The new silver batteries indeed.
https://au.pcmag.com/batteries-powe...state-batteries-for-super-premium-evs-by-2027
It's not necessarily the "breakthrough" that is really important though, its the direction and the benefits.
Consider the problems:
Lithium is dangerous,
It's also heavy, in addition to the copious other minerals required to construct it.
Which contributes to the space it consumes in a vehicle and limits the "potential" for small and long range light efficient vehicles.
It's actually pretty expensive to recycle, compared to mining the raw material.
So its got problems, like silver had with photography... and IMO it doesn't cut it.
So, why
isn't the breakthrough here the important factor?
Take the advent of the light bulb,
The car itself, or trains, or aircraft,
Mobile phones, Small IoT devices,
Earbuds...
Silver batteries have been around for a pretty long time, and have been a focus of R&D ongoing...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720013384/downloads/19720013384.pdf
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tec...silver-zinc-batteries-from-idea-to-the-shelf/
That wont just stop...
Consider this:
Take the lightbulb - light generation.
breakthrough yeah, so their was a ramp up and then everyone was using those lightbulbs?
they made them more efficient right, as well as cheaper, less dangerous, because they just figured it out...
Sure... so go a little deeper because that technology wasn't just for lighting.
We ended up discovering the electrons fly off the wire into the glass tarnishing one side, from a defect.
So we put a metal plate on that side and a wire mesh between the two and connected an a tuned antenna to the grid to
modulate the flow of electrons.
that lead to am and fm radio, and signal amplification, which took the transistor to replace it.
a few trillion of them and we have mobile phones and lithography and graphics cards...
and as for the bulb?
Well we got technical and make diodes so we could be more efficient,
infrared and then red ones...
then a while later we got through orange and yellow to green.
big breakthorugh to get blue though....
But did it stop?
cathode ray tube for TVs (which also came from all the tube tech with light bulbs) and phosphor able to replaced with backlight LCD, then finer LEDs, then so fine you cant see the pixels. and not need a 40kg 25 inch static affected power hungry cube to watch a show.
as for data?
Red gave us CDs to replace magnetic tape, which replaced grooves in plastic... then DVDs, Then Blue-ray.
you seen the current state of this stuff?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-storage-petabit-optical-disc
now we just connect to the air... and request that stuff sent over the optic fiber SFPs in the backbone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Form-factor_Pluggable
https://www.naddod.com/products/101946.html (few grand a pop...)
Sooo. whats important is the direction.
because we have trains, plains and cars, and coal, nuclear tokamacs and other stuff...
and from the looks of things we cant drive the cars far enough at the moment which is a problem.
And they can explode and kill people (rarely... but its still a danger)
so... this will very likely continue in competition with hydrogen technology ongoing.
As for silver.
It's a beast in technology for a wide range of technical reasons.
id much prefer to see massive quantities mined and put into KG blocks in cars, busses, drones, trains etc where it can be recycled in 20 years and save our power consumption (just need to find decent money to take bitcoins potentially infinite consumption away...), than dwindled away in medical sterile bandages and hygenic socks and underwear, and plated coatings that will get lost in landfill forever.
but its a step, and the other foot will move for a while and then this one will need to move.
but its not stuck to lithium, and as we all here know silver has great potential, so thats positive.
