From a young age I've combed the shelves at public libraries and found handbooks on battery technology.
Often 1/3 of the book is devoted to ordinary batteries and the other 2/3 are devoted to "reserve batteries" which are able to deliver a high power density for a short time to power a missile or something like that. There was a huge amount of research on those and I think it's easier to make a battery work if it doesn't have to last very long.
NiMH batteries seemed to come out of nowhere. I remember Sony licensing the technology for "InfoLithium" batteries that eventually took over the world.
The market for batteries is bigger than it ever was. Grid scale batteries relax many constraints: molten salt batteries might be practical there. The South Africans thought this kind of battery might be relevant for cars in the late 1970's and 1980's
I wonder if there was some kind of economic inflection point — it felt like that in my memory, too, where it felt like NiCad was advertised more as new thing in the 80s before getting replaced with NiMH. I wonder how much that perception was steered by what was common in the car battery space since that was probably the most known rechargeable battery for a long time.
Often 1/3 of the book is devoted to ordinary batteries and the other 2/3 are devoted to "reserve batteries" which are able to deliver a high power density for a short time to power a missile or something like that. There was a huge amount of research on those and I think it's easier to make a battery work if it doesn't have to last very long.
NiMH batteries seemed to come out of nowhere. I remember Sony licensing the technology for "InfoLithium" batteries that eventually took over the world.
The market for batteries is bigger than it ever was. Grid scale batteries relax many constraints: molten salt batteries might be practical there. The South Africans thought this kind of battery might be relevant for cars in the late 1970's and 1980's
https://www.afrik21.africa/en/south-africa-the-zebra-salt-ba...
and it might be again with electric cars legitmized and if oil is out of reach.