Discussion on:

Better than lithium-ion?

Perhaps you can take the poll and also share with us on your battery usage patterns.

It should be a fairly simple test to see if they hold more
energy. Do they last longer under the same load?

How do they compare in terms of price? I'm guessing they
don't blow up nearly as often? How do they perform when
exposed to heat? Do they produce much heat of their own,
compared to lithium ion?

Zpower certainly sounds like it answers most of the criticisms of current (!) technology, - what about weight?
My laptop is very heavy, and a significant part of that is the weight of the battery.
Also, there are applications of battery technology where weight is a major consideration (model airplanes, motor vehicles etc).
It will be interesting to see if there is any weight penalty with Zpower.

silver is on the quite heavy side of the periodic table and lithium is one of the lightest elements.

is this 2x power density by volume or by weight?

..., lithium-ions specific energy density is 150 to 200 Wh/kg, and ZPower is claiming 200Wh/kg. (The TR article says it's comparing energy to volume density.)

So they have about the same energy to mass ratio, while silver zinc has a higher energy to volume ratio.

not much more energy storage per gram but
silver is so much more dense they could be alot smaller maybe?

so laptop weight wouldn't go down, it might go up if you put 2 batteries of silver zinc in place of one li-ion (or Lions as I like to call them). but you would get 2x capacity for twice the weight, in same size.

It would have been nice if the reporter had thought to ask some obvious additional questions, such as the ones posted by others, as well as the following.

What are the recharge characteristics? Can these batteries be recharged as they are in use? Should they be recharged frequently, or should they be run to dead before recharging? Do they have a "memory" effect?

Judging by the questions and the pat answers, I'd say this was probably more of a "scripted" interview than an actual probe of the technology. Regardless, it does provide some information (and hope) about a new technology that just might fix one of the major problems with remote computing.

Hi Frdeninlein,

First off, thank you for the feedback. If I might elaborate a little on some of the points raised in some of the comments.

I made a decision to cover only the key aspects of this new technology in a way that will provide a good overview of this (relatively) new technology at a length that more readers will find enjoyable.

The additional questions that you identified are certainly valid. However, I have to bear in mind that only a relatively small fraction of professionals are even aware of many of the drawbacks of lithium-ion technology that you correctly identified. As such, I thought it would be an overkill to delve into such details immediately upon introducing a new technology.

Another consideration is that I am not currently in a position to physically verify the technology in action, as a review prototype will only be available early next year. As such, I thought it prudent to highlight only the key benefits, and reserve my actual comments until I can actually see a review unit.

Regards,
Paul Mah.

the silver battery has some fair points going for it.
green - high recycle re-use
safety - lower explosive potential
power - storage

I'd be curious to know where the plastic capacitor-battery development is. the one feature I liked about that one is the rapid recharge - on the order of seconds - minutes as ooposed to 10's of minutes to hours.

how about a comparison?

some links
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=1131

http://www.physorg.com/news77371085.html

Love to hear about the current status, and especially if they're developing this for electric vehicles.