🔋Give me energy, or give me death?
🔋Give me energy, or give me death?
Energy as the life force of human ingenuity
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Give me liberty, or give me death!
-Patrick Henry, 1775
How about give me energy, or give me death?
Maybe a terrible analogy to energy, but it works in my head in a way and will relate to batteries I swear… let me explain.
These days energy is one of the most important precursors to productivity, ease of life, and prosperity. Without an abundance of energy we would be struggling to keep warm, power our machines, and produce unimaginable quantities of food.
Instead we sit in an office with our laptop eating mass produced granola bar with 10 different ingredients shipped across half the world, listening to music on our phone, maybe scrolling through twitter complaining about politics, and meticulously contemplating what to eat for dinner that night. No “first world problems” would be possible without cheap abundant energy.
We get energy from many different sources including petroleum, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar, which can be seen in detail in my earlier post.
Energy is life
It is in this way that energy is an essential life force to modern day prosperity. No, energy is simply an essential life force, period.
Think about how far we’ve come and how harnessing energy is and continues to be the greatest achievement of humankind. Bold claim?
Throughout history we have built tools of all kinds to harness natures energy in creative ways. We have built boats to facilitate travel using water flow, isolated fire to revolutionize food consumption, and built many tools to harness mechanical energy like spears to facilitate hunting. The more energy we harnessed, the more we diverged from our animal counterparts, exponentially increasing our intellect, control, and dominance.
In this way it is in no way an exaggeration that harnessing energy is the difference between life and death. It is also the difference between 21st century life and well, literally any other time in the past.
Fast forward and aqueducts were built harnessing gravitational energy, revolutionizing access to fresh water and sewage disposal. Keep moving through time and we discovered the internal combustion engine allowing us to harness combustion of fossil fuels and build machines, cars, and planes. Harnessing electrical energy gave us not only the non-trivial benefits of heating and cooling, but the ability to illuminate the darkness yielding more productive hours in the day for people to come up with more crazy inventions.
Entropy
For as long as we remain constrained to the physical world, we cannot defy physics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time. It also states that the changes in the entropy in the universe can never be negative. This is commonly thought of as the measure of disorder in a system, which is ever increasing. You have an intuitive understanding of this if you have ever dropped something on the ground and it breaks, or you have ever had a relationship run amuck and your world is suddenly crazy. These spontaneous phenomena always occur in such a way to create more disorder or randomness. Plates don’t spill and your food is more organized than it was when you dished it out. Similarly, relationships develop and prosper of their own accord. No, it takes work. It is also interesting to note that in physics work can be conceptualized as a change in energy.
In my example here you can think about entropy as the inevitable chaos that surrounds life. It takes energy to overcome the disorder/chaos of the world into uniformity, order, and comfort. In Jordan Peterson’s third book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, he says that it is the heroic principle to willingly explore chaos with vision and sacrifice, in pursuit of transforming chaos into order. I believe this heroic principle is embedded in the harnessing of energy to overcome entropy, psychological or physical.
The hydroelectric dam is a perfect example in the physical sphere. Water is chaotic and travels to the lowest points such that often a river turns into hundreds if not thousands of smaller waterways by the end. It also causes flooding which can ruin the hard work of people trying to make a living. Inspired by beavers, we build dams that control water flow to reduce flooding and also transform the water flow into electrical energy that can power many buildings.
To make this point clearer I would point you to a Doomberg piece titled, Why Are Cows Sacred? Doomberg points out that energy is required to satisfy and climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and once civilization had the tools to harness more energy, it was infinitely easier to meet physiological needs at the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, the crux of that piece was how cows were the first solar-powered rechargeable battery which is quite an idea. Cows transform solar energy into other useful things by eating plants, which harness energy from the sun via photosynthesis where they transform it into milk, fertilizer, and meat. Cows are also regenerative by reproducing and giving birth to more cows.
In Robert Breedlove’s What is Money Show: Jason Lowery Series, Jason discussed his theory of power projection. He views life as a power projection game that you cannot unsubscribe. Power is the amount of energy expended per unit time, and those who are able to project more power get to eat, secure themselves, and get what they want essentially. Furthermore, harnessing energy (and thus projecting or at least having the ability to project power) ensures security and freedom from other people taking your things. The more power projection you have, the more order that can be created in a world of limited resources and people want the same things as each other.
