grid

The 30-year battery: New chemistry holds promise

While consumers may simply crave longer-lasting batteries for electronic gadgets, the holy grail for many material scientists is batteries that can pump power into the grid for hours.

Stanford University researchers today detailed a new electrode material they claim holds promise for grid storage batteries that can work 30 years without a dramatic decline in performance.

In the lab, the copper and iron-based nano-engineered material was able to take 40,000 charge/discharge cycles while still maintaining an 80 percent capacity. By contrast, the lithium ion batteries used in consumer electronics degrade noticeably after only a few hundred cycles.

The … Read more

Spare a little computing power to fight malaria

After IBM's Watson computing system defeated two human competitors on Jeopardy this year, it partnered with the nonprofit Scripps Research Institute to direct the tournament prize money toward finding a cure for drug-resistant malaria.

Now all the team is asking for is a little help from around the globe. It's using the World Community Grid, described as a "supercomputer of the people," to use spare computing power from volunteered PCs.

Since the Grid was set up seven years ago, some 575,000 people in more than 80 countries have donated spare computing power from nearly 2 … Read more

Hybrid solar-wind power connects rural Navajos

NAVAJO RESERVATION, N.M.--Power transmission lines run a few hundred yards behind the Johnson family home here, but it took an off-grid solar and wind generator to finally bring them electricity service.

The Johnsons, who live on a remote stretch of land on the Navajo Reservation west of Farmington, N.M., are among about 200 families on the Navajo Reservation who rent an off-grid renewable-energy system from the rural utility. They opened their home to visitors last week during a fellowship organized by Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources.

The hybrid power generator, which was installed in February, combines … Read more

Gates-backed Liquid Metal Battery hires CEO

Liquid Metal Battery, a company formed to make cheap storage for wind and solar power, has hired its first CEO.

Phil Giudice, who was the third employee of demand-response company EnerNoc and the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources Commissioner until earlier the year, announced his "new gig" on Twitter. One of his tasks as CEO is to raise more money to build up the company, he told The Boston Globe.

Liquid Metal Battery was spun out of the lab of Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Funding for the company has … Read more

No wind? No problem with giant battery bank

A huge battery bank connected to a wind farm was officially commissioned today in a project that makes wind power more closely resemble a traditional power plant.

Two divisions of energy project developer AES today said that the 98-megawatt Laurel Mountain wind facility in West Virginia is now connected to 32 megawatts worth of lithium ion batteries from A123 Systems. It's the largest project to couple wind power with lithium ion batteries, according to the company.

The shipping container-size batteries will allow AES to gradually adjust power delivery to the grid up and down, rather than have a more … Read more

Electric vehicles and building out the smart grid

How do you integrate electric vehicles with the building out of the smart grid? One session at the Networked EV conference in San Francisco yesterday tackled that topic.

Speaking as part of the panel, Phil Davis, a senior manager at Schneider Electric, and John LoPorto, president and CEO of Power Tagging, gave their perspective on the subject.