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| Dear Subscriber,
Launching
our IRI Membership drive this month, we celebrate
the
opportunities that Future Energy offers the
world. The IRI vision for the New Year is in
alignment with other organizations who
believe 2010
will be the year for a carbonless
energy breakthrough. I'm happy to report,
though bound by NDAs, that indeed more than
one energy and even propulsion breakthrough has
already happened. The inventors are just working
the politics and testing labs and IRI Members will
be the first to learn the results, so please join
today.
We have a great FE eNews this
month, including an amazing story
about the great energy pioneer, Nikola Tesla from
The Wall Street Journal that says
"Tesla In, Edison Out". To prove this,
Infinite Energy Magazine has
devoted their entire 89th issue to Tesla and
Fox News also reports that
Tesla has been always hip among techie
inventors including Google' co-founder Larry
Page and microchip designers at Nvidia Corp.
Now, Nikola Tesla is going
mainstream. There is even the all electric
speedy "Tesla Roadster" car.
Let's hope that WiTricity will wake up to the health risks from
chronic 24-hour exposure to high-gauss powerline
magnetic fields and instead, learn about the real
Tesla wireless technology. Also in this FE
news: The review of the year in energy,
turning bacteria and heat into energy, and the
state of rechargeable batteries
R&D.
Thomas
Valone | |
| |
| 1) Nikola Tesla is
Electrifying
|
By
Daniel Michaels, Wall Street Journal, January 14,
2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704362004575000841720318942.html#printMode
His Name Is Branding Magic;
Thomas Edison Is 'So 20th Century' . Decades after he died
penniless, Nikola Tesla is elbowing aside his old
adversary Thomas Edison in the pantheon of geek
gods.
When California engineers wanted to brand
their new $100,000 electric sports car, one name
stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at
microchip producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a
new line of advanced processors, they called them
Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom
Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character
who could understand alien spaceships for their
new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola
Tesla.
Tesla was a scientist and inventor
who achieved fame and fortune in the1880s for
figuring out how to make alternating current work
on a grand scale, electrifying the world. He
created the first major hydroelectric dam, at
Niagara Falls. He thrilled packed theaters with
presentations in which he ran high voltage through
his body to illuminate a fluorescent light in his
hand. His inventions helped Guglielmo Marconi
develop radio.And his rivalry with Edison-called
the Battle of the Currents because Edison had bet
on direct current-was legendary. Tesla won the
contest, when his AC
equipment powered an
unprecedented display of electric light
at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
Tesla
lighting a bulb with his wireless
electricity
Fifty years later, the 86-year-old
Serbian emigré died in obscurity at a New York
hotel, unmarried, childless and bereft of friends.
Meanwhile, Edison was lionized for generations as
one of America's greatest inventors.
But Tesla
has been rediscovered by technophiles, including
Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, who frequently
cites him as an early inspiration. And Teslamania
is going increasingly mainstream.
An early
hint was "Tesla Girls," a 1984 single from the
British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in
the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has
said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie
played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006
film "The Prestige," alongside Christian Bale and
Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described
Tesla in a recent documentary film as "more of an
artist than a scientist in some strange
way."
Tesla, in short, is cool.
"He
was a kind of crazy, interesting dude," says
Melody Pfeiffer, spokeswoman for the Dark Void
game's distributor, Capcom
Entertainment.
Edison, meanwhile, is less
au courant than he used to be, says Paul
Israel,director of the Thomas Edison Papers, a
scholarly project at RutgersUniversity, in
Piscataway, N.J. Many significant Edison
inventions-including the phonograph and the
motion-picture camera-are becoming historical
curios. The European Union has banned
old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, another
Edison innovation.The EU is urging consumers to
replace them with more-efficient fluorescentlights
descended from those Tesla favored. "Edison is so
20th century, much like Henry Ford," says Bernie
Carlson, a professor of Science, Technology and
Society at the University of Virginia. Once,
Edison was revered as the Wizard of Menlo Park,
after the New Jersey town-since renamed
Edison-where he built a laboratory and movie
studio. But Edison biographies have started
focusing on his role in establishing monopolies in
the electricity and movie
industries.
