{"id":27415,"date":"2020-01-26T12:42:34","date_gmt":"2020-01-26T18:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=27415"},"modified":"2020-01-26T12:42:34","modified_gmt":"2020-01-26T18:42:34","slug":"an-electrifying-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/01\/26\/an-electrifying-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"An Electrifying Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a prospective buyer of an electric car &#8211; as is everyone &#8211; I found this <em><strong>NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> (11 January 2020) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2228681-a-new-battery-could-keep-your-phone-charged-for-five-days\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">report<\/a> intriguing:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A new lithium-sulphur battery with an ultra-high capacity could lead to drastically cheaper electric cars and grid energy storage.<\/p>\n<p>Mahdokht Shaibani at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues have developed a battery with a capacity five times higher than that of lithium-ion batteries. The battery maintains an efficiency of 99 per cent for more than 200 cycles, and a smartphone-sized version would be able to keep a phone charged for five days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>While they discuss how Shaibani&#8217;s team got around the problems with electrodes, and how sulfur is a common element, they don&#8217;t discuss whether there are difficulties, environmental, economical, or otherwise, in the manufacture and recycling of such batteries. They do note that there remain ethical difficulties to surmount:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>However, lithium-sulphur batteries may face similar ethical problems to lithium-ion batteries. The metal oxides in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg22830430-300-lithium-dreams-the-surreal-landscapes-where-batteries-are-born\/\">lithium-ion batteries<\/a>\u00a0are typically nickel, cobalt or manganese, which are expensive and diminishing in natural stores. They also have associated\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg21428605-700-will-we-ever-be-able-to-buy-a-fair-trade-smartphone\/\">ethical problems<\/a>: a significant proportion of cobalt is sourced by child miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn order to have much cheaper energy and more ethical batteries, we need a radically new energy storage system,\u201d says Shaibani. The researchers will further test battery prototypes with a view to manufacturing them commercially in Australia in coming years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Extending the range of an electric car would certainly make them more viable, as well as cheaper, alternatives to fossil fueled cars in the minds of many consumers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a prospective buyer of an electric car &#8211; as is everyone &#8211; I found this NewScientist (11 January 2020) report intriguing: A new lithium-sulphur battery with an ultra-high capacity could lead to drastically cheaper electric cars and grid energy storage. Mahdokht Shaibani at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and \u2026 <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/01\/26\/an-electrifying-thought\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27416,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27415\/revisions\/27416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}