Here's my read on the tea leaves that hint at what's going on at Google:
It looks to me like they're probably dumping ~$3 million/year into a battery lab, which gives them state-of-the-art testing facilities and in-house expertise, and thus the ability to knowledgeably stay on top of what's going on in the battery space, what's real and what's not, and the strengths and weaknesses of different technologies.
The probability that Google will invent something important is low, but the business value of having a battery group justifies the cost, given the importance of batteries in portable devices, electric cars, solar energy storage, etc.
Google has built enough devices / systems in house Google Glass, Nexus, Self driving car, solar, and various computer systems that having a small but world class team for battery technology is probably a no brainer. IMO it’s less about keeping ahead of the curve so much as avoiding dumb mistakes.
Tangential thought: is there a sane physical upper limit to power storage/generation in a given space (say, 1cc)? Sometimes helps to bracket the question to predict what's possible & reasonable. (Comparable ex.: total maximum possible solar energy capture is 1367 watts/m^2; circumstances will limit that around 10%)
From what I understand, with assorted chemical energy storage technologies you can get a (for our purposes) arbitrarily high power density... as long as you're also willing to deal with arbitrarily high volatility. See stories about laptop batteries igniting for an example just with current batteries.
Of course, if you're talking about scifi theoreticals, the thing to do would be to calculate the energy from mixing X/2 volume of matter with X/2 volume of antimatter (presumably with some amount of the total volume skimmed off the top for containment structure).
> is there a sane physical upper limit to power storage/generation in a given space (say, 1cc)?
Start off with e=mc^2, revise downward with appropriate number of engineering constraints.
I'd imagine in practice that gets limited mostly by battery chemistry. So something like total reaction energy of components * conversion efficiency - conversion machinery mass - packaging / safety mass.
Which, afaict, is why "battery breakthroughs" all tend to be in the chemistry or conversion efficiency.
As I understand it, much of the "battery breakthroughs" are generally along the lines of attempting to create a balance between capacity, discharge-recharge rate, safety and cost. The conversion efficiency of most batters is pretty good, it's making a long lasting, high capacity, quickly discharging/recharging and safe battery that's also cheap that is difficult.
While pretty much everything above is related to chemistry/conversion efficiency, I was just trying to define the efforts a bit more along the goals.
Considering water is common and a typically heavy substance, that gives about 89,876,000 MJ/cc. Uranium is about 19x heavier, giving a hard practical upper limit (natural occurring) of 1,710,340,280 MJ/cc ... but is much harder to come by and maintain safely.
Chemically, seems XeF2 has the upper bound on energy density, but I can't find the energy per volume (which, from molecular structure, looks astoundingly high). ...not that you want pure Fluorine as exhaust...
Well, based on the characteristics Wikipedia quotes for Pu-238 radioisotope thermal generators, they can store about 10^8 times as much energy (per unit volume) as lithium-ion batteries. So that's a lower bound.
Yes, but they actually provide a very small amount of current per weight, as it's just a decay pile creating heat which is then fed into a TEC, which have very low efficiency (like really low something well below 10%).
Batteries have much less energy density than gasoline, diesel, or kerosine, so I'd use those as a reference. Anyone who can accomplish densities comparable to those fuels will rock the World.
Interesting link. My interest being more about volume than mass, lithium ion batteries have about 1/12.3 the energy of gasoline per volume. Does make for a better showing.
While volume isn't mentioned in the link, I'm surprised that supercapacitors fare so poorly per weight.
Other interesting comparisons would be usable power. ICE is about 20% efficient, but electric motors are 90% efficient. So a lithium ion gas tank needs about 4x less energy.
Small black holes decay very quickly, a black hole the mass of, let's say a small mountain, would decay almost immediately, releasing it's energy as hard gamma via hawking radiation, whose energy could be captured and used via multiple processes including some sort of sterling engine/photovoltaic mechanism.
If some how you were able to create a small "artificial black hole" you could just feed it mass, any mass, and it would be converted directly in energy, as if it were a matter/anti-matter reaction.
At least, that's what my two semesters of modern physics and latent desire to be eventually be a sci fi author tell me. I am reasonably sure nature has some sort of small print that kills my awesome idea, like requiring 100x to create said black hole than energy released, bleh nature. IANAP.
I've been seeing a few of these sort of leaks lately. I have a feeling that it's to counter a shifting perception of Google. I'm willing to bet that this innovation will have the same real world impact as all of the other ones "leaked" so far.
I can't tell if this is great news, due to having a powerhouse with a massive cash war chest lumbering toward this goal, or terrible news, because it will Google-ize the hiring verticals surrounding this industry.
It brings a lot more money to the problem. Doesn't that usually increase innovation in tech? Yes, Google will gobble up some of the startup innovators but doesn't that encourage more startups?
"The company’s latest self-driving car runs on batteries recharged by electricity." I'm missing something, aren't all batteries recharged by electricity?
It looks to me like they're probably dumping ~$3 million/year into a battery lab, which gives them state-of-the-art testing facilities and in-house expertise, and thus the ability to knowledgeably stay on top of what's going on in the battery space, what's real and what's not, and the strengths and weaknesses of different technologies.
The probability that Google will invent something important is low, but the business value of having a battery group justifies the cost, given the importance of batteries in portable devices, electric cars, solar energy storage, etc.