Category Archives: batteries

the battery, Snowy Hydro and other stuff

Let’s get back to batteries, clean energy and Australia. Here’s a bit of interesting news to smack our clean-energy-fearing Feds with – you know, Freudenberg, Morrison and co. The Tesla Big Battery successfully installed at the beginning of summer, and lampooned by the Feds, turns out to be doing a far better job than expected, and not just here in South Australia. Giles Parkinson reported on it in Renew Economy on December 19:

The Tesla big battery is having a big impact on Australia’s electricity market, far beyond the South Australia grid where it was expected to time shift a small amount of wind energy and provide network services and emergency back-up in case of a major problem.



The Loy Yang brown coal fired power station is in south eastern Victoria, so why did South Australia’s pride and joy respond to a problem in our dirty-coal neighbouring state? It surely wouldn’t have been contracted to, or would it? Parkinson also speculates about this. Apparently, when a power station trips, there’s always another unit contracted to provide back-up, officially called FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services). In Loy Yang’s case it’s a coal generator in Gladstone, Queensland. This generator did respond to the problem, within seconds, but the Tesla BB beat it to the punch, responding within milliseconds. That’s an important point; the Tesla BB didn’t avert a blackout, it simply proved its worth, without being asked. And it has been doing so regularly since early December. It seems the Tesla BB has cornered the market for fast frequency control. Don’t hold your breath for the Feds to acknowledge this, but they will have taken note, unless they’re completely stupid. They’ll be finding some way to play it (or downplay it) politically.

As Parkinson notes in another article, the energy industry has been slow to respond, in terms of regulation and accommodation, to the deployment of battery systems and their rapid charge-discharge features. Currently, providing FCAS is financially rewarded, which may have to do with costs involved but the cost/reward relationship appears to be out of kilter. In any case, battery response is much more cost-effective and threatens the antiquated reward system. The AEMC is planning to review frequency control frameworks, but it’ll no doubt be a slow process.

This is an incredibly complex area, combining new, barely-understood (by me) technologies of generation and storage, and the transformation of long-standing energy economies, with a host of vested interests, subsidies and forward plans, but I intend to struggle towards enlightenment, as far as I can.

Neoen’s Hornsdale Wind Farm

Regardless of regulation and grid problems, renewable energy projects keep on popping up, or at least popping into my consciousness through my desultory reading (NY resolution: inform myself much more on what’s going on, here and elsewhere, in clean energy). For example, the Murra Warra wind farm’s first stage will have an output of 226MW,  which has already been sold to a consortium of Australian corporations including Telstra and ANZ. The farm is near Horsham in western Victoria, and will finally have a capacity of up to 429MW, making it one of the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. And of course there are many other projects underway. Back in August, the Renewable Energy Index, a monthly account of the renewable energy sector, was launched. Its first publication, by Green Energy Markets, was a benchmark report for 2016-7, all very glossy and positive. The latest publication, the November index, shows that rooftop solar installations for that month broke the monthly record set in June 2012 when subsidies were twice to three times what they are today. The publication’s headline is that the 2020 RET will be exceeded and that there are ‘enough renewable energy projects now under development to deliver half of Australia’s electricity by 2030’. The Clean Energy Council, the peak body for Australian dean energy businesses, also produces an annual report, so it will be interesting to compare its 2017 version with the Renewable Energy Index.

Hydro is in fact the biggest clean energy provider, with 42.3% of the nation’s renewable energy according to the 2016 Clean Energy Australia Report. Wind, however, is the fastest growing provider. This brings me to a topic I’ve so far avoided: The $4 billion Snowy Hydro 2 scheme.

