I wanted to share with you the following article that was published by The Business Review:

The Business Review: Barriers to break in the battery business Megan Rogers | Oct. 10, 2014

[caption id="attachment_12994" align="alignleft" width="304"] Donna Abbott-Vlahos | Albany Business Review[/caption]

Pradeep Haldar is the vice president of entrepreneurship innovation and clean energy programs at SUNY Polytechnic Institute (formerly the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering) in Albany, New York.

Energy storage is a broad label and the applications of these technologies have wide-ranging potential.

We asked Pradeep Haldar to explain the categories of energy storage technologies and their applications. (see below)

Haldar is vice president of entrepreneurship innovation and clean energy programs at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany (formerly the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering). He has been overseeing research on energy storage for the past 15 years.

Types of ENERGY STORAGE: batteries, Fuel Cells, etc. Batteries and fuel cells are good with energy density, providing lots of energy over long periods of time. But they don’t have power density, meaning you can’t provide a lot of power in short bursts of time. Capacitors are the opposite. Ideally, you want one device that does both — provides a lot of power as quickly as you need it, for long periods of time.

Application: PERSONAL DEVICES “Your cellphone today, 70 to 80 percent of the volume and weight of the device is the battery. If you can imagine that going away, this can be a featherweight kind of product. Everything from wearable electronics and devices from a mobile standpoint is enabled by battery technologies.”

Application: TRANSPORTATION “For electric vehicles, the largest weight in the car is the battery. The biggest limitation for electric vehicles is the distance they can travel. That definitely is improving and has come a long way. I can remember the time when the longest distance you could travel with these cars was 60 miles. Today, you’re at 200, 250 miles, pushing the limit to 300 miles. If you can take that out to 500 miles, it’s going to be huge for the consumer market.”

Application: GRID STORAGE “When you’re generating electricity or energy, if you don’t use it at the time of when it’s generated, it gets wasted, completely wasted. Ideally, if you could save that energy and use it at a time you actually need it, that’s the best application of energy storage.”

This story is part of Megan Rogers' cover story "Powered up: Albany carves a tech niche beyond nano." To read more, click the related content links on this page.