[jmyeet]

Yeah, I've been baited by "breakthroughs" in storage technology for almost 40 years at this point [1]. I'll believe it when it's in Best Buy. Battery "breakthroughs" have really taken up the mantle of headline-grabbing research fund-raising articles so it's nice to see a throwback to the OG: storage.

[1]: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1991/06/23/holograms-the-ne...

[anigbrowl]

I am about the same age and tarted loading programs off cassette tapes. The fact that I can get a terabyte of storage in a micro SD card the size of my pinkie nail for under $200 still impresses me.

[XorNot]

I mean battery breakthroughs are real though? BYD is now demoing 0-80% in 5 mins on production vehicles in China.

The price of the 50kwh unit I had put into my house was very low.

Sodium ion is ramping up too but is commercially available. That straight wasn't possible a few years ago till the electrode breakthroughs.

[golem14]

Do you have any pointers on said 50kWh battery? Asking for a friend.

[XorNot]

This was the group who did it for me in Australia: https://voltxenergy.com.au/

It was under subsidy, but I got about double what I was going to get about 6 months prior. There are 50kwh units going on AliExpress for about $12k AUD outright so I think there's been another step down in per-cell costs which is tickling through.

I'm waiting for a price cut to make outright purchases a bit more affordable but with a wholesale electricity service plan adding another say 100kWh probably works out.

[golem14]

Yeah, unfortunately shipping anything with Li-Ion to my friend is pretty tough. Especially anything larger than a power bank. Amazon isn't even shipping those.

I have hopes for Sodium-Ion cells, they should be way more shippable and presumably a better fit for residential power.

[timcobb]

This is research...

[jmyeet]

It's always "research". I put that in quotes because any press like this isn't really "research", it's "fund-raising". It's the academic game of getting papers into the right publications, getting "street cred" by getting the right heavyweights as co-authors and to cite you, to become a "heavyweight" by doing the same thing and ultimately getting more grants to perpetuate the cycle.

Research can be interesting but so often none of it goes anywhere, it's just hype and there's a reproducibility crisis in academia. Look at the decades wasted on academic fraud and appeals to authority with Alzheimer's research [1].

Most of this media is the academic equivalent of "dcotors HATE This guy".

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12397490/

[cluckindan]

Do you think it’s logically sound to marry the ”no true Scotsman” to a strawman argument?

Or, to imply guilt by association by first constructing a false stereotype of research in one field, and then applying it onto an instance of research in another field?