In this third and final article in our Kibbles and Bytes series on batteries, I’m going to discuss the one that makes all our modern portable gadgets possible: The lithium-ion battery. Without this technology, many (if not most) of our gadgets would be clunky, not last very long, and generally not be very useful. So what is it about lithium batteries that makes them so unique and successful?

First, we should define what we’re talking about. There are two broad types of lithium batteries. The first type are the primary cells. These are not rechargeable. Examples include some camera and flashlight batteries as well as most coin-cell type watch batteries. The second type are secondary cells. These are rechargeable, and they’re the ones we’re going to focus on. They have a lot of different names, but they all operate under the same principle of lithium ions being shifted back and forth between the positive and negative electrodes. So a secondary lithium battery will almost always be referred to as a lithium-ion battery.

You may hear lots of different names for lithium-ion batteries, like Li-NMC, LiFePO4, LMO, Li-Poly*, but these are all the same thing. The variations are simply describing a different cathode material. Different materials change the characteristics of the battery to make it longer lasting, safer, or shaped differently, but they work the same way.

By far the number one reason lithium-ion batteries are so useful is their high specific energy. This is a measurement of how much power a battery has vs how much it weighs. Lead acid batteries have a specific energy of around 40 watt hours per kilogram. Lithium-ion on the other hand has a specific energy of around 200 watt hours per kilogram. So they’re around five times as energy dense as lead acid. A larger amount of power can be crammed into a smaller package. This is what allows your iPad Air to be so incredibly thin and light, yet still last all day.

Another benefit of lithium-ion is their lifespan. Most types can be recharged several hundred times without any performance loss, but many variations can be recharged ??thousands?? of times. Not only does this mean your device will last longer, but it’s also better for the environment to not have to keep making new batteries.

The only real drawback to lithium-ion batteries is their cost. They cost 4-6 times more than a lead acid battery with equivalent power. But because lithium-ion can do tasks no lead acid battery could ever do (heaviest iPhone ever?), we happily accept the additional cost. As they become more and more common though, the price has dropped considerably, and it will likely continue to do so.

The future of lithium-ion batteries is looking brighter all the time too. Because of their high specific energy, better lithium-ion batteries are being developed for things like electric cars, battery backup systems, grid-level electricity storage and more. If you want to know more about batteries, the internet has some great resources. I like this “*wikipedia chart*”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery#Table_of_rechargeable_battery_types that shows an overview of a wide array of battery types.

Thanks for following along on our sometimes technical, but hopefully informative series on batteries. Power on!

??*Extra:* What’s the deal with lithium polymer? (I was confused, too.) You’ll hear this term a lot, but really a lithium polymer battery is just a regular lithium-ion battery, most likely using lithium manganese dioxide as the cathode material, but it could be anything. The “polymer” part is really referring to how these batteries are assembled. Instead of being housed in rigid casings, the cells are laminated together. This allows greater variety in shape, but also makes them even lighter. Most electronics, including the MacBook Pro and iPhone use Li-Poly batteries.??

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Share the love, everybody!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the newly-debuted “*Beats Music.*”:https://beatsmusic.com Beats joined the streaming music team offering allowing you to stream music through your iOS or Android device with a paid subscription of $9.95/month.

I signed up for a free week to test it out and see if I wanted to make the switch from “*Spotify*”:https://www.spotify.com/us/ (my favorite “*app*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spotify/id324684580?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lb7k&ct=Blog ever). However, I didn’t feel like I got a good enough feel for it in just a week.

The fact that you aren’t able to stream music via your computer was a huge downside for me. I sit in front of a computer for 8-9 hours a day, and even though I have my phone right next to me most of the time, I find it kind of a pain to listen to music via my phone when I’m doing everything else on my computer. That said, I mostly listened to it during my commute or while in the kitchen cooking. If we pretend we’re keeping score, I’ll go ahead and give this point to Spotify.

??*Spotify 1, Beats 0*??

If you’re an AT&T customer, you’re able to try Beats Music out for 3 months for free (however you do need to provide your credit card information, unlike the 1-week trial). Because of this, I was able to try Beats out for a bit longer to get a better feel for it. The one thing I do really enjoy about the app is their Beats Playlists. For most artists, Beats has created themed playlists for that artist. For instance, if you like Jay Z, you can click on him as an artist and then browse the number of playlists that Beats has put together. If I feel like listening to some old school Jay, I might try out Jay Z: the 1990s. I’ll give Beats this point.

??*Spotify 1, Beats 1*??

