Never been one to let the carrier drop

As part of a discussion with my friend deadman the other night, the subject of how much batteries suck came up.

Now, as many of you know, I’m a strong proponent of plug-in EVs, rechargables instead of primary cells, and in general a battery kind of guy. However, I will be the first to admit that batteries suck. What’s astonishing is how *much* they suck.

I got into this line of thinking because I was musing about how much energy (tens of kilowatt-hours) each  of us keeps stored. 1 kg of fat = approximately 10 kwh,which means 2 kg of fat – 4.4 pounds for you non-metric types – contains as much power as the traction pack of my car. Which weighs, let’s see, approximately 700 lbs.  Hm. 4.4 lbs != 700 lbs.

It’s easy to see why people are pushing for fuel cells, but really hard to see why they’re pushing for platinum based ones. As deadman pointed out, perhaps what we need – and I’m sure there are thousands of people working on this, and also that by the time I could learn enough about it to contribute anything useful it would be solved – is a enzyme-catalized room-temp fuel cell.

My mother (who believes we were created by a perfect creator)  is probably gloating about how our bodies beat our best rechargable energy systems by a factor of 100 right now, and I can’t really blame her. Our RNA and DNA data storage also beats our best hard drives by several orders of magnitude, so it’s not like this is exactly suprising. We’re not really inventing new technology so much as trying to find ways to duplicate what’s already in our bodies in ways that we can control and debug.

(although, in all fairness, the signalling rate of our nervious systems is way, way slower than the internet. Probably. )

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.