https://phys.org/news/2019-06-graphene-based-ink-printable-energy-storage.html In recent years carbon yarn has proven to be a cheap way to store electricity in things like carbon body panels for cars and aircraft. The first electrical motors have also been produced which use virtually indestructible carbon brushes instead of metal. Making printable graphene for large scale reel-to-reel printing has been a goal as well, and their graphene is doped with nitrogen to make it even more conductive. Using printing they can possibly produce the equivalent of 40,000 newspapers in a night worth of flexible batteries that can be installed in anything including your laptop. Exactly how good these are remains to be seen, but this is a likely candidate for the first batteries that are not only flexible and flat, but are extremely low impact on the environment, totally nontoxic, and dirt cheap to make. You can even drive nails through a carbon supercapacitor and it will only make a popping sound, but they still have a way to go to catch up to batteries for raw power storage. Perhaps in another twenty years, we'll have a better idea of all the basic uses for the technology, but printing solar panels, batteries, and even TVs and computer circuitry all right on top of each other with as little environmental impact as possible is among the long term goals. Reel-to-Reel printing, 3D printers, and self-assembling processes are currently poised to reinvent the manufacturing process altogether. While making things self-assembling might sound a bit Star Trek, there is even an attempt being made right now to make a self-assembling quantum computer, and we are about to make Star Trek look its age.
