Metals Tech

Nowadays, you can’t live without a cell phone and every year there’s always a new upgrade. So what do you do if you have an aging phone?

“That depends on a couple of things, like whether the phone is working, whether it’s damaged or whether it’s repairable,” said Richard Shroyer, Regional Manager at Fanelli Boys, Inc.

To start off, he says if you have a damaged phone, it’s better to recycle it.

“The [Meadowbrook] mall here, Kroger and often times Walmart, would have what’s called ecoATM.” he said. “Those machines buy back phones and you can recycle there too.”

If it’s in good condition, you can earn some extra cash from it.

“You could bring it to a place like us at Fanelli Boys or Game Stop or even your cell phone carrier and they can either pay cash or a bill credit from your carrier,” said Shroyer.

One way that you can help with an old cell phone is to send it to an organization like Cell Phones for Soldiers.

“They’ll go an send it overseas to soldiers or if they’re broken or damaged, they’ll sell it for what it’s worth to get prepaid cards for people overseas so they can call back home,” he said.

Another way is to sell it directly through Facebook, Craigslist or even Ebay.

According to Shroyer, Apple phones hold its value the longest. When it comes to Androids, Samsung has a better value.and LG phones are in the bottom of the list.

“They do make some nice phones but just due to the demand for them, they don’t really have much use and they lose value pretty quickly,” he said.

Most importantly, just because you have no use for them, it’ doesn’t mean it’s okay to throw it in the trash.

“Make sure you just don’t throw them away. It’s bad for the environment. It creates more waste. It’s actually kind of hazardous to the people who collect the trash. Lithium batteries can explode,” said Shroyer.

SAN FRANCISCO – California, the state that helped birth the global boom in battery-toting electric vehicles, is trying to spark a similar transformation for utilities. And that spells trouble for power plants all across the U.S. that run on natural gas.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved an order Thursday that will require PG&E Corp., the state’s biggest utility, to change the way it supplies power when demand peaks. Instead of relying on electricity from three gas-fired plants run by Calpine Corp., PG&E will have to use batteries or other non-fossil fuel resources to keep the lights on in the most-populated U.S. state.

The shift is possible in California partly because there’s a surplus of solar power, after a surge of rooftop panels and large-scale gathering systems helped double the renewable energy it used over the past decade. Batteries can charge up in daylight and dispense electricity later. With improved technology and lower costs, storage systems are becoming more viable for utilities, especially in a state hoping to get half its power from wind and solar by 2030 and targeting major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

“California is going to create a blueprint for the coming years,” said Michael Ferguson, the director of U.S. energyinfrastructure at S&P Global Ratings in New York. “Renewables proliferated where there was supportive regulation, and that caused the costs to decline. I would expect to see the same thing happen with battery storage.”

While natural gas became the biggest source of power in the U.S. two years ago — it burns cleaner and more cheaply than coal — regulators are looking to reduce carbon emissions to combat global warming and climate change. Gas now accounts for about a third of the country’s electricity, but renewables like solar and wind are expanding faster, doubling their share of the market over the past decade to a projected 17% last year, government data show.

SKIPPING GAS

“There is a big push, especially on the West Coast,” to move to cleaner fuels, said Marta Stoepker, a spokeswoman for the Oakland-based environmental group Sierra Club. “If we are getting off of coal, let’s also skip over gas.”

The shift away from fossil fuels in power generation has been pronounced in California, where tougher standards for cleaner air and fuel have become a model for the rest of the country and the world. Gas use dropped to 36% of the state’s electricity supply in 2016 from 42% a decade earlier, while renewables jumped to 25% from 11% over the same period, state data show.

Renewables are dumping so much power onto the state’s grid — on some days it can be more than half of all supply — some generators are losing money because of weak wholesale electricity prices.

SITTING IDLE

That’s a problem for companies whose plants only generate power during periods of peak demand, like some of those run by Calpine. Last year, the Houston-based firm told California’s grid operator that it would have to retire plants because of low prices. The operator determined the market needed the plants for reliability and allowed Calpine to sign profitable, must-run contracts for 2018.

“These gas plants typically sit idle for much of the year, whereas a battery could be used for a range of other services, such as helping integrate renewables,” said Logan Goldie-Scot, an energy storage analyst for Bloomberg New EnergyFinance in San Francisco.

