We all can agree that we, in today's society, are living unsustainably. We all know that Greenhouse gas emissions (Otherwise known as air pollution) are threatening to cause irreversible climate change that will have extremely detrimental and possibly fatal effects on the environment and the planet; And while this is going on, we also have other forms of pollution, such as land and water pollution, to deal with. The combined effect of all of these have caused a massive decline in insect population and have also destroyed our food supply, as over 1 million sea birds and 100,000 sea mammals and fish are killed every year due to water pollution. Oil spills, litter, and other similar factors have contributed to these shockingly high numbers. Information technology (IT) may have brought great economic development, but the areas where it actually is Needed to be applied, such as developing new forms of green, clean and cheap energy, getting alternate materials to replace the current, polluting and scarce materials as well as alternate sources of food.
This is an image that shows an example of the very scarcely present alternate energy
Let's first talk about Energy or, more specifically, Green Energy! There forms of green energy available to us right now which we can access. Most of them are really expensive, however there are some technologies that help our environment which aren't nearly as expensive as the multi-billion dollar dams, barrages and solar power plant. The example we take here, which is the breakthrough this post will be talking about, are cheaper batteries. No, you did not mis-read that, the first of these 3 breakthroughs is indeed (or are indeed?) cheaper batteries. Now, let's talk about why these batteries are so revolutionary, and how they will help us in both the short-term and the long-term. Batteries are already vital as we move away from an economy based on fossil fuels. But cheaper and safer batteries, and ones made from more abundant materials, are needed to decarbonize the grid and transportation (which is another, fancier, way of saying stop pollution). So we, the makers of this blog, looked for a rechargeable room-temperature battery where the unsafe and costly liquid electrolyte, which allows ions to move, was replaced with a safe and cheap solid. We luckily found a material scientist who had invented such an electrolyte, a crystalline polymer.
This is an example of a crystalline polymer
Some countries, like France and the United Kingdom (UK), have already announced bans of new sales of diesel and petrol cars by 2040, and the breakthrough battery technology we developed at Ionic Materials (IM) will allow lithium-ion battery cars to reach to an equal price, as compared to any combustion vehicles (Runs on fossil fuels), much sooner than many people expect. Separately, IM’s brand new alkaline batteries, made inexpensively from abundant materials such as zinc, aluminum and manganese, will be even cheaper than the lithium-ion batteries, allowing electric cars to be thousands of dollars less expensive than those with combustion engines. This will help speed the electric vehicle transition and allow us to consider policies to retire legacy vehicles more quickly.
This is an example of an electric car. This one is a Tesla
But electric vehicles won’t be truly pollution-free unless we stop using fossil fuels as the main source of grid power. Rechargeable alkaline batteries can be made so cheaply that we can imagine a recharge station where we can store a kilowatt-hour of electricity for less than a cent, saving wind and solar energy so it is available when we need it. This could be a grid (place relating to power and electricity or a world) that runs entirely on renewables; a grid where utilities can be not just providers of power but provide a marketplace for energy; a grid where fossil fuels and other existing generation capacity is used only for backup in extreme cases. Cheap energy storage also makes microgrids and off-grid systems (smaller power stations or stand alone power systems) work better. Rural India, for example, can consider leapfrogging over grid dependence to a distributed and more resilient system. It was a system just like this that allowed Cuba to recover quickly from Hurricane Irma. Ionic Materials’ polymer can also enable alkaline fuel cells that can replace marine diesels, greatly reducing the greenhouse gas footprint of marine transportation (Such as Ships); lightweight polymer batteries with sulfur or air cathodes can be used to electrify most aviation, leaving only the longest-haul jets using renewable liquid fuels. The profits and benefits from renewable energy will flow to the innovators, manufacturers and users and then to all of us as renewables counter climate change by greatly lowering the emissions. The fossil fuel industries are threatened with decline and even extinction in this revolution; they are fighting hard, using subterfuge, misdirection and political chaos to keep their profits — environmental and social consequences be damned. This resistance must be overcome.
And this brings me to the conclusion of part one. Hope you enjoyed it!!! stay tuned as I will post part 2 soon as well