So the flipside is often times power projection can be used to turn order into chaos in the form of bombs for example, which are just a storage device for kinetic energy. The The Ying/Yang is a symbol of chaos and order, which is the fundamental struggle between the entropy of the physical world and the energy needed to overcome it and produce stability.
Production, storage, and transport
Heroic humans throughout the years have tried endlessly to discover new ways to control energy. In addition to those mentioned above, electrical, nuclear, thermal, electromagnetic, and chemical energy are some of the other life giving forces yielding humankind ever more power.
While we have no doubt invented many means of creating exorbitant amounts of energy, being able to transport energy over vast distances has provided to be quite the challenge. See the connection yet?
The combustion engine and thus cars, trains, and planes solved this problem where boats could not be used or were too slow. In a different way electrical and electromagnetic energy solved the transmission of information across vast distances. This does not exhaust all the possible ranges in which we need energy.
Batteries come into the picture as an effective way to store chemical energy. Combustion is a chemical process of combining an alkane with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Lead-acid, Ni-Cd, Ni-MH, and eventually Li-ion batteries store chemical energy. Li-ion batteries use specific materials capable of housing ions that can be released and reinserted back into the structure in a chemical process occurring at certain voltages. Batteries store chemical energy which can be released at a later time as electrical energy.
While not revolutionizing energy production or transport itself, it is revolutionary by harnessing the potential to use electrical energy at a future time. It may seem obvious that it is not practical to use a combustion engine, fuel cell, AA batteries, or stored hydroelectric power to power your phone or laptop, but these devices are only feasible with Li-ion batteries.
With rechargeable batteries, portable electrical energy converted from stored chemical energy increased the speed and portability of information, communication and coordination capability, and productive capacity of humans. Li-ion batteries solved the energy density problem which plagued many applications from not supplying enough energy in a size/weight effective manner.
Key to Solar
Rechargeable batteries and Li-ion batteries today unlock the true power of solar energy. While not providing the same amount of energy density as fossil fuels, nuclear, or fuel cells, the renewable and unlimited aspect is game changing. Ignoring climate change/grid applications for the purpose of this article, rechargeable batteries allow for satellites, homes, buildings, and other applications can utilize the virtually unlimited and renewable solar energy even during times of darkness.
Global positioning systems (GPS), space rovers, and exploration satellites always need power. The solar energy is converted into electrical and then to chemical in the batteries where it is converted back into electrical when needed (such as when eclipsed from the sun by the planet). Satellites are a much more important aspect of our lives than most people realize.
Li-ion batteries are more energy dense and overtook Ni-Cd or Ni-H as the space batteries of choice. This allowed longer lifetimes and more energy per unit of mass which is vitally important for space applications.
The network of satellites we have today being a downstream effect of Li-ion batteries have transformed modern life, and saved many lives. They allow for better navigation when lost, on a daily basis, or for shipping purposes. Communication is boosted through phones and televisions. Lives have been saved through satellite images of weather patterns used to warn and evacuate people from impending severe weather. The military is able to do a slurry of new things with satellites and many finance applications like ATM’s are actually dependent on GPS.
Conclusion
Hopefully it is clear now why I think rechargeable batteries and stored energy is so important. We would not be where we are today, especially with the same day to day conveniences without them.
By way of harnessing, storing, and utilizing energy in productive ways, we successfully transform chaos into order; the heroic principle of turning the entropic disorder of nature into stability through energy. Our modern way of living would not be possible without our peers and ancestors continuously discovering new methods to harness energy and engineer new ways to manipulate and store that energy. Current civilization is much wealthier and better off than any other time in history which is the direct result of the amount of energy harnessing capability. In this way energy is the lifeblood of human ingenuity and the only way forward is the heroic path of putting that energy into constructive uses to make the world a better place.
Ingenuity solves the energy problem, but also yields further ingenuity. Today, many of new things we have or do involve phones and laptops. Many systems use GPS networks. Cars are no longer dependent on gasoline. Many people work from their computers and so many things are possible on phones, all because of Li-ion batteries. So if ingenuity harnesses energy, and energy breeds more ingenuity, this cyclical snowball effect process is an integral part of human progression.
What will be the next form of energy that we will harness? What important problem will it help address? What new energy storage methods will arise? What new possibilities and opportunities will they create?
These are exciting questions and hopefully we can all be drivers for a more wealthy and abundant future. I am optimistic for people’s ability to innovate while cautious of the forced removal of our current energy infrastructure. I hope you enjoyed this article!
-Grayson
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