In one of Robert Heinlein’s last novels, Friday (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/034530988X/qid=1115498417/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-0016760-1004908?v=glance&s=books&n=507846), society has been transformed by a high-capacity storage battery called a “Shipstone” after its inventor. They come in various sizes. A large Shipstone in the basement can power an office building for a year. Most electric appliances are powered by small Shipstones instead of being plugged into wall outlets. Power-transmission grids are obsolete and blackouts are a thing of the past. In fact, the Shipstone has effectively solved the world’s energy problems: A Shipstone generates no electric power, it has to be charged at a power plant; but it does eliminate the losses that happen when you transmit power from the power plant to the point of consumption over power lines. It also eliminates the need for fossil fuels, at least as vehicle fuels – cars, buses, trains, airplanes, all can run on Shipstones.
Of course, it’s purely a “black box” technology in the novel. Heinlein does not provide even a theoretical hint as to how such a miracle technology might work. (The Shipstone, in fact, was never patented, in order to keep its workings a secret and maintain a practical, indefinite monopoly for its inventor; and it is implied that trying to dismantle one to reverse-engineer it would cause a nuclear-level explosion.)
Is anybody working on such a battery? Does anybody have a theoretical line of approach? Or is a Shipstone something as definitively impossible (in view of present knowledge of physics) as an antigravity field or a faster-than-light space drive?
Power loss through transmission systems is not all that great. I would think a shipstone powered coffee maker at 100% energy efficency would be less then 100% due to the thing breaking before the shipstone is depleted.
Perhaps the idea is that everything becomes a service, you pay not for a coffee maker but for X cups of brewed coffee after which the device is useless. The apex of the throw away society.
This was never spelled out, but I got the impression from the book that small-appliance Shipstones were replaceable, like flashlight batteries are now.
Chemical batteries are limited in terms of energy storage by, well, a number of things, but primarily on how much energy they can bind up in whatever chemical configuration (lithium-ion, NiCaD, alkaline, et cetera), and thus, while incremental improvements can be made we won’t see any order-of-magnitude improvements in compactness or capacity.
A superconductive loop could theoretically store as much energy as you could pump into it–I understand that supercooled silver toruses have been charged up to store megajoules of energy–but since room temperature superconductors are still a pipe-dream that isn’t a particularly useful avenue as yet.
If you want to go with the tinfoil hat crowd, Blacklight Power claims, among other amazing breakthroughts, to be able to extract enormous amounts of energy from “fractional eletron states” in hydrogen per Randy Mills theory of “Classical Quantum Mechanics”. I don’t think I’ll be betting the morgage on them, though; somehow, despite their impressive claims they still haven’t come through with a power generator that has revolutionized power generation or cured cancer or met any of their other decade-old claims. :rolleyes:
So to answer your question, no, there isn’t anything on the horizon that can match the specifications of the imaginary Shipstone. But a man can dream, can’t he?
It seems to substitute for those losses the costs of transporting the device to the power plant for recharging - probably not negligible.
Assuming the Shipstone weighs nothing, there is still the problem of designing an electric motor of low enough weight and high enough power - not easy.
Which probably wouldn’t stop everyone from trying.
Probably true. The real advantage of the “Shipstone” would be that power stations and power grid would not have to meet the peak power usage level. Instead the power stations would only need to supply the average power usage - any difference between power generated and used will be stored in, or drawn from, the Shipstones.
This makes a lot more sense, and has been tryed, and to some degree has worked. IIRC Niagra Mohonk takes a bit of river water and stores it up in a pond at night then releases it during the day when peak power is needed (hydroelectric power). Also It was proposed to pump water up Stormking Mountain (near NYC) at night (when demand was low) and run it through hydroelectric plants during the day to produce power for the city (the plan was defeated).
It still seems benaficial to maintain a grid, this way power can be delivered to your house at a constant rate while your use varries.
I’m not sure energy efficiency of the Shipstones was really the point. Assume they didn’t add overall efficiency, they would still allow all power generation to be done in the most efficient way possible. But maybe they had unlimited fusion power for that or something. The thing is, how would society change by being able to package energy like that? How would our cities look if people didn’t need to be on a power grid? What would shipping and transportation look like? Probably very different.
I think some success has been found in prototype magnetic flywheels.
basically, an armeture…the innards of an electric generator or motor, is held within an air-tight casing with a high vaccuum, spinning on frictionless magnetic bearings. The more electricity you pump into it, the faster it spins. Slowing down the armeture recovers the stored momentum and converts it back into electricity.
As I recall from the novel, it wasn’t that the grid was obsolete, but that it was much more practical than currently to live off of the grid. For a building in the city, wired power is practical, but for a house fifty miles from anywhere, you’d have to run wires fifty miles for a single house. With a Shipstone, you could just put one in the basement of your house, wherever it was, and then once a year drive the fifty miles to the nearest town to replace it. Even if this was more expensive than city grid power, it’s still cheaper than boondocks grid power.
There were other applications, as well. For instance, a flashlight-sized Shipstone would last essentially forever, at flashlight loads. So you never have to worry about the batteries in your flashlight running out. And you could quickly and efficiently store or retrieve large amounts of energy in a Shipstone: One of Heinlein’s other books (The Cat who Walked through Walls, I think) had Shipstones used in a ballistic subway system in the Moon. The subway car is electromagnetically accelerated to orbital speed and travels through underground conic-section tunnels to another distant city, where it’s caught by another electromagnet system. The energy of the car is converted back into electricity, and then stored in a Shipstone for the next launch. It’s admitted that there are losses in this system (tanstaafl, after all), but they’re said to be almost negligible.