Battery era just hot air?

As a rather sad indictment of what my life has become, I was doing some dusting the other day. Not that there is anything wrong with dusting.It is now some months since we have allowed our cleaner to visit, and while we have managed to keep the place reasonably tidy and the rodents and assorted pests at bay, dusting was one task that seemed to always be missed such that the layer was near an inch thick in spots.And so I was giving the region around the TV a bit of a go over, and noted this strange, flat, black box sitting underneath - a box that apparently has been there for years, but I had simply never noticed it before.Upon asking the kids, I was informed that it was something called a Blu-ray player - which didn't really help.I had to go away and Google that, and it seems that Blu-ray was what came after DVDs, sometime in the mid noughties. Apparently, it was the bee's knees; massive data density, high definition, cinema quality surround sound - and was going to take the audio-visual world by storm. Or at least it would have done if it were not rendered obsolete about a fortnight later.Technology is like that.Yes batteries work, but they are heavy, they don't store much energy, they are inefficient, hard to scale, expensive, require all manner of exotic metals, wear out quickly, and they take a long time to chargeI am reliably informed that Blu-Ray technology was, and indeed still is, quite good. It was cheap, it did exactly what it said on the box, and was a significant improvement over what came before - but was just a bit unlucky with its timing. Sadly, timing is everything, and so I can only imagine there are millions of such boxes in living rooms around the world, holding up pot plants or propping open doors.The issue, as is common with much technology, was that the inventors focused entirely on improving what came before and indeed did a splendid job. But they missed the paradigm shift. They were done in, not by a better product, but rather an entirely different product - streaming.Blu-Ray may have been marvellous, but there was still a disk involved that either had to be bought or hired, which invariably involved a trudge down to the video shop, at the end of a long day, in the rain, when all one really wanted to do was open a bottle of something nice and be a slob.Streaming on the other hand, was actually significantly inferior to Blu-Ray in most respects related to picture and sound quality, but with the entirely unrelated advantage of being able to be summoned forth, from the sofa, in one's undies, with little more than a feeble flick of a thumb. It seems the human race will always choose convenience over quality. Who knew?And so what was meant to be the pinnacle of technological achievement turned out to be indeed like most pinnacles - it was all downhill from there.If we are to believe Elon Musk and any junior mining spruiker with a lump of lithium, cobalt or nickel to flog, we are entering, and indeed are well into the new battery age. Fossil fuel is dead and it won't be long before we will all be having batteries surgically implanted for goodness knows what disturbing purposes.This all sounds really exciting and has no end of silly people waxing lyrical about the possibilities and where this could all lead - were it not for the inconvenient fact that batteries are rubbish.It is true to say that fossil fuels are dead, or at least dying. But it is not true to say we are entering a battery age; what we are entering is an electrical age, and batteries are just one way of storing that electricity - and not a very good one at that.Yes batteries work, but they are heavy, they don't store much energy, they are inefficient, hard to scale, expensive, require all manner of exotic metals, wear out quickly, and they take a long time to charge.Their only saving grace is that they can be small, and so are wonderful for our phones and other devices, but once we move up into transport and utility scale generation, they are absolutely hopeless.Far then from being the bees knees, a temple of tech to which we must prostrate ourselves, the current crop of lithium things are really just another Blu-Ray - an improvement on what came before, but in the longer term, perhaps the final iteration of a particular technology before something new comes along to render it all obsolete.Or perhaps, something old.Anyone who has watched that grizzly clip of the Hindenburg going up in flames will appreciate the energy stored in hydrogen, and indeed the risks associated with it.Hydrogen is old school, and hydrogen fuel cells are not much younger, having been invented in the 1830s. But for the following 180 years we followed other paths, as digging up and burning black sludge was cheaper - but now it's not and so full circle we have come.Science nerds will attest that hydrogen solves many of the issues that plague batteries, but with inherent shortcomings that make it less attractive. But that is just a matter of engineering and cost- the positive attributes never went away, but the negative ones are being ticked off by the lads in lab coats one by one.Firstly of course, hydrogen is plentiful, and being readily produced from water by electrolysis, it is in effect limitless.Second, its energy density per kilogram is three times that of hydrocarbon fuel.But then it gets tricky.While a kg of hydrogen may indeed have three times the energy as a kilogram of petrol, as the lightest of gases, that kilogram will fill a room, and so its volumetric energy density is poor. In order then to be useful the stuff must be either chilled to liquid, or compressed to over 700 atmospheres - which takes energy, requires an expensive container to hold, and is akin to strapping a nuclear bomb to one's buttocks as a container rupturing at that pressure will level a city block.But billions are now being thrown at these issues, for the simple reason that hydrogen solves the really big problem of the day - it is easily and infinitely scalable and so provides a convenient place to store all that pesky renewable energy we keep producing at times of the day when no one wants it.Utility-scale hydrogen plants exist, as do large hydrogen vehicles like buses and lorries. A hydrogen powered ship presents zero technological challenge, and I am sure someone is fiddling somewhere, and hydrogen powered aircraft are up there now.Hydrogen cars are trundling about, but not many as space remains a premium at the small vehicle end, and so we will still have to be buying lithium powered Teslas for a few years yet until the technology improves - but only a few.Hydrogen fuel cells in our homes and businesses is purely a matter of cost, and so by definition, purely a matter of time.Only electronics are likely to remain the domain of batteries.That batteries will be largely replaced by hydrogen in most applications seems almost assured - we just don't know when. Technology is hard to predict, but I suspect, 10 years from now, we will be starting to refer to the battery age in the same way as the oil age - in the past tense.Sad to see them go.

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