I have put a note in my calendar a year from now, and a year after that to read the story about how these laboratory curiosities could not be made in production quantities.
Something I would really love to see would be a solid state battery that exploited the fact that we can draw silicon features at 7nm. How about a couple trillion equivalents of a FLASH cell which we can drain in rows or fill in rows. Sort of a bucket brigade of capacitors at that point but it would not have any recharge issues and since its just charge flying about no dendrites to speak of. At some point I predict that will become a useful way to build energy storage devices.
It is more battery breakthrough fatigue. Last time I looked there was something like 17 - 18 battery "breakthroughs" over the last 8 years of which exactly one made it into production for a relatively small (10%) improvement in charging performance.
These laboratory curiosities usually fail because either you can't reliably manufacture the precursor material or reliably make the structures needed at production rates (which translates into the cost of the resulting battery)
It came up in a discussion with some Tesla enthusiasts on the ground breaking of the Gigafactory where I wondered if there would be a break through that would make the batteries the Gigafactory would produce obsolete before they finished building the factory. That didn't happen :-).
As a result I recognize its a really hard slow slog through chemistry which is well understood to change batteries. And you're correct there have been a number of improvements in manufacturing which have resulted in incrementally better batteries and that is all good, but so far, starting with a basic battery and making a new battery that is significantly better, has been disappointing.
Something I would really love to see would be a solid state battery that exploited the fact that we can draw silicon features at 7nm. How about a couple trillion equivalents of a FLASH cell which we can drain in rows or fill in rows. Sort of a bucket brigade of capacitors at that point but it would not have any recharge issues and since its just charge flying about no dendrites to speak of. At some point I predict that will become a useful way to build energy storage devices.