Powering the Future – The Promise of Batteries
When I was a kid I loved Star Trek – I waited for it every week. One thing I was fascinated with was how much energy they could obviously store in very small places. The handfasers were a case in point. Very powerful weapons with very little place for energy storage. But little did it matter – I trusted that engineers would figure that out. And in part – they did. Batteries have become vastly better than what I knew during my childhood but now we are pushing physical limits. Most of the improvements over the last 10 years came from better loading and unloading management rather than fundamental advances. Batteries are still very far from being able to do what we expect from them. Let’s not build our economies on them just yet.
