this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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I’ll believe it when it ships. I’m genuinely optimistic that we can develop better batteries, but I’ve seen this story too many times before.
Once a week for the last 10 years a breakthrough is announced and twice on a full moon.
Every "breakthrough" makes batteries a percentage point better though.
According to the graphic though, this one’s at 99%, so… Next week? ;)
Batteries have been getting better. Density has increased by more than 8 times since 2008: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-april-18-2022-volumetric-energy-density-lithium-ion-batteries
It's just that the tech shown in headlines promising 50x gains have huge caveats. The practical tech has been improving steadily.
A cool thing to do is to go on a site like GSMArena and follow the battery capacity over time of a particular line of phone (you can adjust for phone weight and volume if you want). It'll steadily go up.
In 2010 most phone batteries were 1000-1500mAh. Even something like 2000mAh was a huge battery.
In 2015, phone batteries were up to 2500-3000mAh.
In 2020, they were up to 4000-4500mAh. 5000mAh was considered a big battery.
Now, we are commonly seeing 5000-5500mAh batteries in mainstream phones, enabling most phones to get 12-14 hours of battery life (when new).
That's really cool and more impressive than I would have guessed. Thanks.
Those 90 stories you’ve seen generally did all ship. Just three decades ago lithium batteries stored about 80Wh per kg. These days it’s around 600Wh per kg and our progress has been particularly rapid lately.
Durability, safety and charge speeds have also all been improving. Oh and costs are coming down dramatically as well.
Ignore the “present” line on this chart as it’s an old one:
Same here. I’m not clicking on the article. I’ll celebrate when a retail product comes out with said battery.
Feels like I've seen the same story in the last 20 years.
Remember fuel cells? One tiny drop would power your phone for a week.
Battery news is pretty world changing so I understand whybit gets the same kind of attention miracle health advancements get. Unfortunately the hardest part remains making a commercially viable product but that said even finding new techniques that may not make it to market still advance the field further and expand our understanding.