Gasoline has 10x the energy (MJ/Kg) than TNT, but it's not a "bomb". Being a "bomb" is about energy release rate. A battery is still controlled by its chemistry.

Some heavier elements have hilariously high energy densities and aren't bombs (on their own), but the catch is the energy release is a trickle. Point is it's not an automatic follow that high density = high discharge.

Making it require air would help with that. E.g. zinc-air battery.

Have a look at Electric impedance spectroscopy- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_spectroscopy

Theres a handfull of Tier 1 BMS chips that support it already. though, half of them are meant for traction/EV packs instead of BESS.

Tesla has been around for nearly 20 years. Model S (12 years) has gained 17% of range due to chemistry (rest is system efficiency and simply bigger battery).

The next revolution will be small scale generation. Fuel cells, extremely efficient cheap solar, even smaller modular reactors, etc.

I live in western Pennsylvania and have both natural gas and electric service, a roof and 1/3 acre of land to utilize. I would love to get rid of at least one of my utility bills and I’m becoming more interested in decoupling from the electric grid than natural gas service. I dream of a future where competition comes to monopoly utilities by way of direct competition with each other as there is a not so far off future where I can utilize solar, batteries and a natural gas fuel cell to cut ties with my Electric Utility. If that kind of competition can exist then the game is on for those utilities to start fighting for customers.

I seem to remember recent advances in TMSR research and construction. Those tend to e much safer and have safer byproducts than uranium or plutonium fueled water-cooled reactors.

In term of dual use nuclear seems culturally radically different from everything else, wondering why.

Biological power is marvelous, but really inefficient. All that sugar and fat in entire human body only generates 50-150 Watts.

Humans do that because we're big and extra complicated. The closest analogue is probably a hybrid car, though ideally you'd want one that can create synthetic fuel from its battery. But I suspect cellphones are properly analogous to e.g. bacteria that have much simpler energy storage.

The good news is that humans already exist, so you can already use them. It will give them something to do with AI replacing them elsewhere.

You might not like the efficiency of that type of battery, though.

I look to a future of regularly servicing the immune system of my battery.

I think I've heard of sodium, lithium hybrids. But that's only 2, what's the fat? Gasoline, LPG hybrid? Shit gets expensive fast. Probably 2x cost of just a sodium or ion EV? The human body is too amazing.

> With a 130Lb/60kg battery instead, and saving the weight of the ICE engine and fuel system, the overall car design could go much more lightweight, regaining a lot of performance and range, all while gaining the huge torque of electric motors.

I think you're underselling it, even. A typical like-for-like modern EV is only marginally heavier than the ICE equivalent. If we were able to drop the weight of the battery by a thousand pounds, cars would be lighter than they have been in decades while retaining all the modern safety and convenience features we've come to expect. And if density improved along with weight, we could make EVs with the same form factor as today but with over a thousand miles of range. Not that we need that, but it is just as a tiny example of how mind boggling the game change would be.

As it is I've only recently internalized the notion that the most powerful electric tools are battery powered (what can I say, I grew up when rechargeable batteries were NiCad and they basically sucked). And it will just get better and better as time goes on.

An EV doesn't need to have 480 miles of range. Nobody is driving that distance daily. 98% of trips are under 50 miles. Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!

Also, EVs use regenerative braking. That should help a little bit.

EVs should be built with 100 - 150 mile range. All families with 2 cars can immediately switch one of their cars to a daily driver EV and the other vehicle is a minivan. There are lots and lots of people for whom an EV works perfectly well and if they need to go longer, US has a robust rental car industry. What would help is to let people charge anywhere they park. All workplaces should offer free charging, and companies can negotiate to get paid for charging their employees cars. The price of electricity goes negative because of lack of demand, and this is something that they can offer to the grid, demand as a service.

High density batteries allows us to have dramatically cheaper electricity. Think of it like this, what happens when electricity is 1/10th the cost? Beyond what others have pointed out (electric airplanes, cars that drive thousands of miles), costs for everything would drop as energy is a core driver of it in every good you consume. If you can pull energy where it's very cheaply available and store/transport it anywhere the world millions of lives would be saved. For example;

If energy is cheaper than the price of water you can pull water out of thin air (dehumidifiers).

If energy is cheaper you can grow food in areas you normally couldn't.

When you can transport anything for cheap you can move food to areas that are vulnerable to food insecurity.

If you can store energy at large scale you can nearly eliminate grid failures, savings lives in the summer and winter.

Costs for transporting food would go down significantly, imagine groceries being 10-15% cheaper.

Assuming airlines have competitive pressure you could expect plane flight costs to drop 20-30% improving everyone's mobility.

Aviation, drones with hours+ flight range, more solar power usage as storage gets easier/cheaper, phones that last more than a day, robots with actually useful battery life, smaller IoT devices. A lot of current tech is severely limited by battery capacity.

Electric long distance passenger planes. Possibly requiring the help of EMALs.

Electric long distance container ships.

Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns.

Even longer range drones.

What point is there in gasoline if we can get better energy storage in batteries?

Storing a month of energy use doesn't make any sense when it comes to renewable grids. Since you don't have to mine/extract and transport an inventory, far far less storage is required.

Instead of batteries, why not green hydrogen or green ammonia? Ammonia is needed for fertilizer, storage/logistics are a solved problem. Emergency plants around that can use ammonia as fuel can solve the dunkelflaute problem?

Another option is natural gas peaker plant on a ship/barge. Have a fleet of these around that can dock at any port and supply electrictity. A peaker powership is essentially a mobile, marine-class version of an onshore peaking power plant.

What would be best long term if we have a few hundred - few thousand nuclear ships/subs that can go anywhere and supply power.

It can be the sharing economy for clean power at scale.