Recent portrayals of Edison have
highlighted his darker side. In the 1998 HBO
miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," Tom Hanks
plays a French filmmaker who was financially
ruined when Edison secretly copied and then
released his 1902 epic, "A Trip to the Moon,"
without paying its creator.
The
Tesla-Edison rivalry was intense partly because
the highly educated young engineer sailed to
America in 1884 to work for Edison. But after less
than a year in Edison's labs, Tesla quit in a spat
over pay. Tesla-boosters note that in Edison's
effort to discredit alternating current a decade
later, his staff deliberately electrocuted a
murderous circus elephant and profited from a
popular film of the killing. To sully Tesla's
ideas, Edison's men also helped orchestrate the
first execution by electric chair.
"I can't
imagine writing a song about Edison...too boringly
rich, entrepreneurial and successful!" said Andy
McCluskey, a founder of Orchestral Manoeuvres in
the Dark, in an email. He calls Tesla "a romantic
'failure' figure."
In 1895-after selling
his AC patents to industrialist George
Westinghousefor a mint and harnessing Niagara
Falls-Tesla hobnobbed with Mark Twain,J.P. Morgan
and French actress Sarah Bernhardt. But troubles
soon began. Tesla's laboratory in New York
was destroyed by fire, along with years of
work and notes. The secretive experimenter then
burned through much of his fortune testing radio
transmissions in Colorado Springs, Colo. In 1898,
he demonstrated a pair of small radio-controlled
boats-decades before guided torpedoes-but was
rebuffed by the U.S. military. When Marconi
changed the world with a trans-Atlantic radio
transmission in 1901, Tesla wasn't
mentioned.
Inventor Nikola Tesla
achieved fame and fortune in the 1880s for
figuring out how to make alternating current on a
huge scale. A contemporary of Edison, Tesla died
in obscurity but is now being rediscovered and
hailed by technophiles, such as Google co-founder
Larry Page. Undaunted, the scientist continued to
be far ahead of his time. His papers suggest he
stumbled upon-but didn't pursue-lasers and X-rays,
years before their recognized discoveries. He
proposed transmitting electricity through the
upper atmosphere. He sketched out robots and a
death ray he hoped would end all
wars.
"There's a sort of science-fiction
aspect to Tesla," says Prof. Israel at Rutgers.
For marketers at chip makers Nvidia, who were
targeting the techno-cognoscenti with a new
product line, that aura is priceless. "A mythology
has built up around Tesla that catches people's
imagination,"says Andy Keane, general manager of
Tesla Products at Nvidia. Tesla's more outlandish
pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he
could use electricity to cause earthquakes and
control weather. He claimed to have detected
signals from Mars while he was in
Colorado.
Unlike Edison, who died in 1931
with 1,093 patents to his name, Tesla left few
completed blueprints. The shortcoming undercut his
legacy but added to the air of mystery surrounding
him. "Tesla's work is incomplete, so people can
read into it what they want to," says Prof.
Carlson at the University of Virginia. Christopher
Priest did just that in writing "The Prestige,"
his novel and then movie about rival magicians in
Victorian London. In it, one of the magicians
visits Tesla in Colorado and pays him to create a
machine unlike anything the real Tesla ever
mentioned. "I wanted an ambiguous, mysterious
genius," says Mr. Priest. "Tesla was the man for
the job."
Creators of the Dark Void
videogame needed a mentor for their hero, Will,
who falls from our world into a parallel realm
ruled by sinister aliens benton annihilating
humans. "We quickly decided that tapping into the
conspiracies and geek mystique built up around
Nikola Tesla would be awesome," says senior
producer Morgan Gray. "What is cooler than having
Tesla reverse-engineer alien technology to build
weapons of super science?"