California’s utility commission wants San Francisco-based PG&E to find power storage or a clean energy alternative to those Calpine contracts. The utility said it supports the agency’s order and asked that power-line upgrades be considered as part of the plan.

Houston-based Calpine opposes the order. In a Dec. 29 letter to the commission, the company said the move imposes “unreasonable costs and risks on customers” and departs from a “considered, thoughtful approach to grid reliability.”

California still needs gas plants to back up a state grid that’s “under pressure from volatile solar power,” Kit Konolige, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a note Thursday. In 2016, about 3 100 megawatts of gas plants retired with 700 megawatts of new gas units coming on line, Konolige said. One megawatt can power about 750 homes, according to the state.

This isn’t the first time the state’s come down on gas. In 2017, regulators moved to reject a permit for a proposed gas plantin southern California, noting that clean energy resources including batteries could be used to fill the need. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has put on hold gas plant projects to explore alternatives.

And the shift extends beyond California. Last year, a proposed gas project was pulled in Oregon after opposition from local environmental advocates, and in Connecticut, a plant was rejected by a state panel. Plans for another gas unit in North Carolina were killed in 2016. New gas-fired generators have faced challenges in other states, including Louisiana and Michigan.

General Electric Co., the world’s largest maker of gasturbines, said last month that it would cut 12 000 jobs in its power business, part of a plan to get leaner as customers turn away from fossil-fuel energy sources.

Batteries may be everywhere in today’s appliances, but the scale of electricity distribution on vast utility networks still makes using power storage costly. That’s changing with the development of bigger, more efficient units that can carry a charge longer, especially in the kinds of electric vehicles manufactured by the likes of Tesla Inc.

Since 2010, Bloomberg New Energy Finance data show, the price of lithium-ion battery packs have fallen 79%.

Storing “considerable amounts of electricity for future use,” Paul Patterson, a utilities analyst for Glenrock Associates, said, “has the potential to significantly alter the economics of the power sector.”

Since the 1970s, lithium has been a common and effective treatment for manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder. But lithium is also the central constituent in powerful modern batteries used in everything from cell phones to electric cars such as Teslas. What makes lithium effective for such diverse purposes?

The philosophy of science (link is external) increasingly recognizes that many important explanations invoke mechanisms, which are combinations of connected parts whose interactions produce regular changes. For example, neuroscience explains how brains work by identifying how the neurons (parts) connected by synapses (connections) excite and inhibit each other’s firing (interactions). Similarly, we can investigate the mechanisms that make lithium good for batteries and the mechanisms that allow lithium to affect the brain in ways that reduce the occurrence of manic episodes.

After hydrogen and helium, lithium is the third simplest element, containing only three protons and three electrons. Atomic mechanisms are well understood such as the operation of the electromagnetic force that keeps electrons attracted to the protons, and the strong force that keeps protons together. Molecular mechanisms are also well understood, such as the way that lithium can combine with carbon to form lithium carbonate, the typical substance given to people for bipolar disorder.

Lithium is good for batteries for three main reasons (link is external). First, it is highly reactive because it readily loses its outermost electron, making it easy to get current flowing through a battery. Second, lithium is much lighter than other metals used in batteries, such as lead, which is important for small objects such as phones but also for cars that require many batteries. Third, lithium-ion batteries are rechargeable, because lithium ions and electrons move easily back into negative electrodes.

It is harder to specify the mechanisms that explain why lithium helps people with bipolar disorder. The calming effect of lithium was discovered by accident in the 1940s, but understanding of how it works has been slow to develop. According to a recent review by Flavio Guzman (link is external), lithium assists the brain in three ways. First, it helps to protect a number of brain regions important for emotional functioning, maintaining gray matter in areas such as the ventral prefrontal cortex. Second, lithium affects the operations of neurotransmitters in desirable ways to discourage mania, by reducing dopamine and norepinephrine excitation and increasing GABA inhibition. Third, lithium modulates cellular signaling systems by affecting important brain chemicals such as AC/cAMP and BDNF. Lithium inhibits the operation of AC/cAMP through competition with magnesium, but I have found no scientific consensus on how lithium affects neurotransmitters such as dopamine and GABA, and how it has more widespread effects on whole brain regions.

