The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S2E4 - The Quiet Power of Batteries
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In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, Renee and Marc dive into the quiet power of batteries. A technology we depend on constantly but almost never think about.
From early chemical experiments to modern lithium-ion systems, they explore what batteries really are, why controlling energy release is so difficult, and how energy density quietly shaped the devices, behaviours, and expectations we take for granted today. Along the way, they unpack rechargeable myths, lithium’s rise, supply-chain realities, and why batteries still feel like the weakest link in a world that refuses to slow down.
It’s a conversation about chemistry, trust, infrastructure, and the hidden systems that keep everything running...long after dark.
Spoiler: the battery isn’t failing us. It’s just the only honest part of the system.
Featuring the Nostalgic Nerds Players song "Hold the Spark."
Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.
email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com
Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.
I had a realization recently that batteries are one of the few technologies We rely on constantly without needing to interrogate how they work. It's not because we can't understand them. We can. But it's because they become so reliable that we don't actually have to. We expect energy to be available on demand quietly, safely, and predictably. And we've built our lives around that expectation. When that breaks down, it's genuinely jarring. You know, for real, there has been for a couple of days, right, power outages. A million people don't have it. And I'm thinking if they did not charge their external battery before that all went down, they don't have a phone and they don't know what's going on.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:That's crazy.
Marc:Well, you know, all of the different infrastructure stuff that we've talked about in the last, you know, three, four months, whatever. And a lot of it's invisible. Some of it's not, but a lot of it's invisible. You know, electricity, water in particular, right? I mean, that stuff works. It always works. And when it doesn't, it's like the reaction. It's not confusion so much as like a betrayal. What's breaking isn't the understanding, it's the trust, right? I turn on the faucet, the water comes out. You know, I turn on my phone, the battery just works. Batteries are invisible infrastructure and invisibility is usually the sign that a system is working well enough that we stop thinking about it at all. And the reason that trust exists is because batteries solved a coordination problem. Chemistry, material science, engineering, they all have to agree on the same outcome. Release energy slowly enough to be useful, but not so slowly that it becomes irrelevant and it blows up the phone or, you know, the car or whatever, which is why batteries aren't mysterious so much as disciplined. They're not magic. They're negotiated compromises between energy density, safety, control, and they're held together by very deliberate engineering choices. I keep it waiting, Welcome to the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, everybody.
Renee:Today, we're doing a deeper dive into the history of technology of batteries. Not just what they've enabled, but how they actually work and why they're such a hard problem to solve.
Marc:We're not going to go into the chemical compounds, are we? Are we going to do Mr. Wizard? We're not going to do that, are we?
Renee:No, we're just going to talk. Okay, at the most basic level, a battery is a controlled chemical imbalance. Certain materials have a natural tendency to give up electrons. Others have a natural tendency to accept them. Left alone, that imbalance will resolve itself quickly and energetically, meaning it'll explode. A battery is what you get when you take those materials, place them close together, and then deliberately engineer the system so that the electrons cannot take the direct path to equilibrium.
Marc:Yeah. So instead of letting that reaction complete all at once, the battery forces it to proceed in a controlled, predictable way. That control is the entire point. You're not creating energy, you're managing how and when it's released. Instead of letting the reaction complete all at once, the battery forces it to proceed in a controlled, predictable way. And control is the entire point. It's not, you know, creating energy. You're managing how and when it's released. So electricity isn't really flowing out of the battery so much as it's being negotiated out of it.
Renee:Exactly. Inside the battery, you have two electrodes, an anode and a cathode, and each made from materials chosen for their specific electrochemical behavior. Between them is an electrolyte, not Gatorade, that allows ions to move internally while preventing electrons from crossing directly. That separation is crucial. The ions can drift through the electrode to maintain charge balance, but the electrons are trapped unless there's an external path.
Marc:When you connect a circuit, you give those electrons a long controlled route to take. They flow through the device doing work along the way before finally reaching the other side. That flow is what we experience as electrical power, which means your remote control, your phone, laptop, you know, whatever. They're all running on a carefully managed chemical standoff. Nothing's exploding. Nothing is. Well, you hope that nothing is exploding, right? Right.
Renee:We'll talk about it in a second.
Marc:Planes, trains, and automobiles. Yeah, boom. Nothing is rushing. Everything is being released just slowly enough to be useful.
Renee:And that's why batteries are harder than they look. You're asking chemistry to behave, not once, but over and over and over again under different loads, temperature, and use patterns. The fact that it works at all is a remarkable piece of engineering discipline. And so just to be sure, right, if you fly like anywhere in the world, they tell you do not pack your batteries in the cargo hold. You have to have them with you. And even when you have them with you, now people are starting to say you can't put them up in the overhead. They have to be like under your seat. Like you have to literally have it with you. So when it does catch fire, you notice it. because when they catch fire in the cargo hold, they explode, which is why we actually don't send them by air anymore. If you're ordering them from China and they're coming over to the United States, it comes on containers and ships just because it's easier to contain it if anything bad happens. Oh, and when a Tesla gets in a car crash and that lithium ion battery underneath cracks and those electrons mix, that car is going to catch fire for sure. And they can't even put it out with water. They got to put it out with chemicals. Great.