At Tesla Motors,
the branding isn't simply an effort to ride the
name's nerdy snob appeal, says spokeswoman Rachel
Konrad. The Tesla Roadster uses an AC motor
descended directly from Tesla's original 1882
design, which he said came to him in a vision.
Still, for all Tesla's cachet, Edison's
legacy remains inescapable. Ms. Konrad says
customers note with irony that Tesla Motors' main
showroom is in Menlo Park, Calif. To help boost
the Tesla name, the automotive start-up has
launched a promotional sweepstakes with Capcom
around the release of Dark Void. The prize: a
Tesla Roadster. For Nikola Tesla himself, Ms.
Konrad says, the prize is overdue recognition.
"You know you've gone into mainstream pop glory
when you're in a videogame aimed at 18-year-old
boys," she says.
OTHER RELATED ARTICLES
AND ITEMS.
Another article on Tesla
just out from Infinite Energy Magazine
regarding the preservation efforts of
Wardenclyffe Tower. The whole 89th issue is
dedicated to Tesla science.
A complete set of DVDs on
Tesla technologies and also books and
reports are available for
anyone who would like to know more about this
Genius! Click on pictures below.
|
| 2) The Year in
Energy |
Liquid
batteries, giant lasers, and vast new reserves of
natural gas highlight the fundamental energy
advances of the past 12 months .
Natural gas drilling has increased 39% in
spite of renewable energy
interests.
With many renewable energy companies
facing hard financial times ("Weeding Out Solar
Companies"), a
lot of the big energy news this year was coming
out of Washington, DC, with massive federal
stimulus funding for batteries and renewable
energy and programs such as Energy Frontier
Research Centers and Advanced Research Projects
Agency-Energy ("A
Year of Stimulus for High Tech").
But there was still
plenty of action outside the beltway, both in the
United States and around the world. One of the
most dramatic developments ("Natural Gas Changes the Energy
Map") was the
rush to exploit a vast new resource; new drilling
technologies have made it possible to economically
recover natural gas from shale deposits scattered
throughout the country, including in Texas and
parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
Advances in drilling technology have increased
available natural gas by 39 percent, according to
an estimate released in June. The relatively
clean-burning fuel could cut greenhouse gas
emissions by becoming a substitute for coal.
Natural gas might even provide an alternative to
petroleum in transportation, especially for buses
and taxis--if only policymakers could take
advantage of the new opportunity.
Meanwhile a number of
technologies promise to cut down on emissions from
coal plants. Feeding heat from the sun into coal
plants could at once increase the amount of power
that can be generated from a given amount of coal
and reduce the cost of solar power ("Mixing Solar with Coal to Cut
Costs"). And
technology for capturing carbon dioxide
("Scrubbing CO2 Cheaply") and storing it ("An Ocean Trap for Carbon
Dioxide") is
finally emerging from the lab and small-scale
projects into larger demonstrations at power
plants, even while researchers explore potentially
cheaper carbon-capture techniques ("Using Rust to Capture CO2 from Coal
Plants").
This year was also the
year of the smart grid, as numerous test projects
for improving the reliability of the grid and
enabling the use of large amounts of renewable
energy got underway ("Technology Overview: Intelligent
Electricity").
The smart grid will be enabled by key advances,
such as superconductors for high-energy
transmission lines ("Superconductors to Wire a Smarter
Grid") and
smart networks being developed by companies such
as GE ("Q&A: Mark Little, Head of GE Global
Research").
Cellulosic
ethanol--made from biomass such as grass rather
than corn grain--moved closer to
commercialization, with announcements of
demonstration plant openings ("Commercializing Garbage to
Ethanol") and
scientific breakthroughs that could make the
process cheaper ("Cellulosic Ethanol on the
Cheap"). But at
the same time, a number of companies are moving
beyond cellulosic ethanol to the production of
gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from biomass--fuels
that can be used much more readily in existing
infrastructure and in existing vehicles.
