My goal is to make the update of this blog a regular occurrence. Obviously that hasn't happened, but I've had some interesting thoughts as of late and few people to bounce them off of. as a result I thought I could share them here, and if I update this small section of cyberspace often enough, people will respond and I will have those well informed conversations I have missed ever since I became a loner in Berkeley.
So without further ado, some thoughts:
1) Our scientific expansion and ingenuity is currently in a state where we are looking at attempting to do the same things in a better way. This may not seem novel to anyone and its not a particularly bad thing, but I think its an important distinction to make. There are a few fields which are expanding due to basic research such as photon trapping for various purposes, but in general, the idea is to do more of the same thing better.
Our current path of energy storage research is an attempt to improve the cathode in Lithium Ion batteries. This is done by increasing the reactive surface area, allowing the battery to charge faster, discharge faster, and store more energy in general. While the technology is still developing, and it will be helpful for a myriad of electronics beyond just electric vehicles, this approach is much like trying to burn coal more efficiently instead of investing in solar panels. You may be saving money in the short term, but in the long run you would do better to switch to something better. Now I don't have a brilliant idea to store or generate energy, I wish I did. I have seen things which I believe are promising, but nothing incredibly novel. So I would like to open this question to the forum, which I believe will grow someday. If you were to pick a direction for energy storage research, what would you pick and what makes you think that the method you chose is the preferable one?
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