I really love the story of technology. Unintended consequences (eg the telephone). Also, how applications from one field affect another (eg precision boring for cannon and artillery was fairly important to the development of pistons that made the steam engine possible).
Of course, many of these consequences aren't foreseen. Go look at sci-fi from the 60s and you'll see flat screens hanging on the wall. This of course happened but flat screens were one of the critical developments for laptops and, more importantly, modern smartphones.
Battery tech is another interesting one. Battery improvements were initially spurred by laptops and then cellphones. A somewhat unforeseen consequence beyond smartphones is that battery tech (along with smartphones) are largely responsible for the development of consumer-level drones.
Electric vehicles are another obvious offshoot.
So one of the big problems with most forms of renewable energy are that they aren't constant. Wind isn't constant. Sunshine obviously isn't (even beyond the day/night cycle). Hydro has ben the one big success story here and is responsible for some of the cheapest electricity in the world where it's suitable.
I feel like the world is one big battery technological advance from a fairly monumental and far-reaching change. Batteries I think are the real missing link in renewable energy (IMHO).
The nice thing about solar in particular is that in a lot of places in the world it's a good option because it doesn't require a lot of expensive infrastructure (ie power lines). Communities can put solar panels near them. I foresee this as being a hugely positive change and I'm happy to see it.
> I feel like the world is one big battery technological advance from a fairly monumental and far-reaching change. Batteries I think are the real missing link in renewable energy (IMHO).
I agree. We are nearing a maturity level in renewable energy, by say 2050, where we will be able to produce vast amounts of extremely cheap electricity with minimal environmental impact – but only in certain locations at certain times. The problem is storing and transmitting that energy.
If I could go back a couple decades and redo my college days, I would be very tempted to focus on battery technology. It does seem to be missing piece to get us the last step in our journey over the last ~200 years of transitioning (worldwide) from an energy-scarce civilization to an energy-abundant civilization.
Having effectively free, effectively infinite energy seems to be on the horizon – not necessarily by 2050 but very possibly by 2100. (I mean for the average person, not industrial/commercial/scientific use.) That will undoubtedly result in monumental, far-reaching changes. But I don't see how we get there without a breakthrough in energy storage.
But who knows, maybe somebody will invent an inexpensive magic cold-fusion energy box that fits in the back of a pickup truck and requires zero maintenance. I'm not holding my breath. :)
Piggybacking, does anyone know where we are with capacitors? Everyone focuses on batteries, but I've always wondered about supercaps. They can't hold a charge for years, but 12-48hrs is possible. Size is not an issue, and I had thought even fancier caps are pretty simple and environmentally friendly. Unlike molten salt and many other storage tech, they have no moving parts.
Obviously the energy density is not incredible, but these are land-based installations we're talking about, not Teslas.
I've wondered myself why supercapacitors haven't been used more for stationary energy storage. If you search the academic literature, it looks like there are many supercapacitor chemistries that can match or surpass the specific energy of lead-acid batteries (~40 Wh/kg), they all manage incredible charge/discharge rates compared to batteries, and almost all of them have incredible cycle life compared to batteries. They can sustain thousands or tens of thousands of charge/discharge cycles with only modest capacity fade.
Here are my guesses why supercapcitors haven't been used for bulk energy storage:
1) The reported specific energy numbers are fudged somehow, so that if you wanted a supercap Powerwall equivalent it'd be much larger/heavier than the reported numbers suggest. Maybe they're excluding e.g. mass of electrolyte?
2) It just takes a long time to industrialize laboratory discoveries. It took 30 years for quantum dots to make their way from laboratory curiosity to consumer display devices. It took 20+ years for the high-efficiency PERC solar cell structure to make its way from the University of New South Wales to the commercial mainstream.
That table gives a value of 9 Wh/kg for electrochemical supercapacitors. I've seen a lot of researchers claim values over 30 Wh/kg in research papers over the past few years. That's still not adequate for mobile applications that currently use lithium ion batteries, but what we're wondering is why supercapacitors aren't being used for stationary applications where cycle life is more important than density. It could just be, as I speculated before, that these improved supercapacitor designs take a long time to move from lab to factory.