Exxon-Mobil announced substantial investments in
algae-based fuels ("Big Oil Turns to Algae"). Remarkably, one startup
declared its process--based on synthetic genomics
and algae--could allow biofuels to replace all of
transportation fuels without overwhelming farmland
("A
Biofuel Process to Replace All Fossil
Fuels").
Still, most people
think biofuels will only supply a fraction of our
transportation needs ("Briefing:
Transportation"). To eliminate carbon emissions and
drastically curtail petroleum consumption will
require plug-in hybrids ("Driving the Volt") and other electricity-powered
vehicles ("Nissan's Leaf: Charged with
Information").
Advances that could double (or more) the energy
capacity of batteries and lower their costs could
one day make such vehicles affordable to the
masses. These include new formulations such as
lithium-sulfur batteries ("Revisiting Lithium-Sulfur
Batteries"),
metal-air batteries ("High-Energy Batteries Coming to
Market") such
as lithium-air batteries ("IBM Invests in Battery
Research"), and
batteries that rely on nanowires and silicon
("More Energy in
Batteries"). A
novel concept for super-fast charge stations at
bus stops could make electric buses practical
("Next Stop: Ultracapacitor
Buses").
Getting the electricity
to charge these vehicles--without releasing vast
amounts of carbon dioxide--could be made easier by
a number of advances this year. A new liquid
battery could cheaply store energy from wind
turbines and solar panels for use when the sun
isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing
("TR10: Liquid Battery"), making it practical to rely
on large amounts of renewable electricity. Vast
arrays of mirrors ("Solar Thermal Heats Up") are being assembled in the
desert to convert solar heat into electricity, and
photovoltaic solar farms for converting light
directly into electricity ("Chasing the Sun") are getting a boost from the federal
stimulus money. And researchers are finding ways
to increase the efficiency of solar cells
("More Efficient, and Cheaper, Solar
Cells") and are
discovering new photovoltaic materials to make
solar power cheaper ("Mining Fool's Gold for
Solar"). And
although progress on nuclear power is moving
slowly, some advances on the horizon could help
this low-carbon source replace fossil fuels
("TR10: Traveling-Wave
Reactor").
Researchers even fired up the world's largest
laser system--one that's the size of a football
stadium--for experiments that could lead to a new
form of fusion ("Igniting Fusion").
Last, and almost
certainly least, researchers have decided to look
beyond the conventional sources of renewable
energy--solar, wind, and waves--to hamsters.
Researchers at Georgia Tech fitted the rodents
with zinc-oxide nanowire jackets ("Harnessing Hamster Power with a
Nanogenerator"), and watched as they generated an
electrical current while scratching themselves and
running on a wheel. See a video of the powerful
hamsters here.
|
| 3) Researchers engineering
bacteria to convert carbon dioxide to Liquid
Fuel |
|
| Global
climate change has prompted efforts to
drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide,
a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil
fuels. In a new approach, researchers from the
UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and
Applied Science have genetically modified a
cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and
produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds
great potential as a gasoline alternative. The
reaction is powered directly by energy from
sunlight, through photosynthesis.
|
| The
research appears in the Dec. 9 print edition of
the journal Nature Biotechnology and is
available online. |
| This new
method has two advantages for the long-term,
global-scale goal of achieving a cleaner and
greener energy economy, the researchers say.