Marc:Have you seen some of those? They're like, yeah, it's rough.
Renee:Those fires are crazy. I've seen them do testing of it in airline cargo holds. And man, that explosion may as well have been a bomb. It may as well have been a bomb. And that's why they don't do it. It's just there's too much risk. And it's a runaway reaction. Once you crack that and everything starts to mix up, you're done. You're done.
Marc:So let's talk about the first batteries, let's say. The first batteries, like voltage pile, were revolutionary because they proved the idea, not because they were useful in the way we think about batteries today. They produce a continuous electrical current, which was breathtaking at the time, but everything about them was problematic other than, you know, continuous electrical current. The voltage was low, inconsistent, materials were crude, leaking, corrosion, and once a chemical reaction ran its course, that was it. The battery was just done. It was exhausted. No recharge, no reset, no second life.
Renee:These weren't devices designed for everyday use, though, right? They were experimental apparatus. Stacks of metal disks with electrolytes, so cloth meant to demonstrate electricity, could be generated chemically rather than mechanically. Right it's not a it's not a generator that's not how it's creating the energy reliability and longevity were not design goals yet but proof was
Marc:Yeah, I think it's a huge leap, right? You know, if you think about just where the first batteries started to where we are now, but those first batteries are just, you know, unpredictable. And so it's completely reasonable if you're powering a telegraph station or a laboratory setup staffed by adults, you know, not children, lab monkeys, who understand the limitations and are actively monitoring the system. It's very different if you're trying to power something that gets dropped, shaken, forgotten, launched into space, or used by a kid who just wants the light to turn on.
Renee:Exactly. Early batteries also had terrible energy density. You needed a large volume of reactive material to get a relatively small amount of usable power. That made them heavy, bulky, and impractical for anything meant to move around. So they found their early success in stationary and semi-stationary systems where size and weight were acceptable trade-offs for the consistency.
Marc:They powered telegraph networks, signaling systems, early scientific instruments, systems where the battery could sit on a shelf, be inspected regularly, and be replaced when it failed. Have you seen some of these early battery systems? They're huge. You know, they're big and bulky. Really interesting, though. But that early question wasn't, how do we power gadgets? Right? Like you can't lug around these early batteries, you know, without a wheelbarrow or something. Personal gadgets didn't really exist yet. The real question was how much more fundamental, how do we make electricity portable at all? How do we shrink something that normally lives in a building or a machine room into a form that can be carried without leaking, failing unpredictably, or becoming dangerous? And answering that question turned out to be one of the longest and most incremental engineering journeys in modern technology. And we're still going through that.
Renee:We're still going through it. Still today. Everything in battery history really comes down to one idea. Energy density. How much energy can you store per unit of weight or volume? That single metric quietly decides where the battery can live. In a basement? In a car? In your pocket? It's the difference between something that powers infrastructure and something that you carry around like it's nothing. And you can actually feel this in older technologies. Those early devices weren't bulky because designers lacked imagination. Well, they were bulky because the power was heavy. Energy took up space. You didn't miniaturize, you know, electricity by wishing harder.
Marc:If wishes were fishes, then Nokia would be, you know, like palm-sized, right?
Renee:Right.
Marc:This is why phones didn't really, you know, exist or really become phones that we'd think about them until batteries catch up. We had the computing power a lot earlier. There were screens, there were processors, even had early mobile form factors. But the compact luggable, remember that thing? Like, you still had to plug it in, but, you know. And then the first ones you could carry around, they were like suitcases that had batteries in them. It's crazy. What we didn't have was a way that—.
Renee:But that's the point, right? It was like a briefcase with a phone thing on top and a cord. And the suitcase wasn't the point. All the stuff you needed was in that handheld part of it. That was the battery. That was the battery. Yeah.
Marc:Well, we didn't. You know, I always think about Wall Street, you know, and Gordon Gekko. And, you know, he was, you know, wasn't walking around in Central Park with the phone. And, you know.
Renee:And it was the size of a shoe.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I love that thing. But what we didn't have, you know, in these early scenarios was a way to power them without turning them into briefcases, right? These huge, you know, bulky bits. Think about early cell phones, right? The brick phones, car phones. Oh, car phones. I miss car phones. Devices that lived in vehicles or came with shoulder straps. Did you ever see the, like, the first satellite phone? Like, it literally was a briefcase. With a shoulder strap? Yeah, with shoulder straps and everything. And it had a companion case for the satellite dish itself. Yeah, it wasn't because people love that aesthetic, right? They, you know, it wasn't, you know, look at, we had great design, industrial design all throughout the, you know, the latter half of the 20th century. But, you know, that's how much battery you needed. So, you know, you had to stay connected for a certain amount of time, you had to have a certain size battery, that was it.
Renee:Computing followed Moore's law, but batteries didn't. You can make transistors microscopic. You can etch logic into silicon at astonishing scales, but chemistry doesn't behave that way. You're constrained by physics, not fabrication. Atoms only give you so much energy per unit of mass, no matter how clever you are. That's why so much early tech feels like power aware in hindsight, devices that went to sleep, screens that dimmed aggressively, manuals that warned you not to use certain features too long, battery life shaped behaviors in a way we barely noticed at the time.
