[deadbadger]

Certainly not when you're trying to judge energy payback horizons for a device incorporating silicon, nickel and cobalt, all of which come with significant costs of production. What if the degradation isn't linear, as seems very likely? Obviously it's a significant improvement, but 45 hours' operation tells us virtually nothing about the device's likely practicality.

The real problem here is that, as usual, we're forced to speculate about what should be straightforward facts, because the story in the OP is based on a dumbed-down press release relating to a talk we can't see, describing research we can't freely access (http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/pubs/publications_2011....), and as a result contains almost no actual information. So it's grandiose claims "we could power the third world!" without any means of assessing whether they're even plausible.

None of this is to say the new cell isn't really interesting, of course. But it's just so typical of science churnalism.