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 FUTURE ENERGY eNEWS
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      January 2010

Dear Subscriber,
 
  Launching our IRI Membership  drive this month, we celebrate the
opportunities that Future Energy offers the world. The IRI vision for the New Year is in alignment with other organizations who believe  2010
will be the year for a carbonless energy breakthrough. I'm happy to report, though bound by NDAs, that indeed more than one energy and even propulsion breakthrough has already happened. The inventors are just working the politics and testing labs and IRI Members will be the first to learn the results, so please join today.
  We have a great FE eNews this month, including an amazing story about the great energy pioneer, Nikola Tesla from The Wall Street Journal that says "Tesla In, Edison Out".  To prove this,  Infinite Energy Magazine has devoted their entire 89th issue to Tesla and Fox News also reports that Tesla has been always hip among  techie inventors including Google' co-founder Larry Page and microchip designers at Nvidia Corp. Now, Nikola Tesla is going mainstream. There is even the all electric speedy "Tesla Roadster" car.  Let's hope that WiTricity will wake up to the health risks from chronic 24-hour exposure to high-gauss powerline magnetic fields and instead, learn about the real Tesla wireless technology. Also  in this FE news: The review of the year in energy, turning bacteria and heat into energy, and the state of rechargeable batteries R&D.
 
Sincerely,
 
Thomas Valone
IN THIS ISSUE
1) Nikola Tesla is Electrifying!
2) The Year in Energy
3) Engineering bacteria to convert carbon into Fuel
4) Turning heat into Electricity
5) State of rechargeable batteries & Federal R&D
 
 

     

 

 

 
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1) Nikola Tesla is Electrifying

By Daniel Michaels, Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704362004575000841720318942.html#printMode

 
His Name Is Branding Magic; Thomas Edison Is 'So 20th Century'TESLA. Decades after he died penniless, Nikola Tesla is elbowing aside his old adversary Thomas Edison in the pantheon of geek gods.
When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 electric sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a new line of advanced processors, they called them Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was a scientist and inventor who achieved fame and fortune in the1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current work on a grand scale, electrifying the world. He created the first major hydroelectric dam, at Niagara Falls. He thrilled packed theaters with presentations in which he ran high voltage through his body to illuminate a fluorescent light in his hand. His inventions helped Guglielmo Marconi develop radio.And his rivalry with Edison-called the Battle of the Currents because Edison had bet on direct current-was legendary. Tesla won the contest, 
when his AC equipment powered an
 unprecedented display of electric light at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
Tesla lighting a bulb with his wireless electricity

Fifty years later, the 86-year-old Serbian emigré died in obscurity at a New York hotel, unmarried, childless and bereft of friends. Meanwhile, Edison was lionized for generations as one of America's greatest inventors.
But Tesla has been rediscovered by technophiles, including Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, who frequently cites him as an early inspiration. And Teslamania is going increasingly mainstream.

An early hint was "Tesla Girls," a 1984 single from the British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film "The Prestige," alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary film as "more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way."

Tesla, in short, is cool.

"He was a kind of crazy, interesting dude," says Melody Pfeiffer, spokeswoman for the Dark Void game's distributor, Capcom Entertainment.

Edison, meanwhile, is less au courant than he used to be, says Paul Israel,director of the Thomas Edison Papers, a scholarly project at RutgersUniversity, in Piscataway, N.J. Many significant Edison inventions-including the phonograph and the motion-picture camera-are becoming historical curios. The European Union has banned old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, another Edison innovation.The EU is urging consumers to replace them with more-efficient fluorescentlights descended from those Tesla favored. "Edison is so 20th century, much like Henry Ford," says Bernie Carlson, a professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Virginia. Once, Edison was revered as the Wizard of Menlo Park, after the New Jersey town-since renamed Edison-where he built a laboratory and movie studio. But Edison biographies have started focusing on his role in establishing monopolies in the electricity and movie industries.
 
Recent portrayals of Edison have highlighted his darker side. In the 1998 HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," Tom Hanks plays a French filmmaker who was financially ruined when Edison secretly copied and then released his 1902 epic, "A Trip to the Moon," without paying its creator.

The Tesla-Edison rivalry was intense partly because the highly educated young engineer sailed to America in 1884 to work for Edison. But after less than a year in Edison's labs, Tesla quit in a spat over pay. Tesla-boosters note that in Edison's effort to discredit alternating current a decade later, his staff deliberately electrocuted a murderous circus elephant and profited from a popular film of the killing. To sully Tesla's ideas, Edison's men also helped orchestrate the first execution by electric chair.

"I can't imagine writing a song about Edison...too boringly rich, entrepreneurial and successful!" said Andy McCluskey, a founder of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, in an email. He calls Tesla "a romantic 'failure' figure."

In 1895-after selling his AC patents to industrialist George Westinghousefor a mint and harnessing Niagara Falls-Tesla hobnobbed with Mark Twain,J.P. Morgan and French actress Sarah Bernhardt. But troubles soon began.  Tesla's laboratory in New York was destroyed by fire, along with years of  work and notes. The secretive experimenter then burned through much of his fortune testing radio transmissions in Colorado Springs, Colo. In 1898, he demonstrated a pair of small radio-controlled boats-decades before guided torpedoes-but was rebuffed by the U.S. military. When Marconi changed the world with a trans-Atlantic radio transmission in 1901, Tesla wasn't mentioned.