> Go look at sci-fi from the 60s and you'll see flat screens hanging on the wall. This of course happened but flat screens were one of the critical developments for laptops and, more importantly, modern smartphones.
Star Trek: The Original Series; 1966; Electronic Clipboard / Personal Access Display Device
Batteries are also the key missing piece behind self-flying personal transportation drones. The problem of making a self-flying drone is in many ways easier than making a self-driving car, because there's no legacy infrastructure (i.e. human drivers & pedestrians) that you need to deal with. You could create skylanes that are entirely computer-controlled and pack densities of vehicles that would be impossible with manual control. They also travel 50-100% faster than cars and use air-miles (i.e. straight-line distance, not drive-around-obstacles distance), which means that it'd become feasible to live in remote areas like the California coastline and commute to major cities.
Unfortunately, the aerospace people I've talked to have indicated that the energy density of current batteries really isn't practical for commuting, or for planes in general. You're looking at 15-20 min of flight time, which will barely get you across town.
Be careful about lauding hydro. It isn't as green as many think. Depending on the location, the type of land inundated behind the dam, they can 'emit' huge amounts of net carbon as the plant life now under water is no longer sucking it up, and as it decays it emits other nasty stuff. Micro-hydro is better but isn't the pure solution many consider it.
I'd like to know more about "damless hydro". I keep hearing about water turbines used in conjunction with tidal currents or offshore wavepower. Some of the numbers they throw around seem promising, e.g., $0.055/kWh, which is ~1/4 of nuclear or 1/6 of coal.
But I have no idea where those ideas are in their maturity. I agree that dam hydro can have some nasty consequences, even if it does look super attractive at first.
Tidal/wave power must deal with corrosion issues. Moving metal parts + saltwater + electricity = headaches. There is also "micro-hydro" that replaces the dam with a long pipe, no inundation but effectively diverts a portion of a river into a pipe. There are ancient ways to reliably pull energy from tides but they involve very location-specific constructions.
There is hydropower boom in the Amazon, and Brazil is the world's second largest producer of hydropower behind China. The environmental impacts of dams are mentioned about 2/3 of the way into [1].
About unforseen consequences. I really enjoyed the original movie Bladerunner; watching it recently, it was interesting to see that while there were ubiquitous video phones, there were no cell phones at all in the movie--flying cars yes, cell phones no.
Cell phones and the internet are the two big developments that most early sci-fi missed. They're obvious in retrospect but clearly they were unexpected by futurists in the decades before they became ubiquitous. It makes me very curious what the next unexpected game changer will be!
A glaring example is Neuromancer, where the protagonist is always running around looking for a landline to connect to cyberspace. You would think that by the 80s it would have been easier to imagine wireless communication, but Gibson is famously non-technical, so I guess it's not that surprising.
Of course, many of these consequences aren't foreseen. Go look at sci-fi from the 60s and you'll see flat screens hanging on the wall. This of course happened but flat screens were one of the critical developments for laptops and, more importantly, modern smartphones.
Battery tech is another interesting one. Battery improvements were initially spurred by laptops and then cellphones. A somewhat unforeseen consequence beyond smartphones is that battery tech (along with smartphones) are largely responsible for the development of consumer-level drones.
Electric vehicles are another obvious offshoot.
So one of the big problems with most forms of renewable energy are that they aren't constant. Wind isn't constant. Sunshine obviously isn't (even beyond the day/night cycle). Hydro has ben the one big success story here and is responsible for some of the cheapest electricity in the world where it's suitable.
I feel like the world is one big battery technological advance from a fairly monumental and far-reaching change. Batteries I think are the real missing link in renewable energy (IMHO).
The nice thing about solar in particular is that in a lot of places in the world it's a good option because it doesn't require a lot of expensive infrastructure (ie power lines). Communities can put solar panels near them. I foresee this as being a hugely positive change and I'm happy to see it.