Here’s what I’m garnering from various experts. It’s a storage scheme and that’s all to the good. As a major project it will have a long lead time, and that’s not so good, especially considering the fast growing and relatively unpredictable future for energy storage. As a storage system it will be a peak load provider, so can’t be compared to the Hazelwood dirty coal station, which is a 24/7 base load supplier. There’s a lot of misinformation from the Feds about the benefits, eg to South Australia, which won’t benefit and doesn’t need it, it’s sorting its own problems very nicely thanks. There’s a question about using water as an electricity supplier, due to water shortages, climate change and the real possibility of more droughts in the future. There are also environmental considerations – the development is located in Kosciuszko National Park. There’s some doubt too about the 2000MW figure being touted by the Feds, an increase of 50% to the existing scheme. However, many of these experts, mostly academics, favour the scheme as a boost to renewable energy investment which should be applied along with the other renewables to transform the market. In saying this, most experts agree that there’s been a singular lack of leadership and common-sense consensus on dealing with this process of transformation. It has been left mostly to the states and private enterprise to provide the initiative.



capacitors, supercapacitors and electric vehicles

(this is reblogged from the new ussr illustrated, first published September 5 2017)

from the video ‘what are supercapacitors’

Jacinta: New developments in battery and capacitor technology are enough to make any newbie’s head spin.

Canto: So what’s a supercapacitor? Apart from being a super capacitor?

Jacinta: I don’t know but I need to find out fast because supercapacitors are about to be eclipsed by a new technology developed in Great Britain which they estimate as being   ‘between 1,000 and 10,000-times more effective than current supercapacitors’.

Canto: Shite, they’ll have to think of a new name, or downgrade the others to ‘those devices formerly known as supercapacitors’. But then, I’ll believe this new tech when I see it.

Jacinta: Now now, let’s get on board, superdisruptive technology here we come. Current supercapacitors are called such because they can charge and discharge very quickly over large numbers of cycles, but their storage capacity is limited in comparison to batteries…

Canto: Apparently young Elon Musk predicted some time ago that supercapacitors would provide the next major breakthrough in EVs.

Jacinta: Clever he. But these ultra-high-energy density storage devices, these so-much-more-than-super-supercapacitors, could enable an EV to be charged to a 200 kilometre range in just a few seconds.

Canto: So can you give more detail on the technology?

Jacinta: The development is from a UK technology firm, Augmented Optics, and what I’m reading tells me that it’s all about ‘cross-linked gel electrolytes’ with ultra-high capacitance values which can combine with existing electrodes to create supercapacitors with greater energy storage than existing lithium-ion batteries. So if this technology works out, it will transform not only EVs but mobile devices, and really anything you care to mention, over a range of industries. Though everything I’ve read about this dates back to late last year, or reports on developments from then. Anyway, it’s all about the electrolyte material, which is some kind of highly conductive organic polymer.

Canto: Apparently the first supercapacitors were invented back in 1957. They store energy by means of static charge, and I’m not sure what that means…

Jacinta: We’ll have to do a post on static electricity.

Canto: In any case their energy density hasn’t been competitive with the latest batteries until now.

Jacinta: Yes it’s all been about energy density apparently. That’s one of the main reasons why the infernal combustion engine won out over the electric motor in the early days, and now the energy density race is being run between new-age supercapacitors and batteries.

Canto: So how are supercapacitors used today? I’ve heard that they’re useful in conjunction with regenerative braking, and I’ve also heard that there’s a bus that runs entirely on supercapacitors. How does that work?

Jacinta: Well back in early 2013 Mazda introduced a supercapacitor-based regen braking system in its Mazda 6. To quote more or less from this article by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), kinetic energy from deceleration is converted to electricity by the variable-voltage alternator and transmitted to a supercapacitor, from which it flows through a dc-dc converter to 12-V electrical components.

Canto: Oh right, now I get it…

Jacinta: We’ll have to do posts on alternators, direct current and alternating current. As for your bus story, yes, capabuses, as they’re called, are being used in Shanghai. They use supercapacitors, or ultracapacitors as they’re sometimes called, for onboard power storage, and this usage is likely to spread with the continuous move away from fossil fuels and with developments in supercaps, as I’ve heard them called. Of course, this is a hybrid technology, but I think they’ll be going fully electric soon enough.

Canto: Or not soon enough for a lot of us.

