21–30 of 90 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well that would require a lot of energy !
Achieving nuclear fusion should provide us with the energy.
> Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. Yes we would. All these things existed without Li-ion. The power/space budget would be more constrained but it was perfectly achievable. What wouldn't work is senselessly burning cycles running managed code in a VM with heaps of battery sucking DRAM. People today have no concept of how much compu…
Or of how many new ideas are created because generous power/space ratios give us the luxury to develop quickly using abstractions higher than highly-optimized references and pointers. You can take a hit on optimal energy efficiency if it results in a larger ecosystem with more possibilities.
The real challenge is to get both.
> Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. Yes we would. All these things existed without Li-ion. The power/space budget would be more constrained but it was perfectly achievable. What wouldn't work is senselessly burning cycles running managed code in a VM with heaps of battery sucking DRAM. People today have no concept of how much compu…
So they would never have been tablets or laptops. They would have stayed as e-readers and PDAs and so forth.
> Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. Yes we would. All these things existed without Li-ion. The power/space budget would be more constrained but it was perfectly achievable. What wouldn't work is senselessly burning cycles running managed code in a VM with heaps of battery sucking DRAM. People today have no concept of how much compu…
A note for those who go looking for the technical details: there aren't many here. According to the article, Dr. Goodenough is being tight-lipped about his work.
I get that he is angry, but I worry that his anger may rob us of what he could do.
A note for those who go looking for the technical details: there aren't many here. According to the article, Dr. Goodenough is being tight-lipped about his work.
I expect a note in the margin of one of his journals, discovered posthumously, "What a simple and elegant anode, the margin is too small to contain it." I get that he is angry, but I worry that his anger may rob us of what he could do.
> But Goodenough is equally dismissive of such tinkering and its measly 7% or 8% a year in added efficiency. 7% extra efficiency per year means electric cars will have twice the capacity in 10 years...and then double up again in 10 more years...and so on. That's a far greater rate of improvement than for gasoline-powered cars, even if we're impatient and we want our $10,000 500 mile on a charge EVs now . > But the pa…
> 7% extra efficiency per year means electric cars will have twice the capacity in 10 years...and then double up again in 10 more years...and so on. An example of the dangers of extrapolating. CPU speeds kept going up - until they didn't. Battery tech is not going to keep going up 7% each year. Although perhaps his 60% improvement will show exactly at the right time to effectively be 7% better than the previous year.
What people often do to hide this fact is talk about energy density, Wh/L, where growth can continue for longer, at the expense of making batteries heavier.
What I'm worried about is the waste of lithium and other battery/accumulator metals. In theory, people should turn electronic devices and batteries to recycling facilities, but a large part of the population ignores the rules and throws their gadgets into the trash when broken... I wonder if someday we will find a way to "separate" trash on atomar level (i.e. put arbitrary stuff in on one side, get raw atoms on the o…
Todays landfills are tomorrows mines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 7% extra efficiency per year means electric cars will have twice the capacity in 10 years...and then double up again in 10 more years...and so on. An example of the dangers of extrapolating. CPU speeds kept going up - until they didn't. Battery tech is not going to keep going up 7% each year. Although perhaps his 60% improvement will show exactly at the right time to effectively be 7% better than the previous year.
CPU speeds stopped increasing because the market stopped focusing on CPU speed (coincidentally to this discussion, the change was largely to reduce power demands). Transistor count has kept plugging right along; http://i.imgur.com/FvVrnn4.png
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 7% extra efficiency per year means electric cars will have twice the capacity in 10 years...and then double up again in 10 more years...and so on. An example of the dangers of extrapolating. CPU speeds kept going up - until they didn't. Battery tech is not going to keep going up 7% each year. Although perhaps his 60% improvement will show exactly at the right time to effectively be 7% better than the previous year.
CPU speeds stopped increasing because the market stopped focusing on CPU speed (coincidentally to this discussion, the change was largely to reduce power demands). Transistor count has kept plugging right along; http://i.imgur.com/FvVrnn4.png