Ben's Talk3G Blog

Recent news that a fire at LG Chem could see a big hole in battery supply for laptops over the next few months had me scratching my head a little.

How can the market be so reliant on one player? Is battery production really that sophisticated?

The whole issue of mobile power sources has left me disgruntled for years. Despite being constantly reminded just how energy efficient our laptops are, with their LED screens and Core 2 Duo processors, we can still only expect the same length of battery life from a laptop as we would have done several years ago.

There are two reasons why this might be. The first is that laptops now consume vastly more power than before and therefore battery technology has only just been able to keep up. The second is that battery technology quite simply sucks.

With the whole cars + hydrogen etc thing I can see the vested interests of the massive oil industry and understand why development is going somewhat slower than it needs to. Of course such a powerful industry isn't going to let a new technology march in overnight and erode the petrol business. In fact, I doubt the UK government would allow that either given the amount of fuel duty charged.

Battery tech, though? Laptop sales are massive, extremely huge, and still enjoying high growth. Maybe even double digit. And you can bet that for every laptop there's at least 1.5 batteries as people order spares and replacements. Laptop battery prices also remain high, you can expect to pay from £40 up to £100 for a laptop battery sans laptop right now. So where's all the innovation? Where are the attempts to corner this high volume high value market? Where's my hydrogen fuel cell that lasts a week or my miniature lap-friendly nuclear reactor?