This article by Richard Martin for MIT Technology Review addresses one of the most frustrating fields of research in modern technology - batteries. Batteries are essential to all 21st Century technologies from smart phones, to electric cars, to infrastructure and so are naturally a focus for research dollars and energy. Yet for all their ubiquity in the world, innovation has moved at a depressingly slow pace. The promises of game-changing technology leaps have not materialized.

Outlined in the article are hurdles unique to the battery industry. One such issue is that batteries are chemical creations - tweaking chemistries is a much more complex process that tweaking, say, software code, and there is a far greater push and pull of improvements and compromises as new ideas are tested. Progress is slow.

Second, the capital investments required to reach economies of scale with battery manufacturing are incredibly high relative to other manufactured products. Batteries are expensive to build and the facilities themselves are extraordinarily pricey too. Complicating that funding issue is the sheer breadth of technologies that are all attracting research dollars. The limited capital is being spread thinly across possible breakthrough technologies, and so acheiving scale is all the more difficult.

Battery technology has the potential to change the world entirely by enabling cleaner power for virtually every industry. The work of improving batteries will continue, even if it does so slowly. 

Read the article on MIT Technology Review