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Skeptical. Hardly room for hope.

I see nothing changing here. If the basics of it started in 1977, and Nobel saw it as established enough to award in 2000, 2016 does seem a long time coming. Especially since a quick internet search reveals nothing promising, especially nothing concrete.

Besides, a battery twice as good and half as expensive (which seems overly optimistic in this case), won’t change the game. It will make the procedures rich, but phones that last two days instead of one and weigh a few grams less is changing nothing. Same for computers. A ten-hour laptop will sell, but nothing has changed.

Cars? I just don’t see a new, unproven battery technology starting in cars, unless maybe Elon is betting the farm on it. If so, he and the battery folks will lose. It is a bad bet.

And stationary industrial applications? Heck, that is hard with proven technology. And weight is not a factor. If cost is truly cheaper, eventually it will take hold, but Edison couldn’t improve on lead-acid significantly, and no one has done it yet. For transportation and industrial energy storage, lead-acid rules. It doesn’t seem likely to change until a better, cheaper battery is proved for many years, in many applications.

Starting a new-technology battery in transportation and grid-scale applications seems impossible, truly insurmountable.

Start small, prove it, and then grow.

This battery promise may prove beneficial, but it is far from game changing.

Game changing batteries will be 100 times better at comparable costs.

Until then, we burn carbon-based fuels in vehicles and power plants, with nuclear fission taking over within a few decades.

I’ll close commenting on wind power: Industrial fans are a fad. They won’t work if batteries prove trivial in cost and simple in engineering with currently unimaginable advances. Windmills just do not work. They are too hard to deal with just as a rotating mechanism, and complicate that with constantly varying winds. They will never work. Wind will never supply a significant portion of society’s energy needs. Never.

Winds blow, but windmills suck.

Over and over for over 3,000 years, we have abandoned windmills. We will this time too, and who do we think will clean up the mess?

Watts Up With That?

Lighter Cheaper More Powerful Battery Changes Renewable Economics
Guest essay by Roger E. Sowell, Esq. Marina del Rey, California

It is not often on SLB that I use the phrase “game-changer.”  Most things progress, if they progress at all, in small increments.  This time, though, is one of those that deserves the phrase game-changer.

The innovation is the low-cost, light-weight but powerful battery developed by Nobel prize-winner Alan Heeger, PhD of the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB).  The company is Biosolar .  see link to http://www.biosolar.com

The battery is suitable for mobile and stationary applications such as cars, trucks, grid stabilization, home power storage, and others.   The innovation is the use of the Nobel prize-winning plastic-that-acts-like-a-metal, haologenated polyacetylene.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2000: Conductive Polymers (see link) is lengthy but has this to say about the discovery:

” In 1977, however, Shirakawa, MacDiarmid and Heeger…

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