There are no absolute numbers in here. How much charge can it hold? How does that compare to an AAA battery? How long can it hold the charge and how does it compare? What dimensions would it need to have to store as much as a AAA battery? What’s the current projected price?
Serious question: How is this different than all the other sensationalized headlines about some technology that’s gonna change everything, and then you later hear nothing about it?
You are reading about it in Popular Mechanics, so it’s definitely a sensationalized headline, we know that at a minimum.
I had a little discussion with a guy complaining about sodium batteries and how you keep hearing these wild claims and then nothing. I did a quick search and saw an article about a $2 billion partnership agreement to work on a pilot plant for sodium batteries. He claimed it was yet another sensational headline and doubted anything would happen from it. Less than a week later I saw an article about a plant in America being announced.
This stuff is hard. It’s not like Master of Orion where you throw money at a specific research and get access upon completion. Different groups around the world are researching a multitude of different ideas, some related, and after a while a bunch of these ideas are combined and associated and researched, and all of a sudden you have a new product that’s significantly different from what was available before. And then you see incremental improvements for decades, not unlike the internal combustion engine or rechargeable lithium batteries.
Although we don’t see it, all of these developments do actually eventually make their way into battery tech. The batteries of today are not the batteries of 2014.
If you remember what battery powertools were like in early 2010s, it’s super obvious how far we’ve come. The higher end things like battery powered lawn mowers didn’t exist, and if you wanted real power, you needed a cord.
I still remember that in the 90s till the 2000s you would get maybe 60 to 90 minutes of battery life out of a new laptop. Then it jumped to 4 or more hours thanks to better batteries, more energy efficient CPUs and displays.
Laptops is a bad example. The improvements are moreso the chips and efficient hardware, not the battery
Cord mowing has a long established tradition.
I mowed my grass with a corded mower for a decade until the motor bearing finally disintegrated. Cost me $100 and one blade replacement. No small gas engine was ever that reliable for me
Did you ever mow your power cord though?
Nah, just zig zag away from where you plugged it in and it’s never a problem.
I wonder why I even read these articles. If these do turn out to be useful it will eventually make its way into technologies I use or buy near me. I don’t have to hunt them out.
I mean the application isn’t exactly arduous but they use capacitors in solar powered watches instead of batteries. They claim you can still get 80% of max voltage after 20 years use.