Marc:Okay, so I got to tell you the story. So when we first met, not the place I was working then, but the time before that, it was, you know, tailored to all the Hollywood types. And I think We talked about that a little bit, but all the Hollywood types, because they're writers and directors, producers and stuff, the technology curve was relatively slow. Writers were like, they didn't want to change, you know, from typewriters, let alone go from a PC to the next PC. So, you know, the first laptops, the first portables and stuff, the aggressiveness of the screen dimming was crazy. Like do you remember the little it was like what three or four inches tall and eight or ten inches wide screens you know we couldn't even see a whole screen it was like only part of the screen, and it was you know you turn the brightness and the contrast and you could get the screen completely blank and you know just to just to you know save on power and okay so i had a customer one time i won't name names but he was he was let's say active in the psychedelic movement of the 60s and he called once and he says hey man I can't see I can't see where my script went I think my screen is dead, You know, man, can you help me out? I know the computer's working, the lights are on, I can hear it do stuff, but man, help me out. And, you know, we said, did you adjust the brightness? And there was a long pause, and then just a click.
Renee:I can't tell you how many support calls I've done, like, is it plugged in? And they're like, I gotta go. I'm like, all right, all right, thank you.
Marc:Yeah, I think all of that old stuff, man, that's, to me, that's the nostalgia, like, I don't, Yeah, I love all those old, really old clunky portable stuff because that's what I was when I was a kid, you know, growing up and first jobs and stuff. That's, you know, that's where I started. But, you know, we used to know where those limits were. Like I had to leave it plugged in for, you know, X amount of time to charge it. You know, dude, okay.
Renee:Let me tell you about Christmas at the Murphy house. So first you unwrap. So, so you'd have a stocking, right? And usually your stocking was a giveaway to what you got. So the first thing at the very top of your stockings were all your meds for that month, because my mom thought it was funny to wrap your meds because she paid for it and she paid for it around Christmas time. And so your inhaler was Merry Christmas. So like, yeah, so first we would open our inhalers like oh inhaler and then it was the package of underwear or whatever it was but at the bottom of that was the batteries and so if you're pulling out d's you're like oh what i get you're pulling out double a's you're like oh what i get like so it really was like nine volts because do you remember the the foot the coleco football game where it's just like three lines and it's trying to run defense oh yeah man yeah that was a nine volt that baby was a nine volt can i tell I heard beeping in the house, beep, beep, beep, and I thought, oh, my God, it's the fire extinguisher. It's like, damn it, man. So I take one apart, and I realize it's a 9-volt. It's a 9-volt. When was the last time you've seen a 9-volt, right? So I go to the stupid Lowe's, and I ask the kid, I'm like, where can I get a 9-volt? And he literally looked me in the eye, and he said, what do you need a 9-volt for? I'm like, all right, I need it for the—he's like, I can't even tell you when I saw one last. I need it for my smoke detector. He's like, you should buy a new smoke detector. Who has a 9-volt? And I'm like, seriously? Like, say, if I have one at all, it's up by the register with all the double A's. You're going to have to dig for it because I haven't seen one. And I found a package of one that still didn't have an expiration date, though. And I thought, my God, he's right. I need new fire extinguishers. Like, clearly the battery technology has caught up.
Marc:Yeah, they run at like radioactive decay or something now. I haven't looked into it, but like literally when we moved into this house, I had to replace one. And yeah, I pull it apart and there's no battery. And I'm like, well, these are always nine volts when I was a kid. Like what are you supposed to do?
Renee:Oh man, is it plutonium? Like what is it?
Marc:It's something, I don't know. And so I got a new one and I'm thinking, well, what do I do with it? You know, I don't know what to do with it. And it had like a radiation warning on this thing. I think it has something to do with the sensors in it that run on it. But, yeah, they're... Yeah, they've gone a long way.
Renee:Yeah, I'm still using a 9-volt. But that's how I remember it. I remember if it took size D batteries, it was going to be a great toy. And even the smaller ones were still great toys, right? Your Game Boy needed AA batteries, like four of them. And there was no recharge in the Game Boy. So when you played that stupid Tetris game for like four hours in a row, you chewed through four batteries and you got to go get more, right? And none of them were crazy cheap and horrible for the environment because none of it is recyclable.
Marc:Right. Well, you know, that was a big deal. My dad was, you know, in the police force. And, you know, L.A. cops, they had those batteries or the flashlights, you know, the cop flashlights, right? Yeah. And it takes like four. No, I think there were six or eight D-cells in those things. Because they're like clubs. Yeah. Yes. Well, that's, yeah, unfortunately, right? It gives them weight. It does. And, you know, some of the guys would just carry them around with dead batteries in them, which tells you something. Yeah, you go. Yeah. You know, it was a big deal when they renegotiated their union contract once, and everybody got new flashlights, and they were rechargeable. I remember that when I was a kid. They switched from the 6 and 8 D-cell mag lights to rechargeable flashlights, and they were like half the size. Yeah. Lo and behold, you can plug them in.
Renee:Well, let's talk about that because let's do the segue to rechargeable batteries and reversibility.