I talked a little bit about the design of Beats in my last article. While I do like the overall look and feel of it, I find it a bit more complicated to use. I find the app to be pretty in depth with a lot of options and features. This could be a plus for some, but to me, it’s a bit overwhelming.

“The sentence” is a pretty cool feature, though — you put in your mood, who you’re with, and what you feel like listening to and it generates a “radio station” for you. You also have the artist playlists like I mentioned earlier, as well as genres, activities, and curators that contain hundreds of playlists ready for you. All great features of the app for the music lover who wants to explore new music.

Again, I think if they had this as an app for my computer, I’d be more inclined to peruse the playlists to play while I work throughout the day. Gonna have to give another point to Spotify here.

??*Spotify 2, Beats 1*??

The Beats Music app is still in the early stages, so there are a few bugs that they need to work out. I’ve had it crash on me a few times and be ??verrrrry?? slow to start playing what I ask of it. However, there have been multiple updates to it since it’s come out, so they’re working on it. Still, my point is going to go with my main squeeze, Spotify.

??*Spotify 3, Beats 1*??

And my winner is…Spotify (shocking)! I’ve created a Calendar reminder to cancel my subscription to Beats Music come April. I’ll keep it for the 3 months I have it for free, but don’t think I’ll pay for it. I’m used to Spotify, have created a couple dozen playlists that I love and having it on both my computer and my phone is the real plus. That said, I definitely think people should try out Beats Music if they are into the streaming music scene. They might find that it fits their needs better than Spotify does!

Happy listening!

*START SOAPBOX*

Climate change is the reality we are living in. It is not going away; it has been clearly established as a fact, IOMCO — or immediately obvious to the most casual observer. The weather is simply becoming more extreme. More tornados, more flooding, more drought, stronger hurricanes and other extreme weather events are only the tip of the iceberg. Climate change is not something that you can change overnight.

It has taken a few hundred years for man to have the negative impact that it has on the climate; even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels tomorrow, it would take hundreds more to reverse the trend.

We hit the big time lottery when we discovered oil and gas. It was like we stumbled upon a treasure chest with millions of years of stored energy and just like some lottery winners, we became mesmerized by the wealth and spent it without even thinking of the future. Many scientists have agreed that the world has probably reached “peak oil.” This means that we have extracted and burned the easy 50% of the world’s supply of fossil fuels.

The remaining 50% will be harder to get, more expensive in the process, and perhaps spurning significant challenges to both the environment and political stability as nations compete for this precious resource. We have always depended upon discovering new sources of oil when the old ones were depleted but we are running out of new sources and some are much more complicated.

Take fracking for example. Our current oil and gas supplies are coming more and more frequently as a result of fracking. This is a process of injecting water and some witches brew of chemicals into a depleted well in the hopes of creating small fractures which will allow oil, gas or other stuff to migrate to that well. This is a more expensive way of getting that second half of the oil and gas out of the ground. It is costly to the environment, costly to the consumer and there have been reports of the oil and gas from fracturing leaching into water supplies.

Additionally, there are increases in earthquake activity associated with these fractures. I have a good friend who makes his living driving trucks full of fracking fluid from well sites in Montana to some random dumping ground. He doesn’t like the work, but it is work. My point here is that future fossil fuel resources come with higher costs both to the environment and to consumers, while continuing our negative impact on climate.

The most sensible alternatives are very strict conservation of resources and renewable energy. I will not get into the debate over nuclear energy other than to say that given its financial and environmental record, I cannot see it as part of our future energy portfolio. While fossil fuels are in fact, renewable, it just takes a few million years for them to renew. On the other hand, wind, water, biomass and sun are renewable on a daily basis.

Any source of energy has its drawbacks. Other than discovering that treasure chest again, each form of energy carries a burden. Burning fossil fuels creates climate change, harms the environment in extraction and use. Wind energy requires space for turbines and some may object to the changes to the landscape or the noise. Solar energy requires land and huge arrays to generate enough meaningful power. Hydro power requires dams and impacts local environments, too. But the most benign sources of energy are renewable resources.

We must do two things if we are to impact climate change. We must reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels. We can do this by making more energy efficient vehicles, heating systems, lighting, etc. Energy conservation is the least expensive and least harmful source of energy and we have a tremendous amount of energy we can save by simply not using as much. The other is to shift the search for new sources of energy from fracking and oil shales to major support and deployment of renewable energy resources.

It is really our only choice and people have been warning us for decades about the impending implications of unrestrained fossil fuel use and the impact upon our planet. Right now, I would say we are moving way, way too slowly — baby steps are not going to even have baby impact on climate change.

*END SOAPBOX*

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