• AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’ve seen so many “this new battery technology” articles over the past decade, I can’t bring myself to care until it enters production.

    • zartcosgrove@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      from the first paragraph of the article, it sounds like they share your feelings:

      Battery technology is one of those areas that is getting a lot of promising research results but very little in the form of commercial products we can use to power digital devices, electric vehicles, or off-grid homes. That may soon change thanks to sodium-ion batteries that are safer, more durable, and cheaper to manufacture when compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries.

    • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      This is an ignorant opinion. My first cell phone (about 30 years ago) had a battery pack about as big as my current cell phone, and had a capacity of 500 mAh. My current phone has a bigger screen, the rest of the phone, and a 4000 mAh battery. How do you suppose that happened if none of those new battery technologies ever panned out?

      • algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Of course battery technology improved, but the amount of news articles claiming XYZ will change technology forever outnumbers the actual number of innovations 100 to 1

        • Sonori@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Your standerd science article is written by someone with a half remembered high school science education rephrasing another person with the same background who has on rare occasion actually talked to the people who wrote the study. Both of these people don’t understand what’s actually happened but need to make it sound like it’s as big a deal as possible to get clicks.

          We’ve found a incremental improvement in sodium ion that may do something becomes sodium ion is going to take over the world in very short order.

          • averyminya@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            It’s about scalability and all the options on the table. We’ve got self-recharging diamond batteries that contain plutonium from refined nuclear waste estimated to last a minimum of 20,000 years. Theoretically this could entirely replace batteries needed for pacemakers and any small cell battery. There could be ways to scale it up even further, we’ll just have to figure out a way how.

            That’s just as promising as sodium power because it gives us another opportunity. It’s a way to reduce waste (nuclear waste is tricky to get rid of). It’s just about ability to deliver. Diamond batteries have been in production and were supposed to be available this year - chances are slim that will still be the case though lol.

      • mkhoury@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I agree that the technologies did pan out, but I don’t think it’s an ignorant opinion.

        I also feel blasé about the new battery articles because they tend to promise orders of magnitude changes rather than incremental change. Batteries did get much better, but it doesn’t really feel that way I suppose. Our experience of battery power hasn’t changed much.

        It’s really about getting excited about the article or the tech, it takes so long to see its mild effects that there’s no real cashing out on the excitement, so it’s not very satisfying.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Factories are being built for sodium-ion batteries right now.

      Every battery breakthrough you’ve heard of in the last 30 years contributed something. It might have shown a method of what not to do, or it might have contributed a 1% boost. Stack several of those 1% boosts on top of each other, and you get a workable EV.