here and
here). The latest out of KAIST is just as future-minded as roads full of charging devices: flexible
batteries.
They won’t be available to move cars for a long, long time – if ever – but the tiny batteries that KAIST researchers are working on are getting ever-higher energy density levels. Right now, as you can see in the video
below, they can’t do much more than light up an LED, but the list of potential uses for these batteries is high. Treehugger writes they, «could be used in things like e-paper, wearable electronics and improved piezoelectric devices for harvesting energy from movement. Imagine flexible gadgets that could be powered by bending them.» It’s that line about «harvesting energy from movement» that lets us imagine them being used in plug-in vehicles in interesting ways, perhaps powering infotainment systems by getting just enough energy from the car’s movement down the road. They might not offer all that much assistance, but every little bit helps. Especially this early in the EV era, and KAIST researchers say they could be commercialized within a year.
