ALTERNATE ENERGY: Last in a battery series for 2025 — Re-think Zinc, you’ll get a charge out of this one! |
This is the last entry — at least for this year — in my series on batteries. Batteries are the missing link to total off-grid living. Once the affordability of batteries is solved, the average homeowner will be able to provide all the energy needed in a properly solar-positioned and insulated home. This month focuses on an innovation for future storage batteries.
As the reader will see, the technology is changing rapidly. As any true capitalist will say, where there’s a dollar, there’s a way. Nothing proves this more than batteries.
So before we begin this latest foray into a new technology — or more aptly, an improved technology — let’s go over the basics of what will make the batteries of the future successful:
1. Safety
2. Energy storage capacity
3. Charge times and cycling times
4. Weight
5. Eco-friendly mining
6. Minimizing use of rare minerals
7. Operating temperature
8. Cost
No — but we’re getting there.
In my always humble opinion, the investigation into improving batteries will improve our understanding of energy and energy transfer. After all, since energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so too with electricity. There will be continual improvement in batteries, even as we asymptotically approach a perfect solution across the aforementioned fabulous eight criteria.
Rome wasn’t built in a........