Marc:There you go. So rechargeable batteries feel like obvious now, but they're actually one of the hardest problems to solve in battery technology. You're asking a chemical reaction to very politely reverse itself, not once, but thousands of times. and not just reverse it, but do it predictably, safely, and without slowly destroying the materials involved. So if you think about anodes and cathodes and reactions and these things, like these components, they deteriorate over time through these chemical reactions. Chemistry is not naturally inclined to be that cooperative and make it predictable and reversible. Every charge cycle stresses the system just a little bit. bonds break they reform materials expand they contract have you ever seen a battery that has gotten too hot you know or too cold and they like, They got bloated, right? The side reactions happen whether you want them to or not. And early rechargeable chemistries had very little tolerance for abuse, right? You couldn't – I remember telling customers all the time, do not let the battery go down to zero. Do not let the battery go down to zero. It damages the battery. Don't do that.
Renee:And they were bad at hiding it, right? Nickel cadmium and later nickel metal hydride batteries came with quirks that felt personal, right? Memory effects, limited cycle life, toxic heavy metals. If you charge them the wrong way, too early, too late, too often, not enough. They punished you by holding less charge. You couldn't just plug something in and forget about it. You had to think about it when you last charged it, how far you discharged it, whether you were doing it right. The battery had expectations of you, and you had to not fail it,
Marc:Right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, I don't know. I don't know. It feels like just a few short decades ago, right, we had— We had, you know, the battery would last 20 minutes, you know, not eight hours or 13 hours or whatever. Like, my headphones, the batteries, when they're fully charged, is like 16 or 18 hours or something, you know. It's inconceivable.
Renee:I think you and I would find that astounding. I think any 19 or 20-year-old would be like, yeah. I know, I know. It is really astounding. It is really, really astounding that your headphones, yeah, like a Bose headphones, will last 19 hours on a charge. Yeah, that's crazy. It's crazy. Absolutely crazy.
Marc:Yeah. This is the era here, you know, we're talking about the early rechargeables, though. Where owning technology feels like owning a Tamagotchi. You didn't just use the power, you maintained it, right? You were nice to it.
Renee:Okay, so for those of you who don't know what a Tamagotchi is, it was this stupid little keychain. That had a stupid little thing on it, and you had to feed it, and then you had to play with it. It was like a pet rock, but it was digital. And then if you didn't do all that, eventually it would just die. And you couldn't use it ever again. It was just dead. You let it die. You live with those consequences. It was ridiculous. So go ahead. I'm sorry. I just didn't want everybody to tell it about Tamagotchi.
Marc:Tamagotchi is coming back. Yeah. So it's not, yeah, like literally it's a nostalgia thing now. And you can get them at the Bandai stores and stuff like that. It's kind of funny. And they're the same. The little LCD calculator-looking screens and stuff. But anyways, I'll make fun of my wife here. She's got to get her daily candy crush, right? And she's got to collect her little whatever, her bonuses and stuff. But that's like what it was with batteries. You had to maintain it. You had a ritual around it. You had to drain it. Not fully drain it. If you weren't trying to reset the memory, but you would... You know, you would drain it to like 10% or fully drain it if you needed to reset it. You don't top it off, right? You run it all the way to 100, then unplug it, and then use it down to a certain percentage, right? You had to store it carefully, not in direct sunlight. You know, don't charge it overnight. You know, you could charge overnight, but not too often. And it just felt like, you know, a big part of the experience. Power wasn't invisible. It was, you needed to give it attention.
Renee:And as annoying as that was, it shaped behavior. You were aware of the limits. You planned around the battery life. You knew the power was finite and fragile, not something you could take for granted, which is probably why modern batteries today feel like magic. They freed us from having to think anything about it.
Marc:You know, it's just, I don't know. This might be one of those things that, do you think batteries are better than double-entry bookkeeping? I don't know.
Renee:I don't, see, I don't know. I think they have the potential one day to be better than double-entry bookkeeping. I think we still have a couple iterations of this stuff to go before we're able to say, damn, that's a great battery. We're getting there, though. We're getting there.
Marc:Well, you know, it ticks me off is like every time, you know, you get one of the brand new iPhones and, you know, it's like, oh, it's got this, it's got this, it's got this. But the battery life, like, they say it goes up more, but like, I don't know, it doesn't feel like it does. But then if you go back and you look at the old, you know, the very first iPhones, you know, that was like, you'd be lucky to get, you know, eight hours out of the darn thing. But yeah, it's so, yeah, it's freeing.
