I’m fortunate that I don’t have many regrets in my life. If there’s one thing I do lament, it’s the fact that, when I wore a younger man’s clothes, my attention was principally focused on low-power digital electronics. As a result, there were many topics to which I didn’t give the in-depth consideration they deserved. I now wish I had paid more attention to my lecturers when they were waffling on about motors and generators, analog electronics, and the generation, storage, and transportation of power.
Battery technology, for example, has made tremendous strides since the days of my youth. On 3 April 1973, when Martin Cooper made the world’s first mobile telephone call using handheld equipment, his prototype phone measured around 9” x 5” x 2” and weighed in at 4.4lb (about the size and weight of a house brick). The battery took 10 hours to charge, after which it provided a talk time of just 30 minutes. Compare this to the smartphones of today.
At the other end of the scale, I was recently introduced to the concept of grid-scale, high-voltage, (1,500V) rechargeable batteries presented in form factors comparable to shipping containers 8 feet wide, 9 feet tall, and 45 feet long. Balancing a multi-cell battery pack of this size and capacity requires some very special electronics indeed.
What does our power future hold? That’s a tricky one. As Mark Twain famously noted: “Prediction is difficult—particularly when it involves the future.”