Jacinta: Apparently, with China’s dictators imposing stringent emission standards, electric buses, operating on power lines (we call them trams) became more common. Of course electricity may be generated by coal-fired power stations, and that’s a problem, but this fascinating article looking at the famous Melbourne tram network (run mainly on dirty brown coal) shows that with high occupancy rates the greenhouse footprint per person is way lower than for car users and their passengers. But the capabuses don’t use power lines, though they apparently run on tracks and charge regularly at recharge stops along the way. The technology is being adopted elsewhere too of course.

Canto: So let me return again to basics – what’s the difference between a capacitor and and a super-ultra-whatever-capacitor?

Jacinta: I think the difference is just in the capacitance. I’m inferring that because I’m hearing, on these videos, capacitors being talked about in terms of micro-farads (a farad, remember, being a unit of capacitance), whereas supercapacitors have ‘super capacitance’, i.e more energy storage capability. But I’ve just discovered a neat video which really helps in understanding all this, so I’m going to do a breakdown of it. First, it shows a range of supercapacitors, which look very much like batteries, the largest of which has a capacitance, as shown on the label, of 3000 farads. So, more super than your average capacitor. It also says 2.7 V DC, which I’m sure is also highly relevant. We’re first told that they’re often used in the energy recovery system of vehicles, and that they have a lower energy density (10 to 100 times less than the best Li-ion batteries), but they can deliver 10 to 100 times more power than a Li-ion battery.

Canto: You’ll be explaining that?

Jacinta: Yes, later. Another big difference is in charge-recharge cycles. A good rechargeable battery may manage a thousand charge and recharge cycles, while a supercap can be good for a million. And the narrator even gives a reason, which excites me – it’s because they function by the movement of ions rather than by chemical reactions as batteries do. I’ve seen that in the videos on capacitors, described in our earlier post. A capacitor has to be hooked up to a battery – a power source. So then he uses an analogy to show the difference between power and energy, and I’m hoping it’ll provide me with a long-lasting lightbulb moment. His analogy is a bucket with a hole. The amount of water the bucket can hold – the size of the bucket if you like – equates to the bucket’s energy capacity. The size of the hole determines the amount of power it can release. So with this in mind, a supercar is like a small bucket with a big hole, while a battery is more like a big bucket with a small hole.

Canto: So the key to a supercap is that it can provide a lot of power quickly, by discharging, then it has to be recharged. That might explain their use in those capabuses – I think.

Jacinta: Yes, for regenerative braking, for cordless power tools and for flash cameras, and also for brief peak power supplies. Now I’ve jumped to another video, which inter alia shows how a supercapacitor coin cell is made – I’m quite excited about all this new info I’m assimilating. A parallel plate capacitor is separated by a non-conducting dielectric, and its capacitance is directly proportional to the surface area of the plates and inversely proportional to the distance between them. Its longer life is largely due to the fact that no chemical reaction occurs between the two plates. Supercapacitors have an electrolyte between the plates rather than a dielectric…

Canto: What’s the difference?

Jacinta: A dielectric is an insulating material that causes polarisation in an electric field, but let’s not go into that now. Back to supercapacitors and the first video. It describes one containing two identical carbon-based high surface area electrodes with a paper-based separator between. They’re connected to aluminium current collectors on each side. Between the electrodes, positive and negative ions float in an electrolyte solution. That’s when the cell isn’t charged. In a fully charged cell, the ions attach to the positively and negatively charged electrodes (or terminals) according to the law of attraction. So, our video takes us through the steps of the charge-storage process. First we connect our positive and negative terminals to an energy source. At the negative electrode an electrical field is generated and the electrode becomes negatively charged, attracting positive ions and repelling negative ones. Simultaneously, the opposite is happening at the positive electrode. In each case the ‘counter-ions’ are said to adsorb to the surface of the electrode…

Canto: Adsorption is the adherence of ions – or atoms or molecules – to a surface.

