Energy: One of the Main Directions of Technological Development.
“This music will be eternal,
If I replace the batteries”Nautilus Pompilius
Modern humans are surrounded by the achievements of science and technology, whether they want it or not. It's just convenient. Everyone has gadgets: phones, computers, tablets, printers, electronic watches, and the internet. Everyone uses household appliances: televisions, air conditioners, refrigerators, microwaves, electric stoves, washing machines, coffee makers, etc. Naturally, lighting and heating go without saying. However, that’s not entirely true. All these benefits of modern civilization are yours only until the electricity is turned off...
Your phones and computers will last 3 to 4 hours. However, there will be no internet or communication (the stations will shut down). The refrigerator will last a little longer. In other words, after 6 to 8 hours, you will be plunged from the 21st century into the 19th... And not just into the 19th century, but into the early 19th century. You will have nothing that you are so accustomed to and that has surrounded you your whole life. Forget about phones, computers, and the internet. But the problem is that with the refrigerator defrosting, you will also have no food... And forget about hot meals... Neither the electric stove nor the microwave will work. So, tea and coffee will also become pleasant memories, just like a bath with water, a shower, and sewage...
After all, the water supply will also stop working (the pumping stations will shut down). For some time, you might survive on bottled water, cookies, and canned goods. But that will end soon too. Your car will soon stall. There will be no gasoline... A trip to the store with your remaining cash will be very sad, as without electronic cash registers, you will not be sold anything. You also won’t be able to withdraw your money from the bank. Without computers (which also won't work), the bank simply doesn't know how much money you have. There are no records on paper. The government will continue to function for some time in major cities. But beyond their borders, a primitive communal society will emerge.
Do you understand how fragile this world is and how quickly all civilization can end? The problem lies in centralized energy. Because there is simply no other option.
Thus, the next decade will be the decade of a boom and technological progress in energy. And, most importantly, the decentralization of energy. Alternative energy sources.
For startups and businesses in this area, this offers not just huge but phenomenal opportunities.
Part One: Home and Car.
At the end of the 19th century, all early cars ran on electricity. They were powered by electric motors. The other issue was that there were no batteries at that time, and electricity was generated by gasoline engines. However, oil companies, primarily Standard Oil of John Rockefeller, quickly realized the profits that the emerging automotive industry would bring them. Due to the intervention of oil companies, the development of cars followed a complex and expensive path of gasoline engine designs without electric motors.
When Tesla offered home batteries that could power a home independently for 7 days, priced at $14,500 for the battery and additional equipment, all servers crashed on the first day of orders, unable to handle the influx of customers.
https://www.tesla.com/powerwall
The waiting time for the batteries you ordered is over a year. Tesla's idea was to accumulate energy for recharging Tesla electric vehicles. But when the number of orders exceeded the number of electric vehicles produced by Tesla over the last 10 years by tenfold, it became clear that the idea of home batteries was many times more popular than the idea of electric cars themselves.
Today, Tesla faces the problem that the number of batteries required for electric vehicles and homes demands such a quantity of materials from which they are made that global extraction of these materials does not even cover a large part of these orders. Yes, yes. The world does not have enough batteries and will not... So, Tesla's Gigafactory, the largest battery factory in the world, will operate with significant interruptions.
https://www.tesla.com/gigafactory
Tesla urgently gathered all the largest global mining companies and offered to buy all their production for the next 5 years... Additionally, they were asked to increase their production several times. But this will not be possible for two reasons. Production can only be increased by 20-30% per year, not by 2-3 times... Even if (theoretically) it were done, the deposits would be exhausted within a few years... Opening new deposits for development takes several years.
And TESLA plans to launch mass production of electric trucks and buses...
China and Kazakhstan will not be able to help, as they have similar problems. In China, 20 million electric vehicles have already been sold, and the entire automotive industry of China is focused on producing electric vehicles. Thus, it's a vicious circle. Without a new technological breakthrough and the development of new battery technologies not based on lithium-ion, the entire automotive industry of the world will go nowhere. Moreover, all European manufacturers are also transitioning to electric vehicles...