Renee:Because every time they make the battery more dense, I think they put more apps on it or more capabilities, which just makes it all seem just the same. But they made the battery better so they could do those apps. I think the battery follows the function. It's not the other way around. It's not like, hey, we've got this crazy great battery. Let's do something great with it. No, it's never been like that. We've never thought about it that way, right? And I think that's why – so we're going to talk about lithium ion. But I think that's, I think, lithium did something really interesting because it gave us computers that were really thin, right, because the batteries started to get really compact. Or it gave us a thin with a battery on the outside that we could take off and put another one on. We could charge them separately. Like, there was a lot of cool stuff that was going on with that. But when Tesla... Hmm. When Tesla first comes out, right, and Elon buys that car because he didn't invent that car. He bought it from a couple of MIT guys. When he buys that car, he realizes, and on the bottom of that car, and it's a Lotus, and it's nothing but Samsung at laptop batteries. That's the very first Tesla car, the one that can go 236 miles an hour, Zero to 60 in eight seconds. You know, like that whole thing, like when people are like, that's a what? That's an electric car. What that like? It really was astounding. But the craziest thing about that first car was the whole thing was being run from Samsung laptop batteries. They just ordered like 300 of them. They came in like on a pallet and they were like, all right, let's do it. And they said, look what we can do. and it's because of the way the lithium ion battery works. Lithium is special because it really, really wants to give up an electron. It's the lightest solid element, incredibly reactive and extremely energy dense. On a periodic table, it's basically restless, right? That combination makes it perfect for batteries and deeply inconvenient everywhere else. Left it unmanaged and lithium doesn't just misbehave, it escalates, which is why lithium sat on the sidelines for so long. Engineers knew it was powerful, but power without control is just risk, right? So the challenge wasn't finding energy. It was figuring out how to use that energy without turning every device into a fire hazard. And we haven't figured it out yet. This is where we mentioned that batteries can in fact catch fire. Remember the Samsung phones? They were catching fire in people's pockets.
Marc:I do remember that. I definitely remember that. Hey, I just want to let you know that the first Tesla Roadster... It was much, much faster than eight seconds, zero to 60.
Renee:Was it like six and a half? Or was it something close to a,
Marc:What was it? No, it was 3.7 to 3.9. Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. It is crazy. The second generation is even faster, apparently, if the second generation ever, like, actually, you know, exists. Yeah, well, yeah. But that first one, under four seconds, zero to 60.
Renee:So here's what i thought when when they were going to put that car into production and i thought and he get what happened was he eventually elon gives away the patent for the car and you think why would you do that like why would you give away the car patent like like you design this car like what the hell were you thinking and what he was thinking was i'm not going to be a car manufacturer the hell with that i'm going to manufacture the batteries i'm going to i'm going to put all my r&d into battery and then he got lost somewhere because we have the same batteries we've had for the last 20 years and he's been doing this and like i feel like that was the great promise that maybe private industry would invest in it and they still haven't and yeah yeah right yeah
Marc:Anyway well let's yeah i mean historically, You know, what changed with lithium-ion wasn't that lithium suddenly becomes safer, right? It's the engineers figure out how to contain it. Lithium-ion batteries don't let lithium metals just, like, hang around and roam freely. Instead, they move lithium-ions back and forth between structured layers in the anode and cathode. Have you seen some of these, the, like, sheet-sized batteries? Instead of, you know, like a bunch of AAAs or whatever, they're forming the batteries in sheets, which is really cool. So you're not breaking the materials down and rebuilding them every cycle. You're intercalating ions into crystal lattices, sliding them in and out like books on a shelf. That structure stability is the breakthrough, and it lets the reaction reverse when tearing the battery apart.
Renee:So instead of chemistry exploding, it politely rearranges the furniture. And that politeness is everything. That's what makes lithium ion rechargeable a thousand times. It's what allows high energy density without constant failure. It's why batteries could finally shrink enough to disappear into devices instead of defining them. And that was really important.
Marc:Yeah, super important. And this is the moment where power stopped being the limiting factor. Laptops stopped being lug-around machines. Phones stopped. Do you remember how heavy those NiCAD and nickel metal hydride batteries were? Do you remember? They were super heavy. Yeah, heavy, heavy. Even the first-generation lithium batteries were heavy. Heavy. Yeah. Phones stopped being bricks. Music players stopped. Do you remember when all the phone manufacturers just kept chasing thinner, thinner, thinner, lighter, lighter, lighter? Yeah. And you get kind of to a certain point where the form factor is the form factor. Music players stopped eating batteries for breakfast. Lithium ion didn't just improve batteries. It unlocks entire categories of technology that had been waiting for chemistry to catch up.
Renee:And that's why we tolerate the occasional headline about battery fires on the side of the road of the 10. It's not because they're trivial, but because the alternative is going back to a world where everything has a power cord or a handle. Lithium-ion isn't perfect, but it's the first time battery chemistry really met modern expectation. It's portable, it's rechargeable, it's powerful, and it's just stable enough to trust. And think about how we trust it. We put it in cars. That's how much we trust it. That's pretty amazing.
Marc:But, okay, so if lithium ion is so good, why do batteries still feel like the weakest part of every device? And it's because good is relative, right? It sucks less, you know, or a queen of the pigs, right? Lithium ion is one of the most efficient compact energy storage technologies we've had. The problem isn't that batteries are stagnating. It's everything around them refuses to slow down.
Renee:Yeah, every year we try. We pile on more expectations, faster processors that never sleep, brighter, higher resolution screens that are always on, sensors constantly listening watching tracking radios talking to wi-fi bluetooth gps cellular networks and now satellites ai models running locally instead of in the cloud none of that is free it all drinks power
Marc:You know it it feels it like it feels free to the user right you know because you plug your phone in every night and it just charges up but like i i didn't do the math for this, but gosh, it's got to be, think about the daily electrical usage for everybody in the whole world that has a cell phone, a mobile phone that plugs their phone in and charges it every night. It's a lot of power.
