Blog Why Not?!

Green Battery
Short summary of what I have learned
Economics, 081110

So I have noticed that my new interest (economics) turns me on to other stuff as well. Whenever I get the chance I try out wacky ideas and discuss stuff with Micke D. He calls himself a brainstorm victim. So to cut him some slack the following writing is a mental exercise performed in solitude. It is a short summary of what I have learned and what I have been thinking about today.

To begin with... things are bad! From what I gather USA will have to borrow themselves out of the dept they have put themselves in. They will have to socialize financial institutions, cut government spending and raise their taxes. They will also have to loans from strategic opponents, such as oil producing countries. Thus the power balance of power will shift.

USA will have to start producing stuff of real value. Preferably something that they can export to foreign countries. For economical and political reasons they will also have to become less dependent of oil. One thing that could has been suggested and that could fit the bill is green technology. Now the question is, how do one make green technology feasible? I do not think that laws and taxation will be enough. The technology itself has to be competitive.

Green technology is among other things (1) about reducing the need for use of energy, (2) producing clean energy, (3) clean transportation of energy and (4) recycling products.

1) Make products more efficient and consolidating functions, i.e. producing multi-functional products. An extreme example just to prove a point would be to replace the TV, phone and computer with cloud computing connected to a cell phone with virtual retinal display (VRD).

2) Nuclear fuel is cheap but not clean. On the up side the infrastructure (in western countries) are already there. For developing countries and for making transportation of energy cost effective, I believe in solar energy and improved batteries.

3) To make products more efficient they will have to become more intelligent so to speak. Intelligent material will only take us so far, information technology will take us even further (GPS saves fuel, the washing machine washes better if it is equipped with a chip and so forth). How do we power these things? Oil is not clean to produce, it is not clean to transport, process or even clean to use and we do not have enough of it to last to the end of days AND it is political. Now let us say that we replace nuclear power with fusion, will then we will have a lot of infrastructure to build in certain countries. And even if we would replace this energy source with a perhaps more mobile solution such as solar power, what we still end up with is a something that can store this energy for later use. Something that can both transport and can store energy is a battery. So until the day that we can generate energy from thin air so that it do not have to be either transported or stored, rechargeable batteries will be the shit.

4) It is not enough to produce new green products, we will have to somehow take care of the waste we already have. If one could make it more feasible to recycle minerals form junk, compared to mining it from the ground one could make loads of money (and at the same time do the world a favor) since the demand for minerals used in electronics will increase.

So much for the short summary, now for some questions: What will oil producing countries invest their money in? What kind of battery technology is the cheapest to produce compared to efficiency and longevity? Who is the best at solar energy technology?

UPDATE
081212: The article Ex-Chief Says Intel Should Power Cars makes me feel as though I was on to something went I submitted this blog entry. As you can see from this article the author, Andrew Grove is touching on several of the key issues in green technology that I wrote about in my blog entry. Mr Grove advocates the use of batteries in cars.

- Aramis

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