Potentially exciting battery breakthrough from UC Irvine

[djacobow]

https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/

Sounds like it is something that would make Li-ion batteries last much longer. Definitely convenient for our life-limited phones, but also an important factor in the economics of grid-scale battery storage. Because each charge / discharge cycle comes with a "cost" most grid batteries so far are actually exercised much less than might be desirable because of the affects on system lifetime.

[Siwastaja]

These "battery breakthrough"s are reported almost daily. In most cases, they are scams. In others, they just popularize normal university research, giving false impressions. 0.1% of these things will actually make any real difference, but those that do are indeed extremely important, and that's the point in researching things.

At some point, I started getting really tired of people asking me about "this new breakthrough that was reported just now", having to explain this over and over again to everyone  .

[TerraHertz]

There's another factor. Watch 'The Lightbulb Conspiracy' (there's usually a copy online somewhere.)

Point being, that products with extremely long lifetimes are not compatible with the Capitalist economic model, and are actively suppressed in favor of products with lifetimes more suitable for corporate profits. Because consumers have to keep buying new ones.
Which is why we won't see perpetual batteries any time soon. Not till after the revolution - as if that's ever going to happen.

If the battery technology mentioned is actually workable in production, some large corporation will buy the patent and sit on it. The only way it will be used is as part of a patent portfolio wielded as a legal sledgehammer, to damage or eliminate competition.