Over the past decade, we have seen a lot of advancements take place in consumer electronics, transportation, communications and more. The pace of progress has been truly extraordinary.
I think it's safe to say that nobody had anticipated that we will get so many groundbreaking innovations in such a short duration. What's more amazing is that things are not looking to slow down anytime soon. Instead, they are only getting faster and faster.
Take smartphones and computers for example. The speed of the processors and storage capacities in them have increased quite a lot. Our computing devices are more powerful, efficient and reliable than ever.
One thing that hasn't been able to keep up though, is battery technology. We basically still use the same battery tech, lithium-ion, to power our billions of devices worldwide. In fact, it's this tech that helped build the modern world, in my opinion. But now, it seems like our current battery tech is holding back further breakthroughs.
What A Drag
One would expect that having come so far in other areas, we would have had batteries already that could last a week on a single charge and took mere minutes to fully charged. But this dream hasn't materialised yet.
It's not for a lack of trying though. Many companies and research teams around the globe have been hard at work trying to figure out the next big thing in this area. It's just that developing a new battery tech or making the current one much more advanced is a really tough task.
It involves lots of research, testing, weighing tons of options to nail down the best, figuring out cost, analysing mass production potential and much more. The problems are seemingly infinite.
But we would need to solve these problems if we are to keep the pace of progress in the coming decades. Faster processors in computers and smartphones will only put more strain on batteries. As devices get smaller, batteries would need to be smaller too, yet provide the same or better power. We are also slowly transitioning to electric cars now and they will need much better batteries for the switch to happen.
Likewise, to make complete use of renewable sources of energy, battery storage has to increase manifolds or our reliance on fossil fuels will dangerously continue well into the 21st century.
In short, the world needs a new breakthrough in battery technology, and it needs it yesterday. This might be one of the most significant things we figure out in the current times.