I'm glad we've got labs researching battery technology, since I think that's one of the most important areas of research we can develop today. But forgive me if I'm skeptical until I see something show up on the shelves.
Power Japan Plus executives have years of experience overseeing battery manufacturing and supply chain at industry powerhouses like Sumitomo Metal Mining.
The company owns a battery production facility in Okinawa, Japan, where it will begin bench production testing of 18650 Ryden cells later this year. This facility will allow Power Japan Plus to meet demand for specialty energy storage markets such as medical devices and satellites.
Mostly because it is very much needed for a whole lot of things from mobile phones to cars to making solar energy work 24-7, so if someone gets there first they will become immensely wealthy capitalising on a shift of our civilisation.
But yeah, proof of concept is not path to market, press releases are not profits and all that.
I am also sceptical of claims that a new battery is both safer and energy-denser. These two things are not natural allies.
Just like cancer or time travel or any kind of cool & urgent research projects, looking at it through the lens of pop science media on twitter is not ideal.
But.. I still want to hear about it.
Honestly, unlike you, I don't want to hear about it if it's going to turn into vaporware. Should it be published in a peer-reviewed journal? Absolutely. Do I want Apple and Tesla and Samsung looking into it? Definitely. Do I, personally, want to hear about it? Not particularly.
Toyota would be the far better choice especially since the CTO of PJP helped design the Prius battery.
I want fuel cell!!!
What is it about battery technology that seems to attract the nutty companies? You don't see claims like this about CPUs, Monitors, Network Cards, etc... It's always batteries for some reason.
And one of Carbon, Graphene, or Buckyballs always makes an appearance as well in these press releases. It would be nice to see a new material take the stage as the "10x faster to recharge, recyclable, energy dense, environmentally safe" battery technology that will solve all our problems.
Sometimes it's pure scam, of course, but I think that's rare. Mainly it's people who are clue-deficient in some important way. They think it works. Or they think they can get it to work. Or, like many marketing people, they're used to trusting somebody else that it works. It's the tech world's version of the magnetic healing bracelet or the ear candle.
The reason nobody is out selling 20 GHz processors is that nobody really wants them. It'd be nice, sure, but we're all pretty happy with what we have. Our desire for something better isn't strong enough to override our sense for what's realistic.
Look at it this way: Human endeavor consists of intelligent application of energy to mass. One of the three elements are close to being made trivial! It's very easy to get excited about batteries and renewable energy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Controversy (not clear cut in Wikipedia's mind, but I think their editors are somewhat in denial)
Every car would be electric. Airplanes too. The idea of running a vehicle on gasoline would be as ludicrous as the idea of running them on steam is to us now.
The massive challenges of wind and solar energy would disappear. Transmission and varying supply/demand are trivially solved with storage.
In computing, the massive effort expended in the name of efficiency would become unnecessary. Multitask all the things all the time! You want your phone to spin the CPU 24/7 listening for swear words so it can record hilarious videos automatically? Go for it.
This is a collaboration between an academic research department and a mining conglomerate, with the CTO being the guy who developed the nickel cobalt aluminum cathode for the lithium batteries they use in the Tesla and the Prius. I wouldn't call it nutty.
Organic = made of carbon. At least it meant that originally. Now the consumerized term meets "Carbon."
That said, I hope this works out. New battery tech rarely ever does, though.
"Organic" dictionary definition: "relating to or derived from living matter", i.e. [0]
> They add that the carbon they use is new as well—it's an organic compound grown from cotton fibers
[0] http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
"Reliable – first ever high performance battery that meets consumer lifecycle demand, rated for more than 3,000 charge/discharge cycles."
If you calculate from lithium ion, based on my own experience with my phone and my macbook, a lithium ion battery crosses over into the less acceptable performance after 4-5 years.
If the degradation curves can be compared that would mean you could expect 12-15 years from these batteries. Pretty impressive!
https://www.google.com/patents/US7052802?dq=ininventor:%22Ka...
However this is still vaporware:
"Power Japan Plus will begin benchmark production of 18650 Ryden cells later this year at the company’s production facility in Okinawa, Japan"
Plenty of people have improved battery technologies, the issue has always been scaling up the process in a cheap enough way. If these batteries cost too much then its back to the drawing board.
1. http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
