ENERGY STORAGE DEVICES
INTRODUCTION
With the articles of daily use and appliances becoming more and more portable the need for batteries is going to increase day by day. The modern man watches his favourite TV clips on utube or on the net streaming, reads his favourtie books on kindle and has smaller and smaller apartments to live in. This calls for a situation whereby he can have the flexibility to sit and work where he pleases. Major commercial organisations are also finding it very expensive to have huge offices to seat all their work force or to allocate a slot to each and every person employed. So the idea of remote access and working from home or from anywhere else is also catching on.
As this need for flexibility increases so does the requirement for portability and hence batteries.
So the demand for more efficient batteries is increasing by leaps and bounds. With technology improving manufacturers are becoming more and more conscious of making their products energy efficient. This gives better battery timings. So in a way this is circle in which better batteries lead to better standby and active time and better and more energy efficient products give even better timings than before.
This essential transition started with the introduction of the transistor which requires far fewer watts than the conventional tube. This has since further been improved upon by the microchip which requires even lesser electricity. The actual requirement can be measured in mill amperes.
It could be a matter of time before we start seeing the reduction in energy requirement of the world in its conventional form. By conventional form I mean the gadgets that run on direct ac power and the non-conventional being the ones being run totally on microchips.
LIFESTYLE CHANGES
Man’s love for the outdoors and leanings towards more freedom are no secret. More so in climates where during winters it is almost impossible to get out. Now with such freedom available with the availability of portable working devices and entertainment tools the dependence on better batteries is increasing. The people living in colder climates have only a small window of good weather available. They would probably want to spend more time in the sun and avail themselves of the good weather during such good weather.
The human being used 2,000 kcals per day 1 million years ago. Today he uses 230,000 kcal per day in the United States. The energy needs would increase due to the increase in sizes of the cities that we live in and the increase in the spikes in climate.
INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY
With this point of view the best investment too in the future would be in the R&D of batteries. Organisations which are already in the battery business can be the ones who are the primary gainers of this trend. This way only the energy companies are not the ones to be watched out for we also have to look at companies which make batteries.
SCOPE
Essentially three areas provide the future potential of these products.
1. UPS for homes
2. UPS for servers
3. Batteries for renewable energy devices
In Pakistan already battery companies are working overtime to meet the demand for UPS systems installed in every middle class house in the country to meet the power disruption. Even though desk top computers are fast becoming a thing of the past yet UPS devices are attached to them in all major organisations for better results.
Due to problems that may be caused in changing over to generators or in changing over from generator to city power supply a UPS is attached to all major servers in the information technology departments.
Again renewable energy companies are also heavily dependent on batteries to store energy of wind or sun for off hours. This basically seems to mean that companies which are into “energy storage” devices are the ones to be watched out for in terms of long term investments.