The contrast between the degree of understanding of lithium in batteries versus lithium in bipolar disorder reveals important characteristics of mechanistic explanation. Mechanistic explanations do not always have to be reductive, going right down to the most fundamental level. Reduction works well for batteries, where the proton-electron structure of lithium translates quickly into the desirable features of lithium batteries, such as reactivity and weight. In contrast, as is common in medical explanations, it has taken decades to deepen the mechanistic explanations of the success of lithium treatment for bipolar disorder.

Mechanistic explanations do not have to come all at once, but can develop gradually as more becomes known about the parts and interactions that operate to produce complex effects.

As a tech pioneer with a significant interest in the race to build and market autonomous vehicles, it makes sense that today they would be deeply interested in artificial intelligence. However, it was only this month that the business’s billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk publicly announced it is working on its own AI hardware.

This is definitely interesting if not exactly surprising. Musk after all has been outspoken in his views about AI. As well as revolutionizing almost every aspect of society, he has warned that it will cause widespread job losses and possibly even start World War Three.He is also a co-founder of OpenAI, a research organization dedicated to ensuring that AI is developed and deployed in a safe, manageable way so as to minimize any existential risk robots may one day pose to humanity.

Not many details have yet been made public about Tesla’s new AI, though it is believed it will process the “thinking” algorithms for the company’s Autopilot software which currently gives Tesla vehicles limited (“level 2”) levels of autonomous driving capability. Musk has said that he believes his cars will be fully autonomous (level 5 autonomous) by 2019.

Tesla has been criticized by some for appearing over-eager to be first to bring autonomous cars onto the roads, in the light of what is being seen as the first fatal accident involving a car which was driving itself.

But as a business decision, it is hoping its pushy tactics will pay off, with experts concluding that the company has trumped its rivals in the data-gathering department. All the vehicles Tesla have ever sold were built with the potential to one day become self-driving, although this fact was not made public until 2014 when a free upgrade was rolled out. This means the company has had a lot more sensors out on the roads gathering data than most of its Detroit or Silicon Valley rivals, many of which are still at the concept stage. Having just launched its first mass-market car, the Model 3 with a price tag of $35,000, the company is expecting the number of its vehicles on the road to increase by almost two thirds to around 650,000 in 2018 – and that’s a lot of extra sensors.

In fact, all Tesla vehicles – whether or not they are Autopilot enabled – send data directly to the cloud. A problem with the engine operation meaning that components were occasionally overheating was diagnosed in 2014 by monitoring this data and every vehicle was automatically “repaired” by software patch thanks to this.

Tesla effectively crowdsouces its data from all of its vehicles as well as their drivers, with internal as well as external sensors which can pick up information about a driver’s hand placement on the instruments and how they are operating them. As well as helping Tesla to refine its systems, this data holds tremendous value in its own right. Researchers at McKinsey and Co estimate that the market for vehicle-gathered data will be worth $750 billion a year by 2030.

The data is used to generate highly data-dense maps showing everything from the average increase in traffic speed over a stretch of road, to the location of hazards which cause drivers to take action. Machine learning in the cloud takes care of educating the entire fleet, while at an individual car level, edge computing decides what action the car needs to take right now. A third level of decision-making also exists, with cars able to form networks with other Tesla vehicles nearby in order to share local information and insights. In a near future scenario where autonomous cars are widespread, these networks will most likely also interface with cars from other manufacturers as well as other systems such as traffic cameras, road-based sensors or mobile phones.

Although details are scarce on the new AI technology that Tesla were creating, its current AI – driven by a partnership with hardware manufacturer Nvidia – is largely based on an unsupervised learning model of machine learning.

On its Facebook page, Nvidia state that “In contrast to the usual approach to operating self-driving cars, we did not program any explicit object detection, mapping, path planning or control components into this car. Instead, the car learns on its own to create all necessary internal representations necessary to steer, simply by observing human drivers.”

Whatever new tech it develops may veer away from this by stepping back into the more tested waters of supervised learning, where algorithms are trained beforehand about right or wrong decisions. However, it is possible that the theoretically greater gains achievable by truely unsupervised learning may keep them on this track.

Tesla has clearly always been a company which has put data collection and analysis at the heart of everything it does. It isn’t just design and manufacturing either, with the company processing customer data with AI and even parsing it’s online forum for text insights into common problems. Whether this focus will lead to victory in the upcoming battle for supremacy of the autonomous car market remains to be seen, but it has certainly provided itself with a head start.

A former chief designer for Aston Martin is working on a new solid-state battery design that could be vastly superior to the currently available lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars.