Inventor Nikola Tesla  achieved fame and fortune in the 1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current on a huge scale. A contemporary of Edison, Tesla died in obscurity but is now being rediscovered and hailed by technophiles, such as Google co-founder Larry Page. Undaunted, the scientist continued to be far ahead of his time. His papers suggest he stumbled upon-but didn't pursue-lasers and X-rays, years before their recognized discoveries. He proposed transmitting electricity through the upper atmosphere. He sketched out robots and a death ray he hoped would end all wars.

"There's a sort of science-fiction aspect to Tesla," says Prof. Israel at Rutgers. For marketers at chip makers Nvidia, who were targeting the techno-cognoscenti with a new product line, that aura is priceless. "A mythology has built up around Tesla that catches people's imagination,"says Andy Keane, general manager of Tesla Products at Nvidia. Tesla's more outlandish pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he could use electricity to cause earthquakes and control weather. He claimed to have detected signals from Mars while he was in Colorado.

Unlike Edison, who died in 1931 with 1,093 patents to his name, Tesla left few completed blueprints. The shortcoming undercut his legacy but added to the air of mystery surrounding him. "Tesla's work is incomplete, so people can read into it what they want to," says Prof. Carlson at the University of Virginia. Christopher Priest did just that in writing "The Prestige," his novel and then movie about rival magicians in Victorian London. In it, one of the magicians visits Tesla in Colorado and pays him to create a machine unlike anything the real Tesla ever mentioned. "I wanted an ambiguous, mysterious genius," says Mr. Priest. "Tesla was the man for the job."

Creators of the Dark Void videogame needed a mentor for their hero, Will, who falls from our world into a parallel realm ruled by sinister aliens benton annihilating humans. "We quickly decided that tapping into the conspiracies and geek mystique built up around Nikola Tesla would be awesome," says senior producer Morgan Gray. "What is cooler than having Tesla reverse-engineer alien technology to build weapons of super science?"

At Tesla Motors, the branding isn't simply an effort to ride the name's nerdy snob appeal, says spokeswoman Rachel Konrad. The Tesla Roadster uses an AC motor descended directly from Tesla's original 1882 design, which he said came to him in a vision.
 
Still, for all Tesla's cachet, Edison's legacy remains inescapable. Ms. Konrad says customers note with irony that Tesla Motors' main showroom is in Menlo Park, Calif. To help boost the Tesla name, the automotive start-up has launched a promotional sweepstakes with Capcom around the release of Dark Void. The prize: a Tesla Roadster. For Nikola Tesla himself, Ms. Konrad says, the prize is overdue recognition. "You know you've gone into mainstream pop glory when you're in a videogame aimed at 18-year-old boys," she says.
 
 
OTHER RELATED ARTICLES AND ITEMS.
 
Another article on Tesla just out from Infinite Energy Magazine regarding the preservation efforts of Wardenclyffe Tower. The whole 89th issue is dedicated to Tesla science.
 
A complete set of DVDs on Tesla technologies and also books and reports are available for anyone who would like to know more about this Genius! Click on pictures below.
 
  Tesla in lab with coils for wireless transmission
Tesla DVD set
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2) The Year in Energy
 
Kevin Bullis, MIT Technology Review, December 28, 2009, http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24280/?nlid=2629&a=f
 
Liquid batteries, giant lasers, and vast new reserves of natural gas highlight the fundamental energy advances of the past 12 monthsgas drilling.     Natural gas drilling has increased 39% in spite of renewable energy interests.
 
With many renewable energy companies facing hard financial times ("Weeding Out Solar Companies"), a lot of the big energy news this year was coming out of Washington, DC, with massive federal stimulus funding for batteries and renewable energy and programs such as Energy Frontier Research Centers and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy ("A Year of Stimulus for High Tech").
But there was still plenty of action outside the beltway, both in the United States and around the world. One of the most dramatic developments ("Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map") was the rush to exploit a vast new resource; new drilling technologies have made it possible to economically recover natural gas from shale deposits scattered throughout the country, including in Texas and parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Advances in drilling technology have increased available natural gas by 39 percent, according to an estimate released in June. The relatively clean-burning fuel could cut greenhouse gas emissions by becoming a substitute for coal. Natural gas might even provide an alternative to petroleum in transportation, especially for buses and taxis--if only policymakers could take advantage of the new opportunity.

Meanwhile a number of technologies promise to cut down on emissions from coal plants. Feeding heat from the sun into coal plants could at once increase the amount of power that can be generated from a given amount of coal and reduce the cost of solar power ("Mixing Solar with Coal to Cut Costs"). And technology for capturing carbon dioxide ("Scrubbing CO2 Cheaply") and storing it ("An Ocean Trap for Carbon Dioxide") is finally emerging from the lab and small-scale projects into larger demonstrations at power plants, even while researchers explore potentially cheaper carbon-capture techniques ("Using Rust to Capture CO2 from Coal Plants").

