Liquid Battery Offers Promising Solar Energy Storage Technique

Liquid Battery Offers Promising Solar Energy Storage Technique March 6th, 2009 by Lisa Zyga Enlarge The all-liquid battery: discharged (left), charging (middle), and charged (right). Molten magnesium (blue) is the top electrode, in the middle is the electrolyte (green), and molten antimony (yellow) is the bottom electrode. Image credit: Arthur Mount. (PhysOrg.com) -- One of the biggest challenges currently facing large-scale solar energy technology is finding an effective way to store the energy, which is essential for using the electricity at night or on cloudy days. Recently, researchers from MIT have designed a new kind of battery that, unlike conventional batteries, is made of all-liquid active materials. Donald Sadoway, a materials chemistry professor at MIT, and his team have fabricated prototypes of the liquid battery, and have demonstrated that the materials can quickly absorb large amounts of electricity, as required for solar energy storage. "No one had been able to get their arms around the problem of energy storage on a massive scale for the power grid," says Sadoway. "We're literally looking at a battery capable of storing the grid." The battery consists of three layers of liquids: two electrode liquids on the top and bottom (electrodes are usually solid in conventional batteries), and an electrolyte liquid in the middle. In the researchers' first prototype, the electrodes were molten metals - magnesium on the top and antimony on the bottom - while the electrolyte was a molten salt such as sodium sulfide. In later prototypes, the researchers investigated using other materials for improved performance. Since each liquid has a different density, the liquids automatically form the three distinct layers. When charging, the solid container holding the liquids collects electrons from exterior solar panels or another power supply, and later, for discharging, the container carries the electrons away to the electrical grid to be used as electricity. As electrons flow into the battery cell, magnesium ions in the electrolyte gain electrons and form magnesium metal, rising to form the upper molten magnesium electrode. At the same time, antimony ions in the electrolyte lose electrons, and sink to form the lower molten antimony electrode. At this point, the battery is fully charged, since the battery has thick electrode layers and a small layer of electrolyte. To discharge the electrical current, the process is reversed, and the metal atoms become ions again. As Sadoway explained in a recent article in MIT's Technology Review, the liquid battery is a promising candidate for solar energy storage for several reasons. For one thing, it costs less than a third of the cost of today's batteries, since the materials are inexpensive and the design allows for simple manufacturing. Further, the liquid battery has a longer lifetime than conventional batteries, since there are no solid active materials to degrade. The liquid battery is also useful in a wide range of locations compared with other proposed solar storage methods, such as pumping water. Most importantly, the liquid battery's electrodes can operate at electrical currents tens of times higher than any previous battery, making it capable of quickly absorbing large amounts of electricity. The researchers hope to commercialize the liquid battery in the next five years. As Sadoway explained, connecting the batteries into a giant battery pack to supply electricity for New York City would require nearly 60,000 square meters of land. Such a battery pack could store energy from enormous solar farms, which would replace today's power plants and transmission lines as they become old.

On the road to Fascism in Australia: Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day

Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day Saved Asher Moses March 17, 2009 - 11:48AM Advertisement The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks. Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites. The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website. ACMA's blacklist does not have a significant impact on web browsing by Australians today but sites contained on it will be blocked for everyone if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme. But even without the mandatory censorship scheme, as is evident in the Whirlpool case, ACMA can force sites hosted in Australia to remove "prohibited" pages and even links to prohibited pages. Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government's censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal. "The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship," Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban. The site has also published Thailand's internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions. Already, a significant portion of the 1370-site Australian blacklist - 506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which are legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond. Electronic Frontiers Australia said the leak of the Danish blacklist and ACMA's subsequent attempts to block people from viewing it showed how easy it would be for ACMA's own blacklist - which is secret - to be leaked onto the web once it is handed to ISPs for filtering. "We note that, not only do these incidents show that the ACMA censors are more than willing to interpret their broad guidelines to include a discussion forum and document repository, it is demonstrably inevitable that the Government's own list is bound to be exposed itself at some point in the future," EFA said. "The Government would serve the country well by sparing themselves, and us, this embarrassment." Last week, Reporters Without Borders, in its regular report on enemies of internet freedom, placed Australia on its "watch list" of countries imposing anti-democratic internet restrictions that could open the way for abuses of power and control of information. The main issue raised was the Government's proposed internet censorship regime. "This report demolished the Communications Minister's contention that Australia is just following other comparable democracies," Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam said. "We are not. The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the internet. "I agree with Reporters Without Borders. If you consider this kind of net censorship in the context of Australia's anti-terror laws, it paints a disturbing picture indeed." EFA said the Government's "spin is starting to wear thin" and it could no longer be denied that the ACMA blacklist targets a huge range of material that is legal and even uncontroversial. The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has repeatedly claimed his proposed mandatory filters would target only "illegal" content - predominantly child pornography. "As time goes on, pressure will only mount on the Government to expand the list, while money and effort are poured into an enormous black box that will neither help kids nor stem the flow of illegal material," EFA said. "If the minister truly believes that children are seeking out, or being bombarded with, child pornography, then there's a dearth of both common sense and proper research in the ministerial suites." Already, the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Jim Wallace, has said he hopes the sex industry will go broke as a result of the censorship scheme. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon previous expressed his desire to have online gambling sites added to the blacklist but has since withdrawn his support for the scheme, saying it was dangerous and could be "counter-productive". The Greens and Opposition also oppose the scheme, meaning any legislation to implement it will be blocked. The Opposition has obtained legal advice that "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required", but others have said it may be possible to implement the scheme without legislation. Speaking at a telecommunications conference last week, Senator Conroy urged Australians to have faith in MPs to pass the right legislation. Despite previously saying his scheme would be expanded to block "refused classification" content that includes sites depicting drug use, sex, crime, cruelty and violence, he said opponents of his plan were spreading "conspiracy theories". The Government's internet censorship trials are due to begin shortly but critics have said they may not provide much useful data on the real-world implications because none of the major ISPs were chosen to take part.

Safe P2P software for all :)

They call it the nightmare of the Hollywood and the RIAA :) http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/

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