Okay, I agree that this is just wack. Our kids deserve better. Lets focus our hard earned money on our own country, rather than elsewhere.

The power still has to be generated, but grabbing charge overnight is a huge piece of Tesla Motor’s claims to cheap fuel. But ultimately, advanced battery technologies are a prerequisite to wide-spread solar and wind (and especially to massively decentralized solar). Until now batteries for such systems have usually been environmentally nasty (things like lead-acid car batteries, but bigger) because better batteries like lithium-ion didn’t have the nearly unlimited recharge cycles of lead-acid. If Mr. Gotcher is right and his batteries can handle 20,000+ recharge cycles with his new electrodes, then that’s a huge deal.

One recharge cycle per day when you can handle only 500-1000 recharge cycles gives you 1.5-3 years before you replace your batteries. But at 20,000 cycles, you get 55 years, which is WELL past the expected usable life of the solar panels you’re charging the batteries with.

As far as nanotech improving solar panels the same way, there’s actually been some research in this exact area recently. Check out http://www.physorg.com/news7076.html and http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17025/

Also – and tell me if this is a stupid question – but say I can store 100 times more energy. Makes owning an electrical car practical, but it exerts no impact on the ultimate energy cycle – it still takes X amount of coal to produce Y amount of electricity, regardless of how that electricity is stored and spent.

Or is this question better posed within the framework of, say, solar storage?

Nanotechnology will transform nearly every field it touches, and it has the potential to touch literally every field.  In this case, it could transform batteries by giving them 40x or more the capacity of current batteries.