Renee:Well, I'll just remind everyone who drives a plug-in EV, like when you say, I don't pay for gas. No, but you're paying for electricity. And if that electricity at your home didn't come from renewable sources, where did it come from? A coal-fired plant. So you have a coal-powered car. Don't tell me any different.
Marc:Yes. I mean, we could probably get into that in some other episode, you know, power generation and stuff. But, like, it had to be good to talk about that. But, you know—, Yeah, is burning, you know, whatever fossil fuel or whatever at a large scale more efficient in one way than, you know, driving in a, you know, gas-powered car? I don't know. I mean, I haven't done enough research to look at that, but, you know, you'd like to think that it would be more efficient for, you know, PG&E or whatever to produce using something rather than distributing a fossil fuel everywhere. I don't know. We'll see.
Renee:Anyway, so it's not that batteries are bad, right? It's that everything else is greedy. We keep asking a slow, careful, chemistry-bound technology to support an ecosystem that behaves like it has infinite energy. When the battery disappoints, it's usually because it's the only honest component in the system. Like, we know its limitations. I don't know why we expect so much from it. Like, my husband. I know its limitations. Oh, come on. I don't know why I expect so much from it.
Marc:Come on. Sam's great. Sam's great. So there's also cost and not just the price tag. Consumers see mining lithium, cobalt. Ooh, cobalt, that's rough stuff. And nickel, it comes with environmental damage, water stress, labor concerns, and longer mediation timelines. These aren't abstract external externalities anymore. They show up in supply chain disruptions, regulatory pressure, and public backlash. So the battery isn't just a technical component. It has a footprint, a very visible one, and is geographically concentrated. A small number of countries control extraction, processing, or refining that concentration. or refining. That concentration turns battery chemistry into a geopolitical one. The trade policy, export controls, sanctions, industry strategy now shape what batteries get built, where and what cost. And that means energy storage is starting to look a lot like old oil did.
Renee:So here's the thing. I live in the Coachella Valley. Maybe like 60 miles from me is the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is the largest body of water in California. If you look at a map of California, if you go all the way down south by the border with Mexico, you'll see this giant lake. It's a sea. It's huge. It's deep. It's deep. So if you go to the bottom of the Salton Sea, it's actually deeper than the very bottom of Badwater Basin at Death Valley. It would be the deepest point in North America if it weren't for the fact that it's filled with water. And I bet you're wondering, well, Renee, how did it get filled with water? Funny story. So actually up in the valley where we actually grow things, the agricultural part of California, they would, you know, water all the time. Or if it rained when it used to happen, it would all flow downhill. Well, the lowest point is the salt and sea. So it just filled all up with agricultural runoff. You see where I'm going with this. It's full of pesticides.
Marc:It's full of chemicals.
Renee:It's gross. But in the 1950s, it seemed okay, right? By the 1970s, it had really turned. Because there's no tributaries in or out, it's And I say dead for real, like you can go down onto Bombay Beach on any given day, which, by the way, if you're ever near me and hanging around the Coachella Valley, please visit Bombay Beach. Don't knock on anyone's door. It's a weird little place. But it is crazy for photography and it reeks. You should go see it at least once. And the thing is, it's that right there, that dead lake that is twice the sea salt. This has got twice the salinic content as the Atlantic Ocean. The only thing that lives in it anymore is tilapia. You can go down there if you could stand the stink and fish. But anyway, that is also the sixth largest deposit of lithium in the world. In the world. And so what they're doing right now is trying to figure out, not trying to figure out, they've actually figured out, how can they extract the lithium from the water and then put the water back cleaner than they got it? And so that's what they're up to now. They think they can clean up the lake by extracting the lithium. And what they have is a lot of lithium, right? And if you're convinced that lithium is our future, and it's probably not, you have to try to get it out of there as fast as you can. Because if lithium is the bridging technology to whatever is new, we don't have to go anywhere else to get it. We actually have it here in the state of California. And we have enough to build EVs for the next 30 years. It wouldn't be a problem, right? So it is real that we have to figure out where to get the natural resources. It is a geopolitical question. And quite frankly, we have it. We have it here in California. We're able to do that. And we've started, I think it starts in 2028, that the plant will be there. They'll start extracting that stuff and they will produce lithium down at Bombay Beach.
Marc:Well, that's all nice and good for you since you're in the States. But not all of us live in the, you know, the good old U.S. of A. But I think, you know, there's definitely new lithium deposits being found in that. I did study a little bit about lithium extraction, and it's kind of interesting because some of the places where it's most plentiful, the extraction is relatively simple, but it's kind of like leeching out the lithium with a bunch of water and just laying it out to dry. It's like, you know, drying out raisins or something like that. So it kind of is a dirty thing, even though it's quite simple to do. It's not necessarily super expensive, but, you know, it leaves a pretty big environmental impact.
