theme. The articles will discuss a new battery “breakthrough” in breathless terms, because one of the necessary features was significantly improved – a battery that can last for millions of cycles, or that can be recharged in seconds. They gloss over, however, the fact that one or more of the other features are deadly – oh, but they have to be made out of platinum, or their capacity is tiny. This is usually coupled with the notion that all the researchers have to do now is fix the fatal flaw, and we will soon have these wonderful batteries. That, of course, is always the rub, and we never hear about these technologies again.
For this reason I am usually more excited about incremental advances to existing working technologies. I would take a 10% increase in existing lithium-ion batteries over the possibility of a battery with 10 times the capacity but a fatal flaw that scientists are sure to work out in 5-10 years (because they probably won’t).
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