
There is no better battery (2008) - mhb
http://www.manifestdensity.net/2008/08/20/there-is-no-better-battery/
======
jdietrich
The advance from NiCd to NiMh chemistry gave approximately a doubling of watts
per kg. So did NiMh to LiPo. It's hardly Moore's Law, but it's a significant
rate of improvement. I can't imagine what smartphones and tablets would look
like without the development of LiPo. We've seen substantial improvements in
those battery technologies, perhaps most usefully Sanyo's development of low-
self-discharge NiMh cells, which vastly broadened the useful market for
rechargeable batteries.

The rate of change seems glacial compared to the rest of the computer
industry, but it's unfair to imagine that no change is occurring. Properly
sexy stuff is happening in battery technology and we'd be extremely foolish to
imagine that batteries are at a dead-end.

~~~
deelowe
The author addresses this in the article. The claim is that the battery
chemistry itself hasn't improved, just our ability to keep it stable has which
has allowed us to explore ideas that were previously not feasible due to a
limitation with charging/discharging electronics. The assumption that there is
little to no further progress to be made in this area (charging or chemistry).
So, while battery technology may be improving, it will continue to improve
slowly or not improve at all as there's a limit to how much more improvement
we'll get from better charging/discharging circuits. Whether that's a valid
claim is debatable, I guess, but I share the same opinion personally.

Now, we could see a super capacitor or something like that one day which may
change things, but so far those have yet to materialize.

~~~
ph0rque
Claiming that battery chemistry itself hasn't improved is like claiming that
the physics constants haven't changed... scratch that, it _is_ indirectly
claiming that physics haven't changed. This seems like it's a few steps from a
tautology.

If you look at this graph (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg> ), which is from a
wikipedia section linked in the article, there are materials that hold more
energy both per unit volume and unit mass than gasoline, we just haven't been
able to exploit them _yet_. Isn't that the whole of materials engineering
progress?

~~~
mikeash
I like "Fat Metabolism" sitting up there near diesel and gasoline. Imagine a
fat-powered fuel cell that can draw from our own bodies....

~~~
stcredzero
So long as it doesn't smell like ketonic B.O.

------
ricardobeat
That's a very pessimistic view. There is plenty of on-going research in
improving graphene batteries, molecular energy storage, and technology that is
not that far from coming to market like Li-Si, Air-Lithium or solid hydrogen
storage.

Tesla now makes cars with a very useful range using standard Li-ion batteries
and good thermal management, I wonder the author thinks of the Model S.

[http://gigaom.com/2013/01/14/13-battery-startups-to-watch-
in...](http://gigaom.com/2013/01/14/13-battery-startups-to-watch-in-2013/)

~~~
kylebrown
But "molecular energy storage" and hydrogen (solid or otherwise) are not
battery technologies. They are better classified as fuels which store
(chemical) energy in chemical bonds, which is distinct from batteries which
store (electrical) energy by charge separation.

I agree with the article author. I was convinced after reading chemistry
professor Daniel Nocera a few years ago, after he became famous for
discovering a cobalt-phosphate water-splitting catalyst, for the first time
enabling hydrogen generation _under normal conditions_ (neutral pH). He had
been looking for it for some time (his "holy grail" of renewable energy).

He's a proponent of solar and hydrogen (collecting energy from solar and
storing it in hydrogen) and a detractor of batteries. He (convincingly) argues
that battery tech is fundamentally limited by the physics of charge
separation. The only way to beat that limit is to store the energy in chemical
bonds - as fuel - like nature does.

His paper "Chemistry of Personalized Solar Energy" is a good place to
start.[1] Just the introduction and conclusion - you can skip the middle (its
dense orbital theory).

1\. <http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/alow/solar2.pdf>

~~~
ricardobeat
Battery technology might never hit the density of fuels, but that doesn't mean
it won't be cost-effective. The 10x increase in density that a slew of new
technologies promise is more than enough for making electric cars mainstream.
seeing we already have viable ones with today's battery tech.