Jacinta: So now there’s a strong electrical field which holds together the electrons from the electrode and the positive ions from the electrolyte. That’s basically where the potential energy is being stored. So now we come to the discharge part, where we remove electrons through the external surface, at the electrode-electrolyte interface we would have an excess of positive ions, therefore a positive ion is repelled in order to return the interface to a state of charge neutrality – that is, the negative charge and the positive charge are balanced. So to summarise from the video, supercapacitors aren’t a substitute for batteries. They’re suited to different applications, applications requiring high power, with moderate to low energy requirements (in cranes and lifts, for example). They can also be used as voltage support for high-energy devices, such as fuel cells and batteries.

Canto: What’s a fuel cell? Will we do a post on that?

Jacinta: Probably. The video mentions that Honda has used a bank of ultra capacitors in their FCX fuel-cell vehicle to protect the fuel cell (whatever that is) from rapid voltage fluctuations. The reliability of supercapacitors makes them particularly useful in applications that are described as maintenance-free, such as space travel and wind turbines. Mazda also uses them to capture waste energy in their i-Eloop energy recovery system as used on the Mazda 6 and the Mazda 3, which sounds like something worth investigating.

References (videos can be accessed from the links above)

what are capacitors?

(this is reblogged from the new ussr illustrated, first published August 29 2017)

the shapes and sizes of capacitors – a screenshot taken from the youtube vid – What are Capacitors? – Electronics Basics 11

Jacinta: We’re embarking on the clearly impossible task of learning about every aspect of clean (and sometimes dirty because nothing’s 100% clean or efficient) technology – batteries, photovoltaics, turbines, kilo/megawatt-hours, glass electrolytes, powerwalls, inverters, regen, generators, airfoils, planetary gear sets, step-up transformers, nacelles AND capacitors.

Canto; Enough to last us a lifetime at our slow pace. So what, in the name of green fundamentalism, is a capacitor?

Jacinta: Well I’ve checked this out with Madam Youtube…

Canto: Professor Google’s co-dependent…

Jacinta: And in one sense it’s simple, or at least it sounds simple. Capacitors store electric charge, and the capacitance of a capacitor relates to how much charge it can hold.

Canto: So how does it do that, and what’s the purpose of storing electric charge?

Jacinta: Okay now you’re complicating matters, but basic to all capacitors are two separated pieces of conducting material, usually metal. Connected to a battery, they store charge…

Canto: Which is a kind of potential energy, right?

Jacinta: Umm, I think so. So take your battery with its positive and negative terminals. Attach one of the bits of conducting material (metal) to the positive terminal and you’ll get a flow of negatively-charged electrons to that terminal, because of ye olde law of attraction. This somehow means that electrons are repelled from the negative terminal  (which we’ve hooked up to the other bit of metal in the capacitor). So because the first strip of metal has lost electrons it has become positively charged, and the other bit of metal, having gained electrons, has an equal and opposite charge. So each piece of metal has the same magnitude of charge, measured in coulombs. This is regardless of the size and shape of the different metal bits.

Canto: But this process reaches a limit, though, yes? A kind of saturation point…

Jacinta: Well there comes a point where, yes, the accumulated charge just sits there. This is because there comes a kind of point of equilibrium between the positive battery terminal and the now positively charged strip of metal. The electrons are now caught between the attractive positive terminal and the positive strip.

Canto: Torn between two lovers, I know that foolish feeling.

Jacinta: So now if you remove the battery, so breaking the circuit, that accumulated charge will continue to sit there, because there’s nowhere to go.

Canto: And of course that accumulated or stored charge, or capacitance, is different for different capacitors.

