[naravara]

>As someone who follows the energy space closely, Lithium ion batteries now have so much momentum and $$$ pumped into them via R&D work, it's going to be hard for competing energy storage technologies to catch up. Flywheel and hydrogen fuel-cell also often come up but I think we're at a point now where batteries are going to take off simply because of their wide area of applicability. With that economy of scale costs will drive down and even more research and $$$ will flow.

I've been surprised by the development honestly. 15 years ago I assumed heavy industry and automotive would make the big decisions about what energy storage tech we go with and the rest of the economy would follow suit and start working with either hydrogen fuels cells, supercapacitors, kinetic storage, or chemical batteries based on the R&D they did.

Instead it's been consumer electronics that led the way and heavy industry is stuck with chemical batteries because that's what worked best on an MP3 player.

[vosper]

Don't rule out hydrogen just yet - at least not for cars (and then using your car as a generator to power your home):

http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-nex...

[mattygh]

I'd be very surprised if hydrogen vehicles work out. Hydrogen is not a source but rather a store of energy like a battery is. There's a few practical and technical issues:

1 it would require building out entirely new infrastructure, running up against severe NIMBYism at this point. It's incredibly hard to even build new power lines right now. Try a highly combustible, very leaky gas.

2 it's far cheaper to just strip H2 from natural gas, which releases carbon (unless you capture it, increasing cost), so not carbon free unless you force using electrolysis from renewable power sources

3 Electrolysis efficiency is ~70%, fuel cell efficiency is ~60%, so round trip efficiency is <50%. Much more waste than a battery (~80%). You're both using essentially the same electricity to create the power, but hydrogen is wasting more of it, so will necessarily be more expensive

4 in vehicles, fuel cells end up charging the battery toi power the motor anyway, so the energy loss from the battery is a wash

The one thing they have is range and speed to refuel, but as batteries get cheaper and better that will be minimized before H2 gets big enough to take over.

There's lots of big companies with smart people who are still pushing for this so hopefully they know what they are doing (mostly in Japan it seems)

[brimstedt]

Possibly a bit off topic,but why do we charge the batteries at stations rather than switching them with full ones?

[rahulroy9202]

probably because we park our cars, instead of giving them away when we reach our destination, and getting one when we need to go again.

[cwkoss]

Have we figured out a good way to store Hydrogen that avoids leakage? I've heard that even thick-walled stainless steel vessels can leak ~1% a day.

[binarymax]

Yeah, you coat the cell interior with platinum. Adds significantly to the cost and complexity of production though.

[jgamman]

and use platinum in the fuel cells. the real-world problems are pretty obvious though - Pt is worth stealing and it's expensive 'cause there aint that much of it so you can't expect to use 100x as much as now and not expect the price to change. FC's are niche. Batteries won.

[tim333]

I guess storage tech is optional for auto and heavy industry - you can use diesel engines or whatever. For smartphones and the like though there is not much option apart from developing batteries.

[jimmaswell]

It would really be something if that miniature nuclear reactor NASA tested ended up being viable for cars, realizing one of the dreams from the early nuclear age.

[ttul]

Given that even a small reactor still requires considerable shielding, generates waste that could be used for nuclear proliferation (if ammassed), and emits harmful radiation, I would say chances of a nuclear car for the every man are slim to none.

[romwell]

There's that, but on the other hand, small gasoline vapor explosions are quite harmful and require considerable shielding, and generate waste that is destroying our ecosystem.

The nuclear waste problem seems to be not so severe in the age where everything is tracked every second; and it doesn't need to be solved completely - just raise the cost of (illegal) waste extraction to be considerably higher than getting it from alternative sources, and you're set.

[ttul]

Yeah, but we are talking about thousands of small reactors driving along highways... that will never scale.