What I’m about to tell you is probably not new, and may even be something you thought about yourself. I’m arguing that an efficient battery is the answer to our energy problems. Not ethanol. Not biofuels. Not even fusion- although that would be kinda neat. Batteries.

Now, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. It’s one of the advantages of having a two hour commute, I guess: lots of free time in which you can do nothing but holding on to a wheel and thinking - sometimes out loud. So if you happened to find this page - accidentally or otherwise - please bear with me, ’cause this is important.

During the course of our history as a civilization there were a few important paradigm shifts pertaining to the way we use energy. There was the wheel - harnessing the energy of beasts. There was the sail - wind power. The steam - coal power. Oil. Uranium. And now we’re looking into ethanol, wind turbines, solar power, geothermal energy, heat exchangers and a host of other new technologies, all aiming at producing reliable and safe energy.

Just the other day on BBC World Service, there was a big row about the decommissioning of the ageing British nuclear power stations, and the controversy surrounding the government’s plans of building new ones. And then we have the even bigger rows about the crops that are now cultivated for ethanol, which cause mass deforestation and a diminishing of the food supply for poorer and less power-hungry nations. There are big talks about the unreliability and inefficiency of solar and wind power, and European Union’s plans of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020 is met with skepticism and incredulity.

Which got me thinking: why don’t we pave Sahara then with photovoltaic cells and let them cook us electricity? Politics notwithstanding, there is actually one serious reason. Reliability. Or more exactly, the lack thereof.

You see, we want our energy to be reliable. That’s the first big requirement. When we push the button or the switch, power should be there, and at the expected voltage and amperage at that, because otherwise our light bulbs are going to blow up. Our engines expect a fuel of certain quality, otherwise they won’t start. The energy that we consume, in other words, has to be a linear function. Which is funny, because or consumption patterns are anything but linear. Of course, we could say that flicking on a light won’t affect the grid that much, but we’re talking factories, assembly lines and other such energy hogs. You can’t just turn off a nuclear power station over night, for instance, because people are not working, so you have to get that power off the grid.

A nice experiment done in the Netherlands used this energy surplus to drop the temperature in a few major deep freeze storage facilities by 4-5 degrees Celsius overnight (from -50C to -55C, for instance) - and letting them come back to the original temperature during the day. The freezers ended up using almost no power at all during the day, and the smart mind who thought this ended up saving his company a lot of money. What he created is essentially a large scale battery, storing power overnight and using it during the day.

The problem with this approach though is that our freezers cannot put power back on the grid during the day. But this is a great idea. What if you could do that in your home? Imagine just storing up the cheap night power and powering your home appliances during the day with it. An efficient energy storage would work wonders for the solar and wind power producers as well; they would just pack up the sunshine and store it for the rainy days. Literally.

The other half of the puzzle is the transportability of energy. You see, that’s what makes oil great. You can transport it relatively easy over large distances, and you can store it indeterminately, as long as you don’t light a fire too close to it. And best of all, you can use it to move vehicles around. The only necessary infrastructure is a well maintained road (or runway, or harbor). No strings attached.

Now imagine having a battery that can reliably power your car for 1000 km or more. And that can fully charge in 3 minutes. No hassle, no choices of leaded, unleaded and ultimate, no smelly fumes - just a big plug and a cup of coffee and it’s done. A pipe dream? This is the domain of the supercapacitor, a new research field which uses the advances in nanotechnology to try to attain these very desirable characteristics described above.

This is where we should be going. Reliable and transportable energy storage. If we achieve this, the energy sources won’t matter any more. We’ll just pave Sahara with photovoltaic cells, we’ll plug every geothermal source in Iceland and we’ll build huge supercapacitor silos to store that energy for future use. And for transportation we’ll just retrofit the supertankers of today with the same big capacitors - or maybe another, yet to be discovered energy storage device - and bring the energy to where is needed. No more energy hunger. No more oil wars. A brave new world.

EDIT: We’re almost there! Stanford researchers discovery may lead to a ten-fold increase in battery life. Well done, world.

EDIT2: Here’s another article about ultracapacitors.

This is a trip down memory lane, and you will hopefully excuse me for indulging. I’ve written the following piece 10 years ago, while sitting in a boring class (not even in my curriculum, but my girlfriend was attending). It was April 6th, 1998. I was 20 years old.

The universe is a great mystery for mankind. For thousands of years, ever since the first man stood on his feet and looked to the stars, he asked himself about it.

What is the universe? Surely, you cannot expect me to have the answer to that question! That’s what we all try to do since the beginning of time; all I want to do is to point out some ideas that crossed our collective minds throughout the history.

The first universe we sense, and beware, sense is the key word, is the universe within our range. Things that we can see, touch, smell, taste or hear form the universe that we call “the real world” - and all living forms have one. We are the center of this universe, which relative to each of us, depending of our (natural) capacity to sense it.

The second universe is the near, or the reachable world. This term refers to those points of the world where we can transfer our real world. The reachable universe occupies only a small amount of space, consisting of the places we can visit - with or without the help of technology. This - as the others that follow - is a virtual universe, because although we can go there, we almost certainly will not, because there is no physical time to reach all the places I am referring to.

The third universe is the known world; it is the universe we can probe using our science and technology. Do not be fooled by its name - it’s not really that known. Since the dawn of man, we looked towards places we couldn’t reach and we tried to figure out what those places were like. Later, when science came up, we came up with a new technique: we experiment, we elaborate on an universe model, then we test that model, which is good until proven wrong or until we find a better one. However, we can only verify our theories in the reachable universe (in fact, in the real one), and by extending our conclusions, we suppose that the universe is the way we say it is.

The fourth universe is the unknown world. Well, this is the one that we know nothing about. Surely, we can extrapolate and assume it’s the way we say it is, but unlike the known universe, we cannot observe it, so the key affirmation here is we just don’t know.¹

So, we’ve structured the universe from man’s point of view. Is then man the center of the universe? You might be tempted to say yes. You would be wrong. The only universe you might say has man for a center is the real world. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

The real world, the first one we talked about, is sense-based. But senses are not always accurate. Therefore you cannot really know your real world if you don’t enhance your senses with technology and science. But can you say then that you know it all?No, we don’t really know the universe. No matter how accurate our technology is, there will always be more information we cannot access (yet), more things to be discovered, more to learn.

Stop! We’ve just found another keyword. Information. The key to all the doors of knowledge, the magic potion, the very essence of it all… What is information? How do you define it? Is it matter? No, it’s not, but it could take a material form. Is it energy? No, because it doesn’t act like it. So it must be a whole different thing. Maybe the center of the universe.

Information is, was and ever will be, regardless of energy and matter. We can say that information just exists. The way to acquire information is also information, and therefore exists too, and so on, ad infinitum. Could we say that we just found God?

We can go beyond this. With a little effort of abstraction, we could say that matter is a form of energy; matter can transform into energy, and energy can transform into matter. But how does the energy know how to organize itself? Does energy generate information, or information is the one that defines the energy’s forms of manifestation?

I believe energy interacts with information. Energy takes from information a form of manifestation, and gives it an opportunity to manifest itself. They’re bound together and they form a whole. Information and Energy. God and the World he created.

1. A man is himself an universe. But what kind of universe? You won’t be surprised to know that the structure of man can be described in the same way, with the four delimitations we discussed so far. [↩]