------
Xcelerate
No. Just no. I don't know how freely I can talk about my research, but there's
_plenty_ going on with batteries.

~~~
thoughtsimple
Just a note that this is from 2008. At least in the short term, he was right.
Not much has happened in battery technology available to the public in the
last 5 years.

~~~
Xcelerate
I saw that it's from 2008. I'm not denying it's a hard problem, but to claim
that improvement has stalled is short-sighted.

~~~
001sky
Without any evidence -- even theoretical -- you are just posturing. The
fundamentals of the post are not "short sighted", they describe a deep
fundamental flaw that is (has been) historically perisistent. There is a
difference between being "short sighted" and a lack of transparency. Until the
"magic" ships.

~~~
hosh
I'm not sure this is posturing. Or at least, it is certainly not "just"
posturing.

I'm not in research like this, so I just hear things fed off of Y(HN). I've
heard of some interesting devices like the carbon nanotube based
supercapacitors (was that what it was?). Who knows?

------
jonmrodriguez
What's preventing us from putting fuel cells in laptops and tablets soon? Is
it just that today's fuel cell designs are physically bulky? Are we near
theoretical limits on fuel cell miniaturization or is there still lots of
headroom? What's the safest way to store the fuel? Are there too many
downsides to making the fuel cell air-breathing (as opposed to the danger of
storing oxygen)?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell>

Wikipedia says that fuel cells are typically "stacked" (placed in series)
since each one only makes 0.7v, but if a new tablet is designed to save space
by using only a single 0.7v cell and upregulating the voltage with a boost
regulator, won't the total efficiency even with regulator losses still be far
above li-ion?

~~~
Breakthrough
IBM made a laptop some years back that was powered by a fuel cell combined
with batteries. It ran off of methanol, and although it was kind of bulky,
this was back in 2005.

[http://news.cnet.com/IBM-pours-a-shot-of-methanol-for-
ThinkP...](http://news.cnet.com/IBM-pours-a-shot-of-methanol-for-
ThinkPads/2100-1044_3-5662616.html)

------
gverri
Considering that this post was written in 2008... What changed in these 5
years in the "battery" industry?

------
ph0rque
False: <http://www.akbars.net/images/battery%20energy%20density.png>

~~~
drucken
That graph shows Li-ion as the highest energy density, which is in accord with
the article. What am I missing?

~~~
icambron
The trend. The point is that energy densities are improving steadily, contrary
to the article.

~~~
regomodo
Which is a bit moot because, going by the trend, it's not until ~ the year
2220 that batteries will equal petrol for energy density by weight.

------
skdoo
Batteries have improved significantly since 2008, and are still improving.

The most important shifts have been in cost ($/kWh), but there have also been
improvements in energy density (Wh/kg), power density (W/kg), and cycle life.

Some of this is due to electronics improvements, but a lot is due to better
cell design and manufacturing, funded in part by higher demand.

------
sallen
Interesting in the 5 years since this was written, what the friend claimed
would happen has come to pass. Car2go runs several all electric car sharing
fleets in various cities. I've used the one in San Diego a number of times.

------
ealloc
The book "Powering the Future" also argues fuel will always outperform
batteries, pointing out that both fuel and batteries store chemical energy,
and that chemical energy density is fundamentally contrained by physics:

Since all atoms are approximately the same size there is a limit to how many
bonds/volume you can have, and since all chemical bonds are roughly the same
amount of energy there's a limit on how much energy/volume you can store with
chemical energy.

The book then argues that hydrocarbon fuels come very close to the ideal
energy density, and have many other advantages over batteries (weight (they're
formed with light elements), extremely safe byproducts CO2 H2O, simple
ingredients).

~~~
frankus
From an energy policy perspective that sounds about right, but from the
standpoint of what's theoretically possible that would seem to be ignoring
some really promising areas of research.

------
Tichy
Reminds me of the time when it was declared that there was a physical barrier
to sending more than 44kbps through a phone line.