First, it recycles carbon dioxide, reducing
greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the
burning of fossil fuels. Second, it uses solar
energy to convert the carbon dioxide into a
liquid fuel that can be used in the existing
energy infrastructure, including in most
automobiles. |
| While
other alternatives to gasoline include deriving
biofuels from plants or from algae, both of
these processes require several intermediate
steps before refinement into usable fuels.
|
| "This new
approach avoids the need for biomass
deconstruction, either in the case of cellulosic
biomass or algal biomass, which is a major
economic barrier for biofuel production," said
team leader James C. Liao, Chancellor's
Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering at UCLA and associate director of
the UCLA-Department of Energy Institute for
Genomics and Proteomics. "Therefore, this is
potentially much more efficient and less
expensive than the current approach."
|
| Using the
cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus,
researchers first genetically increased the
quantity of the carbon dioxide-fixing enzyme
RuBisCO. Then they spliced genes from other
microorganisms to engineer a strain that intakes
carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces
isobutyraldehyde gas. The low boiling point and
high vapor pressure of the gas allows it to
easily be stripped from the system.
|
| The
engineered bacteria can produce isobutanol
directly, but researchers say it is currently
easier to use an existing and relatively
inexpensive chemical catalysis process to
convert isobutyraldehyde gas to isobutanol, as
well as other useful petroleum-based products.
|
| In
addition to Liao, the research team included
lead author Shota Atsumi, a former UCLA
postdoctoral scholar now on the UC Davis
faculty, and UCLA postdoctoral scholar Wendy
Higashide. |
| An ideal
place for this system would be next to existing
power plants that emit carbon dioxide, the
researchers say, potentially allowing the
greenhouse gas to be captured and directly
recycled into liquid fuel. |
| "We are
continuing to improve the rate and yield of the
production," Liao said. "Other obstacles include
the efficiency of light distribution and
reduction of bioreactor cost. We are working on
solutions to these problems."
|
|
| 4) Turning Heat into
Electricity |
by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office,
November 25, 2009 Boston, United States
[RenewableEnergyWorld.com]  http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/11/turning-heat-to
-electricity?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-December2-2009MIT research points to a much
more efficient way of harvesting
electrical
power from what would otherwise be
wasted heat.
In everything from computer
processor chips to car engines to electric
powerplants, the need to get rid of excess heat
creates a major source of inefficiency. But new
research points the way to a technology that might
make it possible to harvest much of that wasted
heat and turn it into usable
electricity.
In the meantime, he says the
technology now being developed by his company,
which he expects to have on the market next year,
could produce a tenfold improvement in throughput
power over existing photovoltaic
devices.
That kind of waste-energy
harvesting might, for example, lead to cellphones
with double the talk time, laptop computers that
can operate twice as long before needing to be
plugged in, or power plants that put out more
electricity for a given amount of fuel, says Peter
Hagelstein, co-author of a paper on the new
concept appearing this month in the Journal of
Applied Physics.
Hagelstein, an associate
professor of electrical engineering at MIT, says
existing solid-state devices to convert heat into
electricity are not very efficient. The new
research, carried out with graduate student Dennis
Wu as part of his doctoral thesis, aimed to find
how close realistic technology could come to
achieving the theoretical limits for the
efficiency of such conversion.
Theory says
that such energy conversion can never exceed a
specific value called the Carnot Limit, based on a
19th-century formula for determining the maximum
efficiency that any device can achieve in
converting heat into work. But current commercial
thermoelectric devices only achieve about
one-tenth of that limit, Hagelstein says. In
experiments involving a different
new
technology, thermal diodes, Hagelstein
worked with Yan Kucherov, now a consultant for the
Naval Research Laboratory, and coworkers to
demonstrate efficiency as high as 40 percent of
the Carnot Limit. Moreover, the calculations show
that this new kind of system could ultimately
reach as much as 90 percent of that
ceiling.
Hagelstein, Wu and others started
from scratch rather than trying to improve the
performance of existing devices. They carried out
their analysis using a very simple system in which
power was generated by a single quantum-dot device
- a type of semiconductor in which the electrons
and holes, which carry the electrical charges in
the device, are very tightly confined in all three
dimensions. By controlling all aspects of the
device, they hoped to better understand how to
design the ideal thermal-to-electric
converter.