Jacinta: And here’s where it gets really complicated, like you know, maths and formulae and equations. C = Q/V, capacitance equals the charge stored by the capacitor over the voltage across the capacitor. That charge (Q), in coulombs, is measured on one side of the capacitor, because the charges actually cancel each other out if you measure both sides, making a net charge of zero. So far, so uncomplicated, but try and get the following. When a capacitor stores charge it will create a voltage, which is essentially a difference in electric potential between the two metal strips. Now apparently (and you’ll have to take my word for this) electric potential is high near positive charges and low near negative charges. So if you bring these two differently charged strips into close proximity, that’s when you get a difference in electric potential – a voltage. If you allow a battery to fully charge up a capacitor, then the voltage across it (between the two strips) will be the same as the voltage in the battery. The capacitance, Q/V, coulombs per volt, is measured in farads, after Micky Faraday, the 19th century electrical wizz. I’m quoting this more or less verbatim from the Khan Academy video on capacitors, and I’m almost finished, but here comes the toughest bit, maths! Say you have a capacitor with a capacitance of 3 farads, and it’s connected to a nine volt battery, the charge stored will be 27 coulombs (3 = 27/9). 3 farads equals 27 coulombs of charge divided by nine volts, or 27 coulombs of charge is 3 farads times 9 volts. Or, if a 2 farad capacitor stores a charge of 6 coulombs, then the voltage across the capacitor will be 3 volts.

Canto: Actually, that’s not so difficult to follow, the maths is the easiest part for me… it’s more the concepts that get me, the very fact that matter has these electrical properties…

Jacinta: Okay here’s the last point made, more or less verbatim, on the Khan Academy video, something worth pondering:

You might think that as more charge gets stored on a capacitor, the capacitance must go up, but the value of the capacitance stays the same because as the charge increases, the voltage across that capacitor increases, which causes the ratio to stay the same. The only way to change the capacitance of a capacitor is to alter the physical characteristics of that capacitor (like making the pieces of metal bigger, or changing the distance between them).

Canto: Okay so to give an example, a capacitor might be connected to an 8 volt battery, but its capacitance is, say, 3 farads. It will be fully charged at 24 coulombs over 8 volts. The charge increases with the voltage, which has a maximum of 8. The ratio remains the same. Yet somehow I still don’t get it. So I’m going to have a look at another video to see if it helps. It uses the example of two metal plates. They start out as electrically neutral. You can’t force extra negativity, in the form of electrons, into one of these plates, because like charges repel, and they’ll be forced out again. But, according to the video, if you place another plate near the first, ‘as electrons accumulate in the first metal plate, they will repel the electrons in the second metal plate’, to which I want to respond, ‘but electrons aren’t accumulating, they’re being repelled’. But let’s just go with the electron flow. So the second metal plate becomes depleted of electrons and is positively charged. This means that it will attract the negatively charged first metal plate. According to the video, this makes it possible for the first plate to have more negative than positive particles, which I think has something to do with the fact that the electrons can’t jump from the first plate to the second, to create an equilibrium.

Jacinta: They’re kind of attracted by absence. That’s what they must mean by electric potential. It’s very romantic, really. But what you’ve failed to notice, is that a force is being continually applied, to counteract the repulsion of electrons from the first plate. If the force no longer applies then, yes, you won’t get that net negative charge in the first plate, and the consequent equal and opposite charge in the second. My question, though, is how can the capacitance increase by bringing the plates closer together? I can see how it can be changed by the size of the conducting material – more electrons, more electric potential. I suppose reducing the distance will increase the repulsive force…

Canto: Yes, let’s assume so. Any, a capacitor, which stores far less charge than a similarly-dimensioned battery can be used, I think, to briefly maintain power to, say, a LED bulb when it is disconnected from the battery. The capacitor, connected to the bulb will discharge its energy ‘across’ the bulb until it achieves equilibrium, which happens quite quickly, and the bulb will fade out. If the capacitor is connected to a number of batteries to achieve a higher voltage, the fully charged capacitor will take longer to discharge, keeping the light on for longer. If the metal plates are larger, the capacitor will take longer to charge up, and longer to discharge across the LED bulb. Finally, our second video (from a series of physics videos made by Eugene Khutoryansky) shows that you can place a piece of ‘special material’ between the two plates. This material contains molecules that change their orientation according to the charges on the plates. They exert a force which attracts more electrons to the negative plate, and repel them from the positive plate, which has the same effect as increasing the area of the plates – more charge for the same applied voltage.

Jacinta: An increase in capacitance.