~~~
twoodfin
Wasn't there? How much faster did modems over POTS really get? IIRC, even
56kbps only worked downstream, and only if you had a modern digital connection
back to your telephone system.

~~~
takluyver
ADSL connections over the same physical wire as a phone line can often get
several Mbps.

~~~
simonh
But ADSL only goes as far as the exchange before being routed onto an IP
backbone network. With modem signals the same signal goes over a voice circuit
(albeit a virtual one) all the way to the receiving modem. They're not at all
the same thing.

~~~
InclinedPlane
That's the point. People make sweeping assumptions about the limitations of
something, and then someone else changes the ground underneath those
assumptions and makes the cconclusions invalid. DSL, for example, is not much
more difficult in terms of capital equipment cost compared to dialup and it
doesn't require running a new line to the home, but the bandwidth available is
a thousand times greater than the previous "hard" limit of phone land line
based networking.

------
jbert
You only need a battery to support you while you are off-grid.

Electric trains don't run on batteries.

Wireless charging is getting better.

Electricity which is "too cheap to meter" would mean we didn't need 'great'
battery tech, current tech would be ok.

The other way to solve this problem is to say "burning hydrocarbons have
_great_ energy density, and the global transport industry is already tooled up
to use them, so lets use those as our 'battery' tech", and just find:

\- a good way to turn our global energy output into stored chemical energy in
hydrocarbons

\- a good way to use hydrocarbons in small-scale non-transport devices
(phones?)

------
frankus
I agree with OP if your timeline is the next few years, but there is still a
ton of headroom between, say, lithium polymer and the theoretical maximum for
specific energy (the speed of light squared).

Obviously nuclear batteries are going to be a long time coming (I'm not even
aware of any theoretical way to make, say, a fission reaction release
electrical rather than thermal energy), but if you expand on the definition of
"battery" a bit from something you just plug in to recharge to something that
maybe requires being physically swapped out and reprocessed, there are some
very promising avenues of research.

The one I'm most excited about is the vanadium boride-air cell, which has a
practical energy density on par with diesel fuel. The catch is that is likely
impractical to make one that can be recharged by simply reversing the current
through it, so it would require a network of reprocessing plants and battery-
exchange facilities.

~~~
GregBuchholz
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery>

------
jzilla
If the issue with batteries for car sharing is that it takes too long to
charge the batteries, why can't interchangeable batteries be used?

~~~
GregBuchholz
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery>

------
mynegation
Lately there's been quite a development in the area of molten salt batteries,
they look promising: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_battery>

~~~
Aardwolf
Hmm, the ZEBRA battery is in a museum and requires 245 °C to operate, I guess
it's gonna be a while before this is in consumer devices :)

------
bmac27
almost on cue: [http://gigaom.com/2013/01/23/battery-startup-leyden-
energy-r...](http://gigaom.com/2013/01/23/battery-startup-leyden-energy-
raises-10m-for-its-next-gen-lithium-ion-batteries/)

------
Aardwolf
Biological organisms have quite a lot of energy stored in a small amount of
space.

A lot of inventions were based on nature, e.g. wings for flying. Who knows,
one day maybe a battery invention will also be based on biology.

~~~
dpark
Biological organisms aren't batteries. We manage to store lots of energy by
storing it chemically. Internal combustion engines are already based on this.
I burn fats, proteins, and carbohydrates for energy. My car burns gasoline.
The issue is that we want to get away from that design, because it's not
particularly sustainable.

If we could come up with a reasonably-efficient way to produce gasoline (or an
equivalent) in a renewable way, that would be wonderful, but it wouldn't be a
battery.

------
jcfrei
A 4 years old article on the front page of HN, with an attention-grabbing
headline and no sign of serious research into the topic? Come on HN!

------
tocomment
Hmm, what about lithium air batteries, and fuel cells, and all the other
things that we hear about having 10x the energy density?

