Department of Energy kicks off 5 year $120 million battery research program

Finally gaming laptops will have relevant battery lives (and regular laptops will last for days)! The goal of this project is to create batteries that are 5x more powerful (which I assume means 5x more capacity) than the ones available today.

Department of Energy kicks off five-year, $120 million battery research program | The Verge

 

I don't care about the research (or who is doing it...) I just want to see the results already!

I hope the scientists are smart enough to not take the whole five years to achieve this...

 

Hey where'd my picture of the battery go? I guess having a sense of humor isn't allowed.

" produce batteries which are five times more powerful than current technology at a fifth of the overall cost"

Do they really think $120M will achieve this? How much money has been invested in automotive battery tech? Billions over decades and they're still not even close. Call me a skeptic, but I'll believe it when I see it, in 25 years. I'd love to see it too, but I think it will take more than DoE and $120M to even get started in the tech.

 

The research program is a good thing, but whether the results will end up giving something that can be manufactured and sold is another story. A lot of research is incremental and it takes time to go from research to product. It can go the other way too, but science sometimes takes time. One thing that rarely gets talked about too is the failures. Sometimes meaningful results are in the failures too as in we tried that, it didn't work so that others seeing those results can look somewhere else for answers.

Personally, i'm not hoping for anything concrete, but as long as it can help other get something better done i'll at least be happy to see things moving forward.

 

there has been headway but the demands required of a rechargeable battery is quite enormous since the very idea of energy storage is going against the Universal Laws of Entropy. You have innumerable factors like charge retention, energy density, reasonable amount of recharge cycles, safety, weight and readily available components/materials. Most research streams like Magnesium Ion or Fluoride batteries can only seem to address several of the factors mentioned but there is always an almost insurmountable setback. This should be a global effort since better energy storage is easily one of the most important technologies for mankind, right alongside stuff like nuclear fusion, a cure for cancer and high temperature superconductors.

 

X220 with 9 cell and battery slice gets 20+ hours on a single charge, more than enough to get through an airplane ride to Asia.

 

Well if this project is successful then that life could be maintained (without adding a big $180 slice battery) while making the laptop thinner / lighter and more powerful.

 

I think it is an issue, don't get me wrong. A HUGE issue actually. With so many battery operated devices, the landfill and chemicals and carbon footprint from making and throwing away used batteries is enormous. Just a measly $120M project by the DoE to drop the price by 5x and increase storage by 5x is something the auto companies have been trying to do for decades and have improved, but not nearly so much. And there's been billions of dollars invested in that tech for automobiles.

Not only that but notice:

" work being focused on products for transportation and the national power grid..."

" JCESR's work on large-scale storage could very well trickle down into the consumer market over the course of the next decade, though it may be some time before the technology starts appearing in the likes of smartphones and tablets."

So I guess it's a long term goal although the title of the article and the image of a laptop battery make it sound like that's the target.