Apparently, not being astounded and amazed by batteries is my superpower. What excites me is how much we DON'T and shouldn't need batteries to do dumb things like fry eggs and move heavy hunks of metal at ludicrous speeds.

Sure a one kilogram battery will keep an incandescent lightbulb going for only a few hours. You know what is better? An LED lightbulb. How lucky we are that someone came along and invented that lightbulb before someone came along to invent a battery that is 10 times better than what we have now. Even low quality LEDs are great. A couple of AA NiMH batteries will light them for... what... a year or so?

And smaller, safer, lighter vehicles that can be used efficiently at lower speeds and with less acceleration are the way we SHOULD be saving fuel. No. Someone had to evangelize for heavy vehicles driven at ludickerous speeds to the point that we have the worst of every world possible... the HUMVEE EV that can go from zero to 60 in a nanosecond. Fuel economy and safety of reasonable vehicles have improved astronomically for decades. Who decided that we had to give up size, safety, and mass-reduction achievements just to adopt some different chemical process? Some lying billionaire.... that's who.

You know what is better than a home battery to run my electric heaters in the winter? A heat pump, running off of grid electricity. Cross your fingers and hope your grid is reliable. A 10 kWh power wall will run your radiant heat for a few hours before pooping out. My heating oil tank outside keeps me heated for a month and a half, even when my solar panels are covered. Even if the grid were to go down.

People are missing it. Batteries are not THE ANSWER that they are cracked up to be. There are neat applications for them that can boost efficiency over vast numbers of users, such as hybrids or plug in hybrids, but making them the centerpiece and pitching out all of our proven infrastructure, and then legislating that choice for everyone is a surrender to faddishness, blind hope, and ignorance to the plight of have-nots.

On one site where people are discussing EVs right now, some guy is making the point that steam ships and automobiles outmoded sailing ships and horse drawn carriages. Sure. But it took a long time and huge gluts of wood, coal, and oil that major trading nations were able to run to. In places where those resources were in short supply, sail was competitive to the 1920s and horses to the 1950s. See how efficiency does not really matter? People who think that EVs must be better for everyone everywhere just because they are more efficient in LA and SF are missing it. They are engineers who just can't figure out why people eat bananas and not breadfruit.

And I am no luddite. There are plenty of cool things that batteries can do for aviation, passenger vehicles, healthcare, portable appliances, and tons of other stuff. Let me just say that batteries are the wrong place to turn for a lot of the "urgent heavy lifting" that people seem to need. Wasting huge masses of battery materials on questionable applications can't be better than applying them judiciously where they can do the greatest good. Wasn't social benefit supposed to be the main message anyway?