~~~
runeks
Haven't heard about "lithium air batteries" but I'd say fuel cells aren't
batteries since they basically just oxidize methanol (which is what an engine
does with gasoline).

But the lines might be more blurred than my thinking indicates.

~~~
ars
> I'd say fuel cells aren't batteries since they basically just oxidize

Many batteries also use oxidation reactions. That's not how you define a
battery. I think the main difference is batteries release all the energy as
electricity without associated heat, but fuel cells are partially electricity,
partially heat.

~~~
frankus
Fuel cells are just "open" batteries, where the reactants are continuously fed
into the battery and the products are removed (whereas in a battery the
reactants and products occupy the same physical volume).

~~~
ars
Then what distinguishes a fuel cell from a
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery> ?

------
hosh
The post was written in 2008. Has there been any changes in the past five
years to indicate any fundmental breakthrough in energy density? I know Tesla
has come out with practical electric cars, but was that an improvement in
energy density or an improvement in energy efficiency and management, as the
article argues?

------
simonsquiff
Tesla, who presumably know a fair bit about this, say that battery energy
density has been improving at a rate of 7-8% a year.
[http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4370061/World-on-
cus...](http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4370061/World-on-cusp-of-EV-
tipping-point--says-Tesla-CTO)

~~~
SeanLuke
That would imply a doubling every nine to ten years. A link from an earlier
comment...

<http://www.akbars.net/images/battery%20energy%20density.png>

... would imply that this is overoptimistic by at least 2x.

------
tocomment
By the way, are super capacitors still a promising technology? What's the hold
up on getting those commercialized?

~~~
jonmrodriguez
(1) Supercapacitors are commercialized, see:
<http://www.mouser.com/Power/Supercapacitors/_/N-6uivw>

(2) Today's supercapacitors have very poor energy density even compared to
batteries. What they do have is good _power_ density, meaning they can deliver
their limited energy very fast.

(3) Boosting the energy density of supercapacitors will happen but requires
many years of great strides in nanotech. Research like this, involving 3D
nanostructures with enormous surface area:
[http://phys.org/news/2012-10-sponge-like-graphene-
supercapac...](http://phys.org/news/2012-10-sponge-like-graphene-
supercapacitor-electrodes.html)

~~~
tocomment
Hmm, I'm trying to compare these to batteries. Does anyone know how to convert
farads to watt hours?

~~~
tocomment
By that formula, I only get ~12 joules for a 1 farad capacitor at 5 volts.
That seems low. Are you sure it's correct?

~~~
zokier
WolframAlpha confirms: <http://wolfr.am/VWAp9B>

------
jws
Perhaps the direction of improvement at this point is lifetime rather than
energy density. 500 cycles was fine for portable electronics. Not so much for
vehicles.

Double the lifetime for a 10% increase in upfront costs would be a huge win.
It isn't sexy enough to make it into the news, but there is progress here.

------
tocomment
Has anyone looked into using ATP in a battery? It seems to work really well
for cells.

------
powertower
> None of this has done much to improve the fundamental energy storage
> densities of the underlying chemistries.

The LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) field is really hot right now.

COPs of 6-20x (and sometimes more) are being reported.

Several labs have been burned to the ground who experimented with it and had a
run-away reaction that was not expected.

Whether it's Fusion or Transmutation or something else, the results are real
and we are seeing heat anomalies that can't be explained, in table-top devices
that use Ni nano-powder, some catalysts, a loading current and heat, and
nothing particularly radioactive or difficult to procure.

Also findings of direct EMF generation were reported recently, which could
potentially bypass the heat-to-electricity step and the wasted energy in the
Carnot cycle altogether.

LENR is a fundamental shift in the energy storage density the author is
talking about.

<http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/tylervan/lenr/2>

~~~
rwmj
LENR is the new baggage-free term for Cold Fusion. Extraordinary claims like
yours need extraordinary proof. Please provide some.

