Tag Archives: energy

Iron Battery 3.0 is Published!

Here’s the Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ohx.2025.e00629

The youtube version of this post is live https://youtu.be/ojolTZqfv-k

I’ve been working on the all-iron battery for eight years now. That feels wild to me. I’m happy to announce that version 3.0 is published! This paper is absolutely Dipak Koirala’s work more than mine. The newest incarnation of the Iron Battery is significantly more powerful than the previous version; it can completely discharge in ~10 hours (still slow compared to a lithium ion, but now in a practical range). To get there, we did 3 major changes:

Commercial membrane
Improved electrolyte and paste material
Soluble electrochemical mediators

First, a recap.

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Nuclear Fusion Fuels – Where will they come from?

This post is also a video! Click here to watch.

I know you’ve seen lots of people say “fusion is limitless energy forever and it’s just around the corner. A brighter future will soon dawn for everyone.” I think that hype is maybe not ideal. I do this thing where I read the news like I’m watching lottery drawing – maybe today will be THE DAY and all the problems are SOLVED. I think that’s setting myself up for disappointment. Instead, I took a look at some technical problems and how far along researchers are to solving them.

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Top Science of 2023

Here is the science I was most excited about in 2023. It’s still January! I got it done just in time! This post is also a video. If you want this post in video format, you can click here.

I reviewed the lists of top science from Science magazine, Nature, the Guardian, as well as my notes over the year. Here are my selections. Links for all sources – lists and original articles – are at the bottom.

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Utopian communities sharing their experiences online

I get the impression that there are not all that many people interested in Utopia (as a concept). Maybe we’re a bit more skeptical than folks were in the 1800s. Or maybe charismatic leaders just don’t gain so much traction in an era with electronic criminal records and background checks.

The good parts of living with room mates were really good. A built in social network and a always-on source of good conversation and affirmation? Yeah. Doing other peoples’ dishes… not so much.

I follow three projects with utopian visions:

Open Source Ecology

Paul Wheaton’s Permaculture community

Focus Fusion

I love that these folks are putting their experiences out there. It’s exciting to see folks trying to build something grand. It’s even interesting to watch the setbacks. I don’t know how much popular interest there is in this kind of thing.

What can we really do about peak oil and global warming?

If you want to solve global warming, here is the method: help solar to beat the price per kilowatt-hour of natural gas. I think it can happen.

Consider the future of solar power. The price of panels is dropping quickly. A price of $0.50 per peak watt would have been absurdly optimistic a few years ago but it is now a virtual certainty. While solar panels may not advance as rapidly as Moore’s Law (as I read recently) they still fall in price by a significant margin every few years. I got my price data from renewableenergyworld.com. After removing the points from 2006-2008 because those years were hit hard by a silicon shortage, the data actually fit an exponential decay reasonably well.

This graph shows the price of solar panels (blue circles) and an exponential fit to these data (green line). The black line indicates $0.50 per watt.

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