Batteries free of metals

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/20...ry-promises-breakthrough-for-renewable-energy

 

That would be something!

 

Too many of these projects turn out to be vaporware. Let's hope this one is for real.

 

It looks very early stages still.

 

There's a broader overview of flow batteries at Wikipedia. Very interesting for home or grid storage, but hard to imagine at small scale. The power density is likely too low for mobile solutions, as these guys are showing. A lot of work is being done in the area, though. See here, for instance. All the big engineering universities are looking into it. Next big thing?

 

Harvard is getting real good at promoting their research to the public. However, certain government agencies are getting pissed off because of all the public inquiries asking why the Harvard technology is not being used. The answer, of course, it is not yet ready for commercialization.

Interestingly enough, a professor from the other Cambridge, Massachusetts institution, MIT, is making lectures that essentially say, innovation is easy, Commercialization is the hard part. Especially when an innovator/inventor realizes that his new technology is not cheaper than the existing technology and the customer is not willing to pay extra for the 'advantages' of the new technology.

 

"... innovation is easy, Commercialization is the hard part. "

I spent most of my career commercializing technology from the lab bench to the market, and I couldn't agree more. Ideas are dime a dozen, even "good" ideas. Getting all the chess pieces aligned to actually exploit a good idea, that is indeed the hard part.

Many whiz bang "ideas" are only exciting until someone does the literature survey and finds out why the idea failed the previous 10 times it was invented. Sometimes they await an enabling technology to come along, and sometimes they're just not ever practical. I believe Steve Jobs once said that he was possibly more proud of the decisions of what NOT to develop. Finding ideas to invest in is easy, but it's much harder to say NO.

 

Bill's right on this one. I have read 2 or 3 articles per month for at least 15 years about a new battery breakthru.
There has been some improvement, but nothing major.
Many fields have just about reached the limit......and must know the true structure of matter to proceed.
Many scientist have become disillusioned with physics because modern physics denies the structure the scientist need to proceed.
The demand for high tech is strong and will drive the recognition of this structure. It will take time.

Meanwhile......I'll keep hoping with you.