Renee:So, yeah, interesting stuff. Yeah, I would also say that we spent a lot of money when the last administration decided to invest in infrastructure. One of the things they did was they went back to Sandia Labs. And if you don't know Sandia Labs, that's where we do a lot of nuclear laboratory stuff. That's why Sandia exists. It was part of the Manhattan Project. And afterwards, when we were looking for the peaceful use of the atom, that's what Sandia was doing, along with weapons manufacturing, I guess. But they went to Sandia and said, I have something I need you to do, and you're going to work on this. And the ask was, we need lithium batteries for EVs. We need them to last 25 years. We need them to be small enough and safe enough to use in, you know, cars for families. And we need them to cost 90% less than they cost today. That was the goal of Sandia. They were going to go figure that out. They got almost all the way there before their budget got cut this time around. We were almost all the way there. I mean, they were down to like 75% cheaper, lasted 25 years. Like they were really, really close. And then you thought to yourself, you know, we're going to lose four years of that because we're not investing in it. And maybe by that time, we've all moved on. That could be terrible. Like, we have all this capability, like, right here, and we're not going to meet that need because it's just going to pass us by.
Marc:Well, you know, hey. You know, you got other benefits, right?
Renee:That's right.
Marc:All right. So let's talk about, you know, kind of moving on to the future here. We kind of come full circle. Well, batteries begin as a way to free individuals from wires and centralized power. Now they're back at the heart of national strategy, industrial policy, global politics. The technology that made mobility possible is once again shaping who holds power and who depends on whom.
Renee:So let's talk about the future of batteries, because this is what gets me excited. I love nothing more. Yeah, so solid-state batteries, love it. Flow batteries, fantastic. Sodium ion is my favorite thing on Earth. I love a salt battery. Like, don't even get me started. And then grid-scale storage. The future isn't one breakthrough battery that replaces everything. You know, it's an ecosystem of chemistries, each optimized for a specific job.
Marc:Oh and those super capacitors too have you seen those those are cool they're like the they're so big you know that they act like batteries but they're not batteries it's just electricity just running around the capacitor for ever and ever it's like super cool anyways.
Renee:It's like in back to the future like a flux capacitor
Marc:Yeah yeah exactly yeah what if the best battery isn't a battery at all it's a capacitor, Anyway, so, you know, what's the next lithium ion? That's sort of the question, right? But the better question is actually, you know, what problem are we trying to solve? Energy density matters for phones and wearables. Safety and longevity matters for grids. Costs and supply chains matter enormously for vehicles. And that's where sodium ion starts to get interesting for cars.
Renee:Yeah, sodium ion doesn't beat lithium on energy density, but it wins on availability, cost, stability, and safety. Sodium, seriously, salt, is abundant, geographically distributed, and far less geopolitically sensitive. And that changes the economics of mass market electric vehicles. You ever see the, there's a documentary on, I think it's on Prime and it's literally called Salt, but it's about, it's about this, these people and they're deaf, they definitely live somewhere else during the rainy season. And then they travel to us a plot of what you would think of as an acre of land and it looks just like a dry, whatever. And then they have, like, every year they bury the pump so no one can steal it. And then they dig it up the next year. So they come and they dig up the pump. They start pumping water out of an underground well. They start filling in this whole space. And then they grow salt. Salt. Salt. And you see how they do it. And you realize, oh, my God. Salt really is one of those things you can make out of nothing. Almost nothing. Right? Right. And like, so like for me, like that, I think like, I just think. Yeah, sodium doesn't beat lithium. But at the same time, you know, I just feel like that's the path I want to take. I love sodium. But, you know, it's not going to give your EV a 400 mile range, right? It's only good for 200. If you can get it in the car to begin with, because it just takes, this is one where we're back where we started. The more density you want, the bigger that thing's going to get. And before you know it, it's like a diesel engine in a rig. That's how big it has to be for you to get 500 miles out of it. So we're not there yet. China would like you to think we are, but we're not.
Marc:But, you know, the U.S. And me living in Europe, you know, it's kind of like my daughter took her driving test today on a Fiat 500. You know, that's a little clown car, you know. And it's definitely not the same as a, you know, Lexus, you know, SUV or whatever, right? And so this idea that every car needs the same size battery is not necessarily, it doesn't necessarily hold true, right? And you could potentially use different types of density batteries, different size batteries, you know, to do different things. Not every car has to be a 400-mile range car, right?
Renee:Well, no, and different environments. So if it's really, really hot, your Tesla doesn't go as far. If it's really, really, really cold, your Tesla doesn't go as far. So the sodium ion doesn't have the same problem. So in those environments, right, that's even better. You know, not every vehicle needs the same engine. You are not going to find a Mercedes-Benz V6 AMG in the Fiat. You're just not going to see it, right?
Marc:That would be fun though.
Renee:There's a reason for that right so we standard around we standardized around the lithium ion because it was the first chemistry good enough at scale but that doesn't mean it should go everywhere and it's not for everyone right
Marc:Yeah no i think that's a good point right that you know that's kind of that was the big breakthrough technology right but is that the right technology for every single you know is that you know hitting the the square peg in the round hole right you You know, maybe not. And I think, you know, there's new technologies like flow batteries and grid size storage that makes that kind of even clearer. You can use different tools for different jobs.