Hagelstein says that with
present systems it's possible to efficiently
convert heat into electricity, but with very
little power. It's also possible to get plenty of
electrical power - what is known as
high-throughput power - from a less efficient, and
therefore larger and more expensive system. "It's
a tradeoff. You either get high efficiency or high
throughput," says Hagelstein. But the team found
that using their new system, it would be possible
to get both at once, he says.
A key to the
improved throughput was reducing the separation
between the hot surface and the conversion device.
A recent paper by MIT professor Gang Chen reported
on an analysis showing that heat transfer could
take place between very closely spaced surfaces at
a rate that is orders of magnitude higher than
predicted by theory. The new report takes
that finding a step further, showing how the heat
can not only be transferred, but converted into
electricity so that it can be harnessed.
A
company called MTPV Corp. (for Micron-gap Thermal
Photo-Voltaics), founded by Robert DiMatteo SM
'96, MBA '06, is already working on the
development of "a new technology closely related
to the work described in this paper," Hagelstein
says.
DiMatteo says he hopes eventually to
commercialize Hagelstein's new idea. In the
meantime, he says the technology now being
developed by his company, which he expects to have
on the market next year, could produce a tenfold
improvement in throughput power over existing
photovoltaic devices, while the further advance
described in this new paper could make an
additional tenfold or greater improvement
possible. The work described in this paper "is
potentially a major finding," he
says.
DiMatteo says that worldwide, about
60 percent of all the energy produced by burning
fuels or generated in powerplants is wasted,
mostly as excess heat, and that this technology
could "make it possible to reclaim a significant
fraction of that wasted energy."
When this
work began around 2002, Hagelstein says, such
devices "clearly could not be built. We
started this as purely a theoretical exercise."
But developments since then have brought it much
closer to reality.
While it may take a few
years for the necessary technology for building
affordable quantum-dot devices to reach
commercialization, Hagelstein says, "there's no
reason, in principle, you couldn't get another
order of magnitude or more" improvement in
throughput power, as well as an improvement in
efficiency.
"There's a gold mine in waste
heat, if you could convert it," he says. The first
applications are likely to be in high-value
systems such as computer chips, he says, but
ultimately it could be useful in a wide variety of
applications, including cars, planes and boats. "A
lot of heat is generated to go places, and a lot
is lost. If you could recover that, your
transportation technology is going to work
better." Try using case studies, success stories,
testimonials or examples of how others used your
product or service successfully. Solicit material
from clients and vendors, or ask your readers to
write. It's a win-win! You get relevant content,
and they get exposure.
|
| 5) State of Rechargeable
Batteries & Federal
R&D |
|
By Paul Werbos,
PhD. Global Energy Group.
Another IEEE input, this less
certain but more exciting.
In brief, I may have been guilty of
UNDERSTATING the near-term potential
of advanced batteries. If we limit ourselves
to batteries already in mass production,
proven to meet the requirements of vehicles
(e.g. in 10-40 kwh batteries),
the existing line of batteries from Thunder
Sky is already enough to prove we
can already do a whole lot better than the
NAS envisions for the future.
My numbers for Thunder Sky ($2000 for 10kwh)
are not speculative; one of the companies my
wife
is part owner of went out and bought
some of the batteries, for the price they
advertized to us, and tested them in great
detail. I have seen them with my own eyes in
busses
and scooters and one old car (Mao's old
limo). The BYD car is also out there on
the market for anyone to see...
and I doubt that Warren Buffet would have put
so much money into the company without doing
a whole lot of due diligence. There are
probably other batteries available right now
for mass purchase (though not so public)
which are just as good.
BUT THAT'S WHAT'S BEEN OUT THERE FOR YEARS ON
THE MARKET ALREADY.
What about the near-term future?
An IEEE guy told me today about one new
breakthrough
we should be checking into:
This immediately reminds me of Lonnie
Johnson, an NSF grantee in Atlanta,
who has had a breakthrough this year with
rechargeable lithium-air batteries.
