Or you could just Google the subject. The company mentioned in the article is GBatteries Energy in Canada.
I wasn't able to access the MT article, as I don't have a subscription, but I did google it and it seems promising (pulse charging). They have yet to scale up to larger batteries (using watch batteries because you have to gather large amounts of energy to pulse into the batteries, as redpoint5 was saying.) But, all this stuff is definitely doable, redpoint5's scepticism aside.
{Totally geeky stuff ensues, degenerating quickly into philosophical drivel, might want to go on to the next post}
Here's an interesting symposium on battery research from Stanford:
I find this research fascinating. And if you get past all the chemistry and math, it's pretty simple too. The relatively primitive, brute force way we store and use electrical energy presents some basic problems. For instance, using metal (Copper mostly) as a conduit creates much resistance, so you have to use a bigger cable. A cable sufficient to charge a bolt in 5 minutes would be as big around as a small pumpkin. Also, a charging station capable of charging 8 Bolts simultaneously at that speed would take over a megawatt of transfer capability. That's 1 million watts, which would power, @ today's average {instantaneous} demand, about 750 homes, and cost about 137 dollars. A coal processing plant uses about 650 megawatts.
So, how to address these problems?
Firstly, the conduit, copper wire. Electrons don't actually flow through the wire at all. The "electrons" generated at power company are still back at the power company. It's the potential that moves through the wires. charges build up at the atomic / molecular level, and when enough energy is built up, a charge flies off, and bangs into the next atom, which knock an electron loose from it's shell, which goes to the next atom, which bangs into it and breaks loose one of it's electrons. So, it's not like a flow of electrons, it's more like a relay race, handing off your electron to the next guy and so on.
This is very inefficient, and lots of energy is lost as heat. If you supercool your conduit, it transmits potential more readily, but the cooling process is cost prohibitive. What we need to find is some other kind of conduit that transmits energy more readily, perhaps some kind of liquid medium, or magnetic field that could actually transfer a stream of electrons instead of having the atoms relay the charge. This could theoretically reduce the size of the "wire" necessary to charge the Bolt in 5 minutes to the width of a telephone cord wire.
And as for the megawatt problem, again, the way we transmit out power through our antiquated grid system creates huge losses. Just changing from an a/c to d/c transmission {grid} ( for long distance transmission - still needs to be converted back to ac at the point of use, since all our devices are designed to use ac) would double its efficiency. dc power transmission is the future of our grid, and an integral part of our need to update our infrastructure as a country.
https://www.quora.com/Do-we-need-to...t-is-the-time-scale-and-what-are-the-benefits
But, in the short term, if we could transmit energy through a more efficient conduit than wire, it could drop the cost of the grid and transmission costs by orders of magnitude.
But we're going to be using a lot more electricity in the near future, as our ability to harness and store renewable energy such as wind, solar, dams, ocean waves, etc. become more viable every day. So, megawatt charging stations will probably have to be ubiquitous.
But even these solutions are primitive, cumbersome, and costly.
Energy is the key to everything. If we made a breakthrough, for instance, in fusion, everybody would get a small fusion reactor for their home, that would satisfy all the energy needs for that family for decades, with no more need for a grid or transmission at all, (it's fuel would be garbage, and the by-product would be water vapor.).
At that point, what is fun (to me) to think about is - what would our society be like? If you have unlimited energy at home, you can make food, cars, planes, TVs, whatever you need from the comfort of your living room. No need to "go to work" anymore, no hunger, famine, fighting over resources would disappear. The 1% possessing most of the "wealth" of society would be meaningless - wealth is just the ability to obtain stuff, and if your home generator makes all the stuff you could ever want, what does being "wealthy" even mean any more? What would get us out of bed in the morning? For me, (after all the sex, or course
) it would be discovery, exploration, as in Star Trek. (Roddenberry is my personal hero, and the architect of my favorite blueprint for our future.)
You might say "why even talk about this, it's a thousand years in the future?" Well, it's not really. Even today we're seeing robots doing the work we traditionally got paid for.
Only so many of us will be needed to program the robots that do the farming, manufacturing, R&D, etc. What are the rest of us supposed to do when there aren't enough jobs left for everyone?
And more and more of our resources are being hogged by people who don't even "work" the just manipulate stocks, buffalo the proletariat, and devise ever more ingenious ways to keep and hog their wealth and gain more. (The french solved this by mounting a revolution, making extensive use of the guillotine, and chopping off the rich people's heads. Again, primitive, but very effective
We have some MAJOR changes coming up in our society, and soon.
I love thinking about this stuff.