Renee:Low batteries trade energy density for durability and scalability, which makes them perfect for grids, but absurd for cars. I've seen those batteries. They're the size of containers, like shipping containers. Look at any wind farm, and you'll see a couple of these things that are just put in places next to the wind farm. You're like, that's the battery. Like, that's the battery. That's where all that stuff is going to be stored. And solid state might, you know, redefine safety and density for premium applications. Like, I don't know, your electric toothbrush. It's good for that, right? Sodium ion replaces affordability and supply resilience for everyday transport. So your Fiat can be a salt battery. It doesn't have to do more than 200 miles on a charge. You know, it goes fast enough. It's incredibly reliable. And the best thing is, is when you hit a pothole, it won't catch fire.
Marc:No, but you can salt your pasta water with it.
Renee:Right? That's right. Stick a pretzel under there, you're set.
Marc:Yeah. So, you know, your phone battery and your power grid battery, they really shouldn't be the same thing.
Renee:And neither should your delivery band and your flagship EV. The real innovation ahead isn't chasing a single miracle chemistry. It's matching chemistry to context. And finally, designing systems that would admit different kinds of good enough instead of pretending one battery rules them all. We're looking for good enough. We're not looking for perfection. And we're looking for a bunch of different technologies we can leverage as we look at truly being unplugged.
Marc:We didn't touch on this too much, but modern batteries, yeah, there's a lot of chemistry involved. And there's a lot of new tech just in the battery side of things. But there's always going to be this combination of hardware and software, right? You don't necessarily have to, you know, have... You know, the best battery, you just want the best usage, right, for the form factor. And software potentially has, you know, has some help there as well. I mean, you can look at your phones, your, you know, whether it's an Android or an iPhone or whatever, you know, they stopped doing, you know, the, you know, fast charging, right? It knows, oh, well, I can charge slower overnight. That's a nice software feature, and it saves on energy use and battery, you know, lifetimes. So, you know, that's a different approach than just, you know, new battery technology, new battery technology, new battery technology.
Renee:But your Game Boy made you respect the battery. That's all I'm going to say. You know what else I think is, I have an Anker, just a, you know, you plug it into the wall and it's got a couple ports, a USB and a USB-C. Like it's, you know, and then, but it's smart. It's that IQ technology. So when you plug it in, it knows what it's talking to, to charge it. So if I plug it into my iPhone, it'll charge in about 45 minutes. It's just like, boom, it's done. If I take that and I stick it into like my iPad, it's just, it's really, really efficient. But the efficiency is coming from the brick that's plugged into a wall and a cable that's the right cable to understand the negotiation. But it's really, I mean, that kind of stuff is really, really... Coming into its own like the the idea that i would have to keep it plugged in for three hours and walk away that's crazy 45 minutes and i'm done and i can leave it here plugged in all day using you know the magnet like yes yeah like that's crazy too i don't even have to have a cable to charge it anymore well
Marc:And you know and that that kind of you think about the scale okay phone yeah the phones we we live with them all the time laptops okay maybe not everybody uses a laptop all the time, you know, but eventually, you know, electric cars are going to be a little bit, you know, more broadly used than they are today. And the amount of energy that you have to transport into a phone versus a laptop versus a larger appliance versus a car, right? You know, those types of software technologies, you know, rapid charging, rapid charging, you know, that de-risks, you know, damaging the battery or the, you know, making it too hot or whatever, right? Knows its environmental conditions. All of those things are like, like we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have the nice things, right? Without the combination of, you know, the new battery technologies chemistry wise, but also the really intelligent handling of power management. And it takes all of that, like religion and the rigor and the discipline, all of that stuff. Like, that's all software now.
Renee:And as boring as it might sound, right? Like, it sounds like batteries are boring. But remember, it's like, that is the thing. That is the thing that's keeping us from moving ahead. It is why your phone doesn't fold into a tiny little thing and like fit in your back pocket. That is why. And if we don't put time, effort, money, and innovation into the battery, it's going to hold us back. Like, it is always the thing that's going to hold us back. You really want to make some strides in technology, start making some strides in battery technology. That's what, like, in a lot of ways, I feel like, like, maybe, like, maybe my watch could be so much thinner if it didn't have a power source that was so thick, right? And there's got to be a way where you think about that stuff. So maybe, maybe, just maybe, if we can get someone other than Sandia Labs to like, you know, the U.S. National Laboratory to think about this stuff. And China does. They actually think about it. And they're thinking not how can I get lithium any smaller? They're thinking, how do I get that salt battery that's in that car to go 400 miles instead of two. BYD works on that a lot,
Marc:A lot.
Renee:Batteries are slow, stubborn technology in a world that wants everything faster, thinner, and always on, which is exactly, exactly why they get the last word.
Marc:Batteries are quiet. They're a quiet constraint that decides whether your future actually turns on.
Renee:So everybody, thanks for listening. Thanks for, honest look, if you're still here. Thank you for hanging out and talking about batteries it was really fun thanks for listening to the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast where yesterday's tech explains today's problems we'll
Marc:See you next time assuming we remember to charge the mics the laptops and ourselves thanks everybody.
Renee:Alright
