Some people wish for a world with cleaner cars, smaller computers, faster mobile internet, and sustainable energy.  I for one can’t wait til we crack the battery problem—it is easily the greatest bottleneck in technology in the medium-term. Here are just a few examples; and I’m sure there are plenty more.

Battery bottleneck

Laptops — Form factors are getting smaller and sleeker, but the battery isn’t getting any smaller.  Not to mention, screen size/brightness and CPU speeds are effectively capped by battery life constraints, which have remained ~3hours for past 5 years.

Cellphones/mobile internet – On top of the screen and CPU, now you’ve got a radio competing for power.  For the same Blackberry model, the jump from 2.5G to 3G halves talk-time.  The picture looks even uglier when you talk about uplink transmission.  As radio technology improves over time, the battery will become the single choke point to mobile broadband.

All-electric cars — The challenge is building a battery that takes you at least around town without breaking anyone’s bank.  Thus far no one (except maybe Tesla) has figured how to do this without major sacrifices in price and performance.  Meanwhile, did you know that process of producing lithium ion batteries has a godawful carbon footprint?

And finally…

Solar energy — While the geniuses in sunny California are pushing towards the all-important 7c/kW-hr milestone, the problem of weather dependence still remains unsolved.  How can you power entire cities at night, or through a few consecutive days of gloom?  The key to linking daytime power generation to nighttime use is the ability to store excess energy.

The power of liquidity

There’s a common theme to all this; it is the importance of being able to disaggregate energy, and decouple production from consumption.  It’s about liquidity.

Today, we are forced to produce and consume energy in either the same place or at the same time.  To have to produce energy on the spot is a huge disadvantage; resulting in use of a portable, yet dirty and scarce fuel such as fossil fuels, and wasteful engines such as internal combustion.

This concept is not foreign: we do this all the time with economic wealth.  One could say the entire money system is designed to seperate the production and consumption of wealth with the help of liquid markets.  Batteries are a similar form of liquidity creation, or currency, which connect efficient production sources with convenient consumption preferences.