New, Inexpensive and Long-Lasting Battery Technologies for the Grid and Beyond

The growing demand for energy and the movement towards green and sustainable energies has spawned research into new battery technologies for energy storage that will be more cost effective and environmentally friendly.  Some of the new technologies tout low fabrication costs, scalability and longer lasting battery life.  I selected two articles which represent two different but interesting solutions.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110929074021.htm

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/38689/?p1=A4

One such solution was from the September 28, 2011 posting on Technology Review titled “New Battery Could Be Just What the Grid Ordered” using sodium and manganese based technology and the other solution came from the September 29, 2011 posting on ScienceDaily titled “World’s First Energy-Stored Membrane Devised” using a synthetic polymer membrane.

Surprisingly both solutions are responding to the same issue---cost effective and environmentally friendly energy storage capabilities for the power grid revolutionizing energy storage.   Applications these batteries could be used for include: hybrid vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and storage of excess energy produced by power plants.  Other applications using the membrane might be for use with dynamic prosthetic limbs, other medical devices and beyond.

Polymer membrane                                                                      

Scalable Sodium Ion

Internet Traffic Cops Battle Seriously Clogged Web

The following article was published on July 18, 2011 by Yang-Yi Goh, an InnovationNewsDaily Contributor.  The entire write-up can be viewed at:
http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com/internet-traffic-cops-clogged-web-2126/

Princeton researchers are working to ensure the Internet does not grind to a halt.  Everyday entertainment and software companies are adding more and larger content to the World Wide Web such as Netflix’s streaming videos and the growth of Google’s and Office360’s networks, just to name a few.  While consumption is ever increasing, the infrastructure has not kept up with the growth.  Princeton’s Chiang has led a team to research and solve the data flow issue. 

Chiang’s team partnered with AT&T to strategize and implement a solution.  Rather than throwing more servers and hardware into the mix which would just be a temporary solution, Chiang’s team created an application called TUBE (Time-dependent Usage-based Broadband price Engineering) which will alert customers on their current usage and pricing.   Just like with today’s mobile devices that use peak and off-peak pricing plans, customers would be cognizant of their usage and could better determine if their actions during peak times were worth the high cost or do they want to save money by using off-peak hours.  This would be a win-win respectively for both the customer and the provider through cost reduction and higher profits.

The outcome was a great success in the clinical trial and a disaster was averted.  Creative thinking, collaboration and a simple mobile application enabled a better business solution.