If manufacturing plants in the US can deliver
batteries at 3 to 10 times the
storage per dollar as the best batteries now
available (all Chinese, Korean or Japanese),
there are interesting implications. If we can
get 3 times as good as Thunder Sky
without using any lithium, that also has some
security implications.
Some important immediate thoughts:
1. Federal R&D really needs to capture
these kinds of possibilities, whatever they may
be.
2. I do not know whether the zinc one really
is three times the miles/$ of Thunder Sky.
Those words on the web site should not be
taken at face value, since I don't
yet see WHICH Li-ion they are comparing
against. Even within the realm of iron
phosphate
lithium ion batteries, miles/$ seem to vary
by a factor of two or more, depending on
some
related technologies I shouldn't talk about
too much. Still, the words might well be
correct,
since these guys are focusing on electronic
device markets, where the capabilities
of the best Asian batteries are better known
than they are in the automotive sector.
3. Johnson does appear to have three times
the miles/kilogram as these
(Swiss American) guys, probably because
lithium is lighter. That's crucial
to aviation applications (Yes, a real
possibility now), but miles/$ is far more
important
for cars and trucks, and it may be some time
before we REALLY know what that is for these
new
technologies.
4. Roughly speaking, cost of manufacturing a
battery is a matter of materials cost and
materials processing cost. UNLESS there are
some heavy catalyst costs (something
we need to look at), zinc is probably much
cheaper than lithium and just as easy to
work.
(Just a guess!!!!). I don't think there are
major catalyst costs with the Johnson
version,
but I still need to study the web page of the
zinc people more closely. If manufacturing process
costs start to dominate, costs will depend
more on things like labor costs and automation
capability --
areas where there is enormous room to reduce
costs over time in this sector, in part by using
some
technologies I have patents on myself.
5. Some sad realities we must face up to --
when I say that a great breakthrough has been
achieved
by a guy whose name is Lonnie, who is an
Afro-American with strong ties to Tuskegee, there
are some
folks who unconsciously assume this can't be
the world's number one leader in this scientific
field.
A lot of the "top tier' press picks up much
more on stories like a recent project in
Technion,
where they haven't done anything to make
thier metal-air battery rechargeable... perhaps
because
there is an unconscious bias here. I remember
a time years ago when I proposed some
reviewers
for an NSF panel, 60% of whom had names like
"Mary Lou" and "Jennie." I still remember the
filter who
said: "Paul, we want the top people. How
could the top people be people with names like
Mary Lou and Jennie?"
To keep up with reality, we really need to be
conscious of such nonsense enough to get rid of
it
from our thinking. Or, more precisely, if we
are really engaging with the ground-level
realities, these
kinds of biases should be
reduced automatically; if they don't, we
should re-examine ...
6. The zinc project seems to be focusing on
the smaller scale market for now, to get
started.
(1 kwh, like laptops instead of cars?).
That's legitimate. After all, that's how the
Asians
became leaders in Li-ion. It would be
transferrable to larger sizes. How soon will
they get to mass production of batteries
suitable for cars? This may be a case where
federal action at many levels could be very
important.
7. With Johnson's stuff, Argonne has verified
the breakthrough in its testing, but I think
he is a little behind in going to mass
production with all the bells and whistles (e.g.
battery management for assured long
lifetime). Those are low risk tasks, in
principle,
IF he continues to have the funding stream
and so on that he needs.
8. Of course, these are only two examples. I
now wonder whether rechargeable
aluminum-air would be as hard as I thought
last week... and there is the Techion
metal-air effort...
9. Notice how fuel cell technology is crucial
both to this new stream of battery work,
and to Johnson's "JTEC" technology. It is
very common that the real benefits
of an R&D effort are with the unexpected
spinoffs. We really need to keep that
in mind in everything we do. There are
probably mainly "failures" which
generated more value to society than low-risk
"successes"!!
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