New battery packs powerful punch (sodium-sulfur batteries)

[jpak]

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/environment/2007-07-04-sodium-battery_N.htm

Batteries have long been vital to laptops and cellphones. They are increasingly supplying electricity to an unlikely recipient: the power grid itself.

Until recently, large amounts of electricity could not be efficiently stored. Thus, when you turn on the living-room light, power is instantly drawn from a generator.

A new type of a room-size battery, however, may be poised to store energy for the nation's vast electric grid almost as easily as a reservoir stockpiles water, transforming the way power is delivered to homes and businesses. Compared with other utility-scale batteries plagued by limited life spans or unwieldy bulk, the sodium-sulfur battery is compact, long-lasting and efficient.

Using so-called NaS batteries, utilities could defer for years, and possibly even avoid, construction of new transmission lines, substations and power plants, says analyst Stow Walker of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. They make wind power — wildly popular but frustratingly intermittent — a more reliable resource. And they provide backup power in case of outages, such as the one that hit New York City last week.

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[hunter]

1. What goes around comes around...

October 31, 1966

...Developed by Drs. Neil Weber (left) and Joseph T. Kummer, shown with an operating cell and a model of a 2,000 watt unit, the new sodium-sulfur battery system should be able to store up to fifteen times the amount of electrical energy available from present lead-acid storage batteries...

http://scienceservice.si.edu/pages/001017.htm

[jgraz]

3. Neat, but I remember a different caption

October 31, 1966

...Drs. Neil Weber (left) and Joseph T. Kummer, shown here shortly before their tragic deaths by suicide only a few hours after selling the rights to their invention to Exxon Oil. Both men apparently sealed themselves in oil drums after removing their head and limbs...

[Schema Thing]

4. lol! very funny.

[mopinko]

5. hey- i didn't realize mickaboo was still around

or that they worked with the telegraph hill parrots. i used to have a little conure just like those.
they sure seem to be spreading out there. we saw them when we were there in june. they were over almost by the presidio.

[jgraz]

6. Yep, they just turned 10

Now we just have to get them to 11. Last month they racked up 35k in vet bills. We're all scraping out our piggy banks to help keep them afloat.

[glitch]

2. Kick! nt

[tomreedtoon]

7. Can we call them "salt and brimstone" batteries?

Because when these things blow up, well, they may be more ecological to clean up than a mercury battery, but PHEW, they will smell!