Sir James Dyson, known to housekeepers around the world as a creative problem solver, has announced that he will be investing £1 billion ($1.3 billion) to develop a premium electric car and an equal amount of money on solid state battery development. The battery effort is key to his automotive dreams, and his star player and…
It should surprise no one to learn that Elon Musk, a master of promotion, is capturing worldwide media attention Friday for Tesla’s selection as the winning bidder for a project to install “the world’s largest grid-scale battery” in South Australia. It also shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who pays attention to claims made by…
During the holiday weekend, I finally got around to watching “The Martian.” Though it was a terrific, suspenseful drama, its treatment of the radioisotope thermal generator (RTG) was wrong on a number of levels. That was disappointing in the context of a high budget movie that has received numerous kudos for the significant effort its…
Many advocates of unreliable power sources like wind and solar blithely toss out the concept of “storage” as the panacea that makes their favored energy sources viable competitors in the potentially lucrative business of supplying on demand power. I’m skeptical because I have some experience with operating and budgeting for power systems that use batteries…
As part of the discussions stimulated by their airing of Pandora’s Promise, CNN hosted a debate between Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute and Dale Bryk of the Natural Resources Defense Council. That debate included some commentary that I thought was worth promoting to the front page. A commenter named Fred, a tech who has…
I have been fascinated by radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs), aka nuclear batteries, ever since I saw a display at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor sometime in the early 1990s. In that energy exhibit, there was a tiny RTG that was designed to power a cardiac pacemaker. What impressed me the most was…
Atomic batteries can store thousands of times more energy per unit mass than chemical batteries – leading to very long lives in special applications One of our listeners – Bruno Garcia – asked us to talk about nuclear (atomic) batteries. These devices make use of the energy that radioactive isotopes emit on a continuous basis…