FAST CHARGING

Henrik Fisker, a former chief designer for Aston Martin, claims that he will soon revolutionize the world of electric cars with a new, superior battery. After leaving the luxury car brand, Fisker started his own company and has filed patents on a new type of solid-state battery, which can be charged faster and has greater capacity than leading lithium-ion batteries, at least in theory.

In lithium-ion batteries, current flows through either liquids or polymers, but in solid-state batteries it flows through a solid. Although the technology is still in its infancy, these new batteries are designed to be cheaper and smaller than their lithium-ion counterpart.

In an interview with The Irish Times, Fisker said that “Everyone has gone down a road of working on what we call thin-film sheet batteries. One of the early scientists who worked on these was Dr Fabio Albano.” When Albano left the company Sakti3, he brought his ideas for the next development in battery technology to Fisker.

“The breakthrough that Fabio brought to me, just over a year ago, was a development of the solid-state battery, and he said that he wanted to bring this battery into Fisker, and he really wanted to get it into a vehicle. He believed that he was close to a breakthrough,” Fisker told The Irish Times.

BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH

For now, the details of this collaborative design remain undisclosed. However, we do know that it will be able to hold 2.5-times the energy of a traditional lithium-ion battery and it will charge at a much faster rate. Fisker even suggests that this battery could be charged in as little as one minute.

In addition to these advantages, this mysterious solid-state battery would outprice competitors like Tesla that still use conventional lithium-ion batteries for their electric cars. According to Fisker, “the unique thing about our battery is that the solvent that we use to build the battery is the cheapest one you can get – water.”

So far, the main downside to the concept is that it doesn’t technically exist in real life. But, should the theoretically sound science behind this design amount to a commercially-viable product, the lithium-ion batteries that currently power electric vehicles (EVs) could give way to these batteries and EV capabilities and range could seriously advance.

One of the biggest stories in consumer electronics right now is Apple’s secret throttling of older iPhone models with aging batteries. The company misled customers for years as “conspiracy theorists” claimed Apple was intentionally slowing down older iPhone models in order to force people to upgrade. While Apple contends that the reason behind the throttling is to increase battery life and prevent unexpected shutdowns, the company has indeed been intentionally limiting the performance of its iPhones as they age.

Lithium ion batteries lose capacity over time, and Apple’s iOS software automatically slows performance once capacity is degraded to a certain point. But what if there was a way to easily restore these aging batteries almost to their original capacities? A groundbreaking new invention can do just that, and it could end up being a game-changer for consumer electronics, electric cars, and more.

There is no such thing as a lithium-ion battery that maintains its full capacity over time. As these batteries are charged and drained, the cells that store electricity slowly begin to deteriorate. Li-Ion batteries are typically good for between 300 and 500 full recharge cycles before capacity drops to 80-85%, and degradation continues from there. For the time being, there is no way to easily and effectively restore these batteries to their original capacity.

What does this mean for the millions upon millions of devices that are powered by lithium batteries? It means that the amount of time in between charges decreases continually, so they last for a shorter amount of time per charge. This is true of everything from smartphones and laptops to electric cars. The only way to restore the battery capacity in a device is to remove the old degraded battery and swap it out with a new one — though that may change in the near future.

A researcher from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore claims to have invented a device that can refresh Li-Ion batteries, and it could be a game-changer for any industry that involves battery-powered devices. What’s more, this technology could lead to a dramatic decline in the number of batteries that need to be produced and disposed of, which would obviously have a huge positive impact on the environment.

Professor Rachid Yazami says that his invention is capable of restoring an old lithium battery to up to 95% capacity in as little as 10 hours. What’s more, it could be reused on the same battery every few years as capacity continues to drop. The scientist says his invention could be used for consumer electronics like iPhones, but he sees it playing a much larger role for electric vehicles.

“People don’t change their cars as often as they do smartphones – some would change a phone every two years, but you would want a car to last for more than 10 years,” Yazami told Singapore-based news site The Straits Times.

The invention works by adding a third electrode to the two poles already present in every Li-Ion battery. This third electrode then drains residual lithium-ions from one of the poles, thus removing “rock content” that prevents battery cells from storing more electricity. The researcher says that he already built and tested a prototype smartphone battery last year using this new technology.

Professor Yazami presented his invention at the International Battery Seminar last year, and he says he has received interest from a number of companies including Apple, Samsung, and Panasonic.