Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 1 April 2005, 7:35 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Thursday 31/3/2005
There are reports abroad of a new battery technology from Toshiba. The figures look fantastic — as much capacity as current lithium ion cells but capable of being charged in a minute. Moreover, they should last for many more charges than the current tech. How many gizmos lie mouldering because the battery’s dead after a year?
It all seems a little too good to be true, so I do some maths. If you hoik [Thats a technical term for 'carefully remove after fully shutting your computer down, you understand - Ed.] the battery off your laptop (wait until you’ve finished reading this or the screen will go dark. I know these things), you’ll see it marked as something like 12V and 4400mAH. That means it can supply around four and a half amps for an hour, at twelve volts. That’s a surprising amount of power — enough to power a 100 watt light bulb for 30 minutes, for example.
But that power has to come from the charger in the first place. Now, 100W for 30 minutes is the same amount of energy as 1kW for three minutes. Or 3kW for a minute — the time in which Toshiba says their battery can be charged.
A 3kWW power supply is not a thing of beauty. It is not something you can encase in a small black plastic case the size of a tin of sardines, all the better to carry around in your briefcase. It will not have delicate black wires terminating in a twee little round plug. A 3kW power supply will be much bigger than a laptop, will weigh much more than a laptop, and at that sort of voltage will have leads like well-fed pit vipers. Short them out by mistake, and they’ll briefly illuminate the surrounding room so you can get a last look before it, you and they combust in short order.
The modern executive may have issues with this. I rattle off a few questions to Toshiba in Japan and elicit the following exchange.
Q: What sort of power supply will be needed to deliver the recharge performance promised by the battery chemistry?
A: Power supply for large electricity.
They’re not joking. And, as they say further on in the conversation, laptop and mobile use will be ‘studied’ after the technology is first used in industrial and automotive applications (where you can and do safely deal with power of the order of kilowatts).
It’s still very interesting technology, and it’s not alone — if I can get it together, I'll take the rest of the Toshiba Q&A and do the same for some other purveyors of super-fast charging technologies and report back on the scene as a whole. But things aren't quite as innocently joyous as they may seem from those original reports.
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