this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
232 points (96.4% liked)

Technology

59711 readers
5618 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
232
Cheap proton batteries compete with lithium on energy density (newatlas.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/technology
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

edit I am an idiot, who uploaded the image link as the URL. The original source should now be accessible

RMIT engineers say they've tripled the energy density of cheap, rechargeable, recyclable proton flow batteries, which can now challenge commercially available lithium-ion batteries for capacity with a specific energy density of 245 Wh/kg.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] cynar 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's happened multiple times before. Mostly when a big company is heavily invested in an alternative technology. They don't want to completely retool, since it's expensive, but they want to limit others from developing it, and so become competitors (that eat into profit margins).

The simplest solution is to buy up critical patents and either sit on the, or slow boat them.

Oil and car companies did this with electric/alternative car research for a while. Kodak also did it with digital cameras, since they competed with film cameras. It doesn't last forever, but it can give decades of extra profit, before the competition gets over the speed bump.

[โ€“] PetDinosaurs 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah. None of that is true.

There was plenty of electric car R&D (and it was never overly restricted by patents). Battery technology and electronics were just not got enough until recently, and there wasn't as much of a financial incentive to go electric.

Kodak is a standard example of a company's failure to migrate from its legacy business. It very much did not stifle digital imaging.