Canto: Yes, and as you’ve surmised, bringing the two plates closer together increases the capacitance by attracting more electrons to the negatively charged plate and repelling them from the positively charged one – again, more charge for the same voltage.

Jacinta: So you can increase capacitance with a combo of the three – increased size, closer proximity, and that ‘special material’. Now, one advantage of capacitors over batteries is that they can charge up and discharge very quickly. Another is that they can endure many charge-discharge cycles. However they’re much less energy dense than batteries, and can only store a fraction of the energy of a same-sized battery. So the two energy sources have different uses.

Canto: Mmmm, and we’ll devote the next post to the uses to which capacitors can be put in electronics, and EVs and such.

















on the explosion of battery research – part one, some basic electrical concepts, and something about solid state batteries…

(this is reblogged from the new ussr illustrated, first published July 29 2017)

just another type of battery technology not mentioned in this post

Okay I was going to write about gas prices in my next post but I’ve been side-tracked by the subject of batteries. Truth to tell, I’ve become mildly addicted to battery videos. So much seems to be happening in this field that it’s definitely affecting my neurotransmission.

Last post, I gave a brief overview of how lithium ion batteries work in general, and I made mention of the variety of materials used. What I’ve been learning over the past few days is that there’s an explosion of research into these materials as teams around the world compete to develop the next generation of batteries, sometimes called super-batteries just for added exhilaration. The key factors in the hunt for improvements are energy density (more energy for less volume), safety and cost.

To take an example, in this video describing one company’s production of lithium-ion batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles, four elements are mentioned – lithium, for the anode, a metallic oxide for the cathode, a dry solid polymer electrolyte and a metallic current collector. This is confusing. In other videos the current collectors are made from two different metals but there’s no mention of this here. Also in other videos, such as this one, the anode is made from layered graphite and the cathode is made from a lithium-based metallic oxide. More importantly, I was shocked to hear of the electrolyte material as I thought that solid electrolytes were still at the experimental stage. I’m on a steep and jagged learning curve. Fact is, I’ve had a mental block about electricity since high school science classes, and when I watch geeky home-made videos talking of volts, amps and watts I have no trouble thinking of Alessandro Volta, James Watt and André-Marie Ampère, but I have no idea of what these units actually measure. So I’m going to begin by explaining some basic concepts for my own sake.


Metals are different from other materials in that electrons, those negatively-charged sub-atomic particles that buzz around the nucleus, are able to move between atoms. The best metals in this regard, such as copper, are described as conductors. However, like-charged electrons repel each other so if you apply a force which pushes electrons in a particular direction, they will displace other electrons, creating a near-lightspeed flow which we call an electrical current. An amp is simply a measure of electron flow in a current, 1 ampere being 6.24 x 10¹8 (that’s the power of eighteen) per second. Two amps is twice that, and so on. This useful videoprovides info on a spectrum of currents, from the tiny ones in our mobile phone antennae to the very powerful ones in bolts of lightning. We use batteries to create this above-mentioned force. Connecting a battery to, say, a copper wire attached to a light bulb causes the current to flow to the bulb – a transfer of energy. Inserting a switch cuts off and reconnects the circuit. Fuses work in a similar way. Fuses are rated at a particular ampage, and if the current is too high, the fuse will melt, breaking the circuit. The battery’s negative electrode, or anode, drives the current, repelling electrons and creating a cascade effect through the wire, though I’m still not sure how that happens (perhaps I’ll find out when I look at voltage or something).


So, yes, volts are what push electrons around in an electric current. So a voltage source, such as a battery or an adjustable power supply, as in this video, produces a measurable force which applied to a conductor creates a current measurable in amps. The video also points out that voltage can be used as a signal, representing data – a whole other realm of technology. So to understand how voltage does what it does, we need to know what it is. It’s the product of a chemical reaction inside the battery, and it’s defined technically as a difference in electrical potential energy, per unit of charge, between two points. Potential energy is defined as ‘the potential to do work’, and that’s what a battery has. Energy – the ability to do work – is a scientific concept, which we measure in joules. A battery has electrical potential energy, as result of the chemical reactions going on inside it (or the potential chemical reactions? I’m not sure). A unit of charge is called a coulomb. One amp of current is equal to one coulomb of charge flowing per second. This is where it starts to get like electrickery for me, so I’ll quote directly from the video:

When we talk about electrical potential energy per unit of charge, we mean that a certain number of joules of energy are being transferred for every unit of charge that flows.

