First thing’s first: nobody gives a damn about the Energizer Bunny. After twenty years of unnatural pink fur and incessant drumming, we get the point. Put down the instrument. It wasn’t cool when you were in marching band in high school and it isn’t cool now.
If you really want to get excited about battery technology, you should check out Lithium Iron Phosphate cells. (I’m going to refer to them as LiFePO4′s to cut back on the finger exercise.) These aren’t your grandpa’s double A’s. Shit, they’re not even your Macbook’s Lithium Ion battery.
I’m not much of a tech nerd. Apart from the occasional memory swap on my notebook or Blackberry peripheral, I’m somewhat disconnected from it all. But trust me when I say that the LiFePO4′s are actually pretty interesting. Consider, first, the safety advantages. Ever read a blog post about a laptop exploding? Or how about the Chinese man that was killed when his cell phone exploded? That stuff happens more often than we realize. The explosions and heat come from typical lithium ion cells being susceptible to thermal runaway. In a nutshell:
Thermal runaway refers to a situation where an increase in temperature changes the conditions in a way that causes a further increase in temperature leading to a destructive result.
Basically, the heat builds at an every increasing rate until a catastrophic failure results. LiFePO4′s aren’t as likely to suffer from thermal runaway – extremely good news for anyone that’s ever used a laptop on their lap. Men especially.
LiFePO4′s also produce a higher current at peak output, have a longer shelf life, and deplete more slowly, giving you a longer window of usage per charge. I don’t know about you, but I”m getting pretty sick of having to charge my computer every three hours. It kind of defeats the purpose of it being portable. Also, using iron and phosphate has a lower environmental impact than using cobalt – cobalt isn’t easy to extract or recycle.
Prototypes of the LiFePO4 battery cell have been used for projects including the Hexapod walker, the One Laptop Per Child Initiative, and Aptera electric cars.
One of the more impressive applications can be found in BRAMMO’s Enertia Powercycle which housing a six-cell Lithium Phosphate battery pack manufactured by Valence Technologies. With this pack on board, it only costs about $0.0007 per mile to drive the powercycle.
Take that, bunny.
