Better Batteries, Better World

Frequent commenter Tim Kingston sent me this piece called “Better Batteries, Better World,” and notes, “Interesting topic for Foreign Affairs magazine; they rarely talk about renewables.”

I don’t normally read Foreign Affairs; thanks for pointing it out.  I’m delighted  this subject, i.e., energy storage, is getting the attention it deserves in the larger community.  Good article, with a clever title.

They write, “Thanks to breakthroughs on the horizon, batteries qualify as one of 12 disruptive technologies that the McKinsey Global Institute has identified as part of a recent report on innovations that will change the way the world works.” This is absolutely true.  Obviously, electric transportation comes immediately to mind, but so does the electrification of rural parts of the developing world, a point the authors make very clearly.  Here, we hope to leap-frog over the classical utility model, i.e., burning fossil fuels and transmitting the power over long distance; we hope to have microgrids featuring renewables, perhaps solar PV with adequate battery storage for nights and cloudy days.

The ultimate product of bringing electrical power to people who never had it before is better education, better health, greater productivity, smaller and stronger families, and a reduction in deforestation and burning hydrocarbons.  It’s the single best thing we can be doing for this planet right now.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t make anybody wealthy, or we’d get right on it.  🙂