I think people can imagine lighter cars and laptops and things. Is there something bizarre that’s unlocked like battery powered space launches or something?
I think people can imagine lighter cars and laptops and things. Is there something bizarre that’s unlocked like battery powered space launches or something?
High density batteries allows us to have dramatically cheaper electricity. Think of it like this, what happens when electricity is 1/10th the cost? Beyond what others have pointed out (electric airplanes, cars that drive thousands of miles), costs for everything would drop as energy is a core driver of it in every good you consume. If you can pull energy where it's very cheaply available and store/transport it anywhere the world millions of lives would be saved. For example;
If energy is cheaper than the price of water you can pull water out of thin air (dehumidifiers).
If energy is cheaper you can grow food in areas you normally couldn't.
When you can transport anything for cheap you can move food to areas that are vulnerable to food insecurity.
If you can store energy at large scale you can nearly eliminate grid failures, savings lives in the summer and winter.
Costs for transporting food would go down significantly, imagine groceries being 10-15% cheaper.
Assuming airlines have competitive pressure you could expect plane flight costs to drop 20-30% improving everyone's mobility.
Energy density doesn't matter for electricity since the storage batteries don't move and there is plenty of space for them. Cost per energy stored is what matters. Density is important for transportation especially planes.
Sodium ion batteries have worse energy density than lithium ion but they have potential to be cheaper and more reliable. Iron air batteries have poor round trip efficiency but could be even cheaper.
Batteries are not power sources, but storage. The energy still has to come from somewhere, and power generation won't magically become 10x cheaper overnight. No matter how cheap battery storage becomes.
But it IS crucial for removing bottlenecks & replace fossil fuels.
Imagine for a moment that batteries with decent shelf lives are free.
You build a power plant on a geothermal vent in Iceland. The electricity it produces is plentiful and cheap. You run it full tilt charging batteries.
You ship those batteries to wherever you need cheap power, and send them back empty. This works with hydro, wind, solar, ...
Batteries do drive down energy costs because even ignoring transmission lines, they let you move energy in both space and time, pushing all energy costs towards the cost of the cheapest means of generation on its best day.
Aviation, drones with hours+ flight range, more solar power usage as storage gets easier/cheaper, phones that last more than a day, robots with actually useful battery life, smaller IoT devices. A lot of current tech is severely limited by battery capacity.
Electric long distance passenger planes. Possibly requiring the help of EMALs.
Electric long distance container ships.
Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns.
Even longer range drones.
What point is there in gasoline if we can get better energy storage in batteries?