I don’t want you to think I’m obsessed by batteries; it’s just a busy time in the whole power generation and delivery field, as some futurologists start talking about battery-powered airliners, cargo ships, forklift trucks and so on. We in the IT sector have a head start. Our experience of the behaviour and risks of rechargeables is a premonition of the state of society for years to come. The whole design of a power grid that allows for home generation and EV charging is dependent on good battery design and placement. We’ve already seen the comic videos of laptops on fire morph into not at all amusing videos of scooters being the seed of much more catastrophic incidents.
Everybody is on the case of finding better ways to store energy. If you can figure out how to use other elements to hold and release charge, the world will beat a path to your door. There has been no shortage of hopefuls so far: hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells looked hot for a while, until it became clear how hard it was to keep them heated to the 400°C at which they worked most efficiently. Lots of other material combinations have had their turn in the spotlight, without delivering the game-changing stamina and capacity we seem to need. Zinc-air laptop batteries, anyone? No, I thought not.
And this field is no different when it comes to cranks. Articles about perpetual motion machines