Companies that succeed in developing new non-lithium-ion battery technologies will receive billion-dollar orders.
Wireless Charging Devices and Wireless Power Transmission.
Just 30 years ago, 99.99% of people couldn’t even imagine a phone that could be carried in their pocket rather than being connected to a phone line. Now, many people only have mobile phones. And the number of phones connected to regular lines is decreasing…
It’s hard to believe, but electricity also doesn’t need wires for transmission. Remote chargers for phones and headphones are already being sold by the millions. Now, the next step is coming. It’s time to say “goodbye” to numerous electrical outlets, wires, and extension cords in our homes.
The next step is remote connection of homes to sources of electricity. Homes will be able to draw power from several independent sources of electricity. So there will be no more outages.
Part Two. Decentralization of Power Supply.
Once, large power plants were considered a blessing. A single large thermal power station, nuclear power plant, or hydroelectric power station can serve customers within a radius of 100 to 150 kilometers. In the past, large power plants had a significantly lower unit cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity compared to smaller ones.
Now, there has been enormous progress in the development of small power plants and energy sources. This means that the unit cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity is now comparable to that of a large power station. However, the overhead costs of distributing electricity over hundreds of kilometers— all those power lines, substations, wiring, and maintenance— can easily double or even triple the cost of the electricity itself.
This becomes especially expensive when you have to lay all these wires over tens of kilometers to a remote village with 10 houses… The cost of installing hundreds of poles and running tens of kilometers of wires will never be recouped.
From the perspective of the safety of the entire state, the current power supply system is utterly flawed. The destruction of several hundred large transmission towers can leave the entire country without electricity for weeks to months. Last year, a single hurricane in Florida left 500,000 people without electricity for one to two weeks… Of course, large stores and hospitals have backup generators, but the fuel lasts for only 2 to 3 days of continuous operation. What happens after that?
This problem now confronts all countries. Decentralization of power supply and diversity of various energy sources are among the main directions of technological progress for the next decade.
Now, we need small local sources of electricity that can meet the energy needs from an apartment or house to several blocks of a city. In other words, energy production must gradually become completely decentralized and transitioned to renewable energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal, and other options).
IoT
The IoT, or Internet of Things, is a network of interconnected objects through the Internet that can collect and exchange data from embedded services. This can include any electronics, computers, phones, televisions, household appliances from refrigerators and stoves to vacuum cleaners and coffee makers, security systems, cameras, sensors (smoke or fire), and various sensors (for doors, motion, garages, lawn watering, etc.). The idea is that these things can interact with each other and various services independently, without human involvement. If something breaks, malfunctions, leaks, or fails, there’s no need to wait for a person to discover it. Everything will be detected automatically and will automatically order repairs.
And what does this have to do with energy? It’s that all these devices must be energy-independent, and in the event of a failure of the main equipment, they must operate completely autonomously, signaling malfunctions independently and unrelated to the power system of the device in which the IoT is located. All these devices (and there will be billions of them) need small, long-lasting, and reliable power sources. The market is simply enormous. By 2020, there will be around 50 billion such devices in operation.
Thus, startups developing power supply elements and wireless charging systems for IoT will achieve phenomenal success in the market.
Power Supplies and Batteries for Household Appliances
Everyone wants their phone or computer to run on batteries for not 4 to 6 hours, but for 24 hours. There are two options here. Either invent more powerful batteries with a long charge retention time, or make your device draw power remotely from independent sources. Startups that can accomplish this will earn hundreds of millions of dollars. After all, all autonomous devices (and there are already tens of billions of them) require more powerful and durable batteries, as well as the ability to charge from various independent sources during operation. Preferably without special connections requiring human intervention.
We will gladly assist companies in this field.
