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Ring of Honor [21554]
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Is Elon Musk developing a glass battery?
Nov 22, 2019, 12:10 PM
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I've been fascinated with this AI-controlled solar smelter that Bill Gates is backing that I posted about the other day, so I've been doing some digging in the geek community (and the answer so far is a definite "maybe", though there's a good bit of skepticism), but in the process I stumbled onto something far more interesting and the thing that's got the tech geeks truly stirred up at the moment: they think Elon Musk might be developing a solid-state "glass" battery.
Long story short - the driver behind this theory is John B. Goodenough, the 97-year-old Nobel-prize winning researcher who is still alive and still running his lab at the University of Texas...and incidentally, the same guy who developed first RAM (yes, he helped developed Random Access Memory now used by all computers!) and then the lithium-ion battery that every device we use today now uses, apparently revealed in 2016 that he and a co-researcher called Helena Braga had discovered a "glass" battery that was 2-5 times better (and vastly cheaper, because it's made from sodium) than lithium-ion.
That's big. Goodenough is...one of the biggest names in tech. Ever.
Digging around, there's still apparently problems with the cathode. Which would require corporate development.
Enter Tesla - maybe. The biggest purchaser of batteries, by a mile, is Tesla, for use in their electric cars. Recently Tesla has acquired two major battery companies, Hibar Limited and Maxwell, and even industry experts were scratching their heads a bit trying to figure out exactly what the rationale was:
https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/06/tesla-acquires-battery-expert-hibar/
https://qz.com/1541864/tesla-bought-maxwell-technologies-for-218-million-but-not-for-its-ultracapacitors/
There might not be fire there, but taken together, that's apparently a heckuva lot of smoke. And the tech geeks seem to think it's a distinct possibility.
Anyhow, if it's true that Musk has a glass battery under development, that changes...everything. It means the internal combustion engine is dead, CO2 emissions just got cut by not the 7% that Bill Gates seem to think his industrial solar cells could create...but this would cut CO2 emissions by close to fifty per cent. And oh, yeah, start an entirely new tech revolution too lengthy to get into here.
Also of note - John B. Goodenough and Braga have filed for some interesting patents recently, the latest of which on October 19th....
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/john-b-goodenough![]() USPTO patent applications submitted by and patents granted to John B. Goodenough
If there's tech-heads here - and there's gotta be, this is Clemson! - I'd love to hear from you guys.
Is this actually happening?
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1st Rounder [674]
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Re: Is Elon Musk developing a glass battery?
Nov 22, 2019, 7:14 PM
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Is his name really John B. goodenough? That sounds like someone Bart Simpson would call Moe at the bar asking for.
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Ring of Honor [21554]
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Re: Is Elon Musk developing a glass battery?
Nov 22, 2019, 7:51 PM
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LOL. It truly is his name.
The guy is astounding, though. Like I said, he was one of the team that invented RAM, and then in 1978 was one of the three that invented the lithium-ion battery.
Those are paradigm breakers, inventions on the level of the light bulb or antibiotics...and he had not one but two of them in his lifetime...and it appears, now, at age 97, he may have actually added a third.
Glass batteries, if they work - and it appears they well could - will literally change everything.
It could be a very anticlimactic end to the Climate Crisis, for starters, because batteries almost instantly replace internal combustion engines, and their ability to store vast amounts of power cheaply would instantly make stuff like wind and solar vastly more cost-efficient than fossil fuel plants.
There's plenty of power, but the problem has always been storage. As they say, when it's raining soup...what you really need most is a bucket. Up until now we haven't had a very good cost-effective one.
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110%er [3969]
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Re: Is Elon Musk developing a glass battery?
Nov 22, 2019, 10:52 PM
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LOL. It truly is his name.
The guy is astounding, though. Like I said, he was one of the team that invented RAM, and then in 1978 was one of the three that invented the lithium-ion battery.
Those are paradigm breakers, inventions on the level of the light bulb or antibiotics...and he had not one but two of them in his lifetime...and it appears, now, at age 97, he may have actually added a third.
Glass batteries, if they work - and it appears they well could - will literally change everything.
It could be a very anticlimactic end to the Climate Crisis, for starters, because batteries almost instantly replace internal combustion engines, and their ability to store vast amounts of power cheaply would instantly make stuff like wind and solar vastly more cost-efficient than fossil fuel plants.
There's plenty of power, but the problem has always been storage. As they say, when it's raining soup...what you really need most is a bucket. Up until now we haven't had a very good cost-effective one.
This would be SUPERB!
I always worry about these things though...you know, the whole, "some MAJOR CORPORATION/HIDDEN ENTITY" comes along and either PAYS THEM OFF or OFFS THEM.
Okay, I'll take my tinfoil hat off to at least say this is awesome news and I hope it happens.
I watched the Joe Rogan Experience podcast with Elon Musk and it was super cool to watch this guy conversate
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Ring of Honor [21554]
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Re: Is Elon Musk developing a glass battery?
Nov 23, 2019, 7:29 AM
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The thing is, though, Elon Musk is the mega-corporation. The guy is basically Tony Stark. In fact he's the guy Robert Downey Jr. patterned Tony Stark on, and he prepped for the role by hanging with Elon Musk for a few days.
My guess is, if Tesla is producing the battery, Musk a lot more interested in the battery than its use in the car. I mean, he'll use it in his cars, of course...but the battery is worth trillions, and you can only sell so many cars.
And even then, it's not going to happen overnight...and there will be setbacks. Musk is notoriously impatient and he wants stuff done yesterday, and his stuff fizzles spectacularly as often as it works...at first. Like, just yesterday he unveiled his new unibody/uniframe space-age-material all-electric "Cybertruck" that supposedly had unbreakable materials in its frame - and he proved it by letting a guy go to town on the thing with a baseball bat. Couldn't make a dent. Then he decided to show off its unbreakable windows by letting a guy throw metal balls at them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6UpHjJvnn0
Basically it'd be like that opening scene in Iron Man 2 when Tony Stark lands at the expo...if the Iron Man suit misfired and went and did a header into the gallery.
He'll get it working - eventually - as he did in spectacular fashion with his Model 3 S-Class back in Q3 this past year, but the shareholders will be in for an extended ######## check until then. That's life with Elon Musk.
The good news is, this guy isn't about to bury something like that. Musk isn't remotely about money; he's a 6-year-old kid who really wants to see cool stuff go.
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1st Rounder [674]
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Re: Is Elon Musk developing a glass battery?
Nov 22, 2019, 7:14 PM
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Is his name really John B. goodenough? That sounds like someone Bart Simpson would call Moe at the bar asking for.
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Top TigerNet [30494]
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Re: Is Elon Musk developing a glass battery?
Nov 22, 2019, 7:53 PM
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If he’s goodenough for Bart, he’s Goodenough for me.
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TigerNet Immortal [176165]
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cool, but you know what would be even cooler?
Nov 22, 2019, 11:24 PM
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Scores of Gen IV nuclear reactors that consume their own nuclear waste scattered across the country to charge those glass batteries.
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Clemson Icon [27786]
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...or Gen V reactors that consume existing nuclear waste...?***
Nov 23, 2019, 2:51 AM
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TigerNet Immortal [176165]
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High five.***
Nov 23, 2019, 8:22 AM
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TigerNet Immortal [176165]
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Sorry, high V.***
Nov 23, 2019, 9:59 AM
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