So apparently, with a 1.5 volt battery (and I note that’s your standard AA and AAA batteries), for every coulomb of charge that flows, 1.5 joules of energy are transferred. That is, 1.5 joules of chemical energy are being converted to electrical potential energy (I’m writing this but I don’t really get it). This is called ‘voltage’. So for every coulomb’s worth of electrons flowing, 1.5 joules of energy are produced and carried to the light bulb (or whatever), in that case producing light and heat. So the key is, one volt equals one joule per coulomb, four volts equals 4 joules per coulomb… Now, it’s a multiplication thing. In the adjustable power supply shown in the video, one volt (or joule per coulomb) produced 1.8 amps of current (1.8 coulombs per second). For every coulomb, a joule of energy is transferred, so in this case 1 x 1.8 joules of energy are being transferred every second. If the voltage is pushed up to two (2 joules per coulomb), it produces around 2 amps of current, so that’s 2 x 2 joules per second. Get it? So a 1.5 volt battery indicates that there’s a difference in electrical potential energy of 1.5 volts between the negative and positive terminals of the battery.


A watt is a unit of power, and it’s measured in joules per second. One watt equals one joule per second. So in the previous example, if 2 volts of pressure creates 2 amps of current, the result is that four watts of power are produced (voltage x current = power). So to produce a certain quantity of power, you can vary the voltage and the current, as long as the multiplied result is the same. For example, highly efficient LED lighting can draw more power from less voltage, and produces more light per watt (incandescent bulbs waste more energy in heat).

Ohms and Ohm’s law

The flow of electrons, the current, through a wire, may sometimes be too much to power a device safely, so we need a way to control the flow. We use resistors for this. In fact everything, including highly conductive copper, has resistance. The atoms in the copper vibrate slightly, hindering the flow and producing heat. Metals just happen to have less resistance than other materials. Resistance is measured in ohms (Ω). Less than one Ω would be a very low resistance. A mega-ohm (1 million Ω) would mean a very poor conductor. Using resistors with particular resistance values allows you to control the current flow. The mathematical relations between resistance, voltage and current are expressed in Ohm’s law, V = I x R, or R = V/I, or I = V/R (I being the current in amps). Thus, if you have a voltage (V) of 10, and you want to limit the current (I) to 10 milli-amps (10mA, or .01A), you would require a value for R of 1,000Ω. You can, of course, buy resistors of various values if you want to experiment with electrical circuitry, or for other reasons.

That’s enough about electricity in general for now, though I intend to continue to educate myself little by little on this vital subject. Let’s return now to the lithium-ion battery, which has so revolutionised modern technology. Its co-inventor, John Goodenough, in his nineties, has led a team which has apparently produced a new battery that is a great improvement on ole dendrite-ridden lithium-ion shite. These dendrites appear when the Li-ion batteries are charged too quickly. They’re strandy things that make their way through the liquid electrolyte and can cause a short-circuit. Goodenough has been working with Helena Braga, who has developed a solid glass electrolyte which has eliminated the dendrite problem. Further, they’ve replaced or at least modified the lithium metal oxide and the porous carbon electrodes with readily available sodium, and apparently they’re using much the same material for the cathode as the anode, which doesn’t make sense to many experts. Yet apparently it works, due to the use of glass, and only needs to be scaled up by industry, according to Braga. It promises to be cheaper, safer, faster-charging, more temperature-resistant and more energy dense than anything that has gone before. We’ll have to wait a while, though, to see what peer reviewers think, and how industry responds.

Now, I’ve just heard something about super-capacitors, which I suppose I’ll have to follow up on. And I’m betting there’re more surprises lurking in labs around the world…