Not really, no. If this even gets close to current tech and make batteries as invincible as they say, you could have lifetime batteries. Take a power wall. Even with minimal usage it needs to be replaced 20-25 years down the line. Same for bigger storage, like for large renewable energy storage. Sure you can make a 50 story building full of batteries if you want, but 25 years later you have to do it again.

But what if they ran 10,000 years? All of the sudden it's a lot more interesting for long term investment. Especially if it's a company that rents it out. Current lithium ion batteries have like 2,000 full charge cycles if you're nice to it. This says 200,000. That's 100x more, which would actually be more like 200,000 years. I just said 10k because 200k sounds ludicrous.

Plus, it would be practically permanent for homes. Imagine new builds just have a power wall just built in with a week of power storage that never gets weaker. Amazing.

Throw in the dropping cost of solar panels, along with the fact they actually keep working well past the recommended, 25 year replacement window, and we could have neighborhoods of houses that are self sufficient, or even feeding the grid. Hell, they could feed other people's invincible batteries that haven't bought the panels yet, or retrofitted the power wall.

On top of all that, electric cars! Those engines chug past 500k easy all the time. But when the batteries need replacing the cost can be pretty extreme. It's why the older plug in hybrids aren't as attractive as older gas cars. If you had a frame that had permanent batteries, you could basically rebuild the whole car over and over until it rusted out or something. Electric cars are (or at least, can be) a lot easier to fix and rebuild too.

No fuel pump, worrying about fuel/air mixture, timing, spark plugs, changing oil, etc. Basically a charge controller, battery, engine. Maybe a transmission lol. But then, I don't know if these would handle the movement well enough. The article doesn't make it sound like an issue, but idk.

For phones and laptops and whatever, they could even make batteries that go between devices. If nothing else they'd at least be worth recycling. We just throw away lithium because collecting a billion phones and extracting out the lithium isn't economically worth it.

But if you can just pull a battery out and it works like brand new, you're good to go. Standardize like a car battery and almost any "recycled" battery could just be stacked within the standard size for bulk storage or whatever. Easier than designing new devices around batteries and way easier to assemble. Really as long as the storage and voltage is the same the exact size doesn't matter as much.

Although I'm sure there's still some risk carrying all that power, it sounds like there's no volatile chemicals to burst into flame like lithium. Might zap tf out of things and start them on fire though... I bet "in town" cars like china's little EVs would take off like crazy too. Nicer cars could practically become family heirlooms. You can upgrade with new motors or controllers or whatever. Sure we'll improve on them over time, but if you can push 300 mile range it's practical for nearly everyone as a daily driver for a long time into the future.

As far as gold use, I thought that too. But if they're coating it anyways, I'm pretty sure they could use silver.

Googled it, they totally could.

>Silver has the highest electrical conductivity of all metals. In fact, silver defines conductivity - all other metals are compared against it. On a scale of 0 to 100, silver ranks 100, with copper at 97 and gold at 76.

From another source: https://www.mysmartprice.com/gear/graphene-gold-nanowire-future-battery-tech-looks-promising/

>And since nanowires are smaller than the tip of your hair, you can achieve a large surface area by bundling them together. As a result, gold nanowire batteries offer higher storage capacity.

This is a little rabbit hole for me now. Seems like they can actually integrate this into existing batteries.

>This noble idea of improving the battery tech involves a noble metal. Researchers at the University of California have developed a process involving gold nanowires that can increase the longevity of batteries by hundreds of times.

Emphasis mine. Saw a few references elsewhere, but not much in depth. Seems like they can use nano wires with existing tech. Not the end goal though.

I guess they're thinking nickel as a next try.

>For mass production, researchers are hopeful to replace gold with nickel to keep the manufacturing costs in check.

On top of that, Intel is collaborating on a copper foam 3D battery. Instead of a flat sheet (like smartphones) or a flat sheet rolled around (cylindrical batteries) it's almost a spray in foam. They could basically build a frame and spray foam the battery into it. Then there's this!

Lithium:

>Energy Density 185 to 220 Wh/L and Power Density 245 to 430 W/Kg

Copper foam:

>...expected to have power densities reaching 14,000 W/L while maintaining energy densities of 650 Wh/L.

Copper foam is mostly air (crazy!) so W/kg is hardly worth checking. But I found this neat quote

>One of her battery prototypes, for example, doesn’t store energy at 100% of its theoretical capacity, but it’s safer than conventional models—it can be heated or shorted without igniting.

The theoretical capacity is already so high it hardly matters. Apparently it could start getting produced already if they wanted to.

>A big lesson that Prieto is now learning about industry is when to say something is ready for market. “As an academic scientist, you always know you can make your process or compounds or devices better,” she says. In industry, “when you see that what you have can actually meet a need in a particular market, then you have to say, ‘Good enough.’ ”

They're still working on tooling and optimizing production, but it's basically copper foam with an electrolyte layer for conductivity. I saw 100,000 charge cycles with no issue, but I lost the page now.

Tl;dr: Gold is unlikely to be used in commercial products. Probably nickel or an alloy. But capacity and charge/discharge are already great. It could also be used to improve existing batteries without having to completely switch. It would massively increase lifespan. Other battery tech is also very promising, and finally becoming realistic.

> Even the cheapest large scale energy storage method, pumped storage hydropower, is being implemented at a depressingly slow pace.

Well, yeah, because it takes A LOT of real estate do so. Falling water doesn't generate as much energy as you might think.