More nano apps are popping up, five years of intensive funding as bound to result in more than stain resistant pants and odour free underwear. Todays big idea is Toshibas battery, which apparently uses nano-particles to “prevent organic liquid electrolytes from reducing during battery recharging, which sounds feasible. What this means in practice is a recharging time of minutes rather than hours.
Its also good news for the environment, although not only for Toshibas claimed reason that with such a fast recharge time, it consumes less energy than today’s Li-ion cells, leading to reduced carbon-dioxide emissions. A fundamental problem of most renewable energy sources is that you need to store the energy when the sun shines, the wind blows, or the waves pound, and that may not always be for long enough to trickle charge a battery. While that may not be a significant factor for the operators of wind farms, it can be a major headache for local energy generation projects in the developing world.