This year was also the year of the smart grid, as numerous test projects for improving the reliability of the grid and enabling the use of large amounts of renewable energy got underway ("Technology Overview: Intelligent Electricity"). The smart grid will be enabled by key advances, such as superconductors for high-energy transmission lines ("Superconductors to Wire a Smarter Grid") and smart networks being developed by companies such as GE ("Q&A: Mark Little, Head of GE Global Research").

Cellulosic ethanol--made from biomass such as grass rather than corn grain--moved closer to commercialization, with announcements of demonstration plant openings ("Commercializing Garbage to Ethanol") and scientific breakthroughs that could make the process cheaper ("Cellulosic Ethanol on the Cheap"). But at the same time, a number of companies are moving beyond cellulosic ethanol to the production of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from biomass--fuels that can be used much more readily in existing infrastructure and in existing vehicles. Exxon-Mobil announced substantial investments in algae-based fuels ("Big Oil Turns to Algae"). Remarkably, one startup declared its process--based on synthetic genomics and algae--could allow biofuels to replace all of transportation fuels without overwhelming farmland ("A Biofuel Process to Replace All Fossil Fuels").

Still, most people think biofuels will only supply a fraction of our transportation needs ("Briefing: Transportation"). To eliminate carbon emissions and drastically curtail petroleum consumption will require plug-in hybrids ("Driving the Volt") and other electricity-powered vehicles ("Nissan's Leaf: Charged with Information"). Advances that could double (or more) the energy capacity of batteries and lower their costs could one day make such vehicles affordable to the masses. These include new formulations such as lithium-sulfur batteries ("Revisiting Lithium-Sulfur Batteries"), metal-air batteries ("High-Energy Batteries Coming to Market") such as lithium-air batteries ("IBM Invests in Battery Research"), and batteries that rely on nanowires and silicon ("More Energy in Batteries"). A novel concept for super-fast charge stations at bus stops could make electric buses practical ("Next Stop: Ultracapacitor Buses").

Getting the electricity to charge these vehicles--without releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide--could be made easier by a number of advances this year. A new liquid battery could cheaply store energy from wind turbines and solar panels for use when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing ("TR10: Liquid Battery"), making it practical to rely on large amounts of renewable electricity. Vast arrays of mirrors ("Solar Thermal Heats Up") are being assembled in the desert to convert solar heat into electricity, and photovoltaic solar farms for converting light directly into electricity ("Chasing the Sun") are getting a boost from the federal stimulus money. And researchers are finding ways to increase the efficiency of solar cells ("More Efficient, and Cheaper, Solar Cells") and are discovering new photovoltaic materials to make solar power cheaper ("Mining Fool's Gold for Solar"). And although progress on nuclear power is moving slowly, some advances on the horizon could help this low-carbon source replace fossil fuels ("TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor"). Researchers even fired up the world's largest laser system--one that's the size of a football stadium--for experiments that could lead to a new form of fusion ("Igniting Fusion").

Last, and almost certainly least, researchers have decided to look beyond the conventional sources of renewable energy--solar, wind, and waves--to hamsters. Researchers at Georgia Tech fitted the rodents with zinc-oxide nanowire jackets ("Harnessing Hamster Power with a Nanogenerator"), and watched as they generated an electrical current while scratching themselves and running on a wheel. See a video of the powerful hamsters here.

3) Researchers engineering bacteria to convert carbon dioxide to Liquid Fuel
  
 
Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels. In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.
The research appears in the Dec. 9 print edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and is available online.
This new method has two advantages for the long-term, global-scale goal of achieving a cleaner and greener energy economy, the researchers say. First, it recycles carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Second, it uses solar energy to convert the carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can be used in the existing energy infrastructure, including in most automobiles.
While other alternatives to gasoline include deriving biofuels from plants or from algae, both of these processes require several intermediate steps before refinement into usable fuels.
"This new approach avoids the need for biomass deconstruction, either in the case of cellulosic biomass or algal biomass, which is a major economic barrier for biofuel production," said team leader James C. Liao, Chancellor's Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA and associate director of the UCLA-Department of Energy Institute for Genomics and Proteomics. "Therefore, this is potentially much more efficient and less expensive than the current approach."
Using the cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus, researchers first genetically increased the quantity of the carbon dioxide-fixing enzyme RuBisCO. Then they spliced genes from other microorganisms to engineer a strain that intakes carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces isobutyraldehyde gas. The low boiling point and high vapor pressure of the gas allows it to easily be stripped from the system.
The engineered bacteria can produce isobutanol directly, but researchers say it is currently easier to use an existing and relatively inexpensive chemical catalysis process to convert isobutyraldehyde gas to isobutanol, as well as other useful petroleum-based products.
In addition to Liao, the research team included lead author Shota Atsumi, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar now on the UC Davis faculty, and UCLA postdoctoral scholar Wendy Higashide.
An ideal place for this system would be next to existing power plants that emit carbon dioxide, the researchers say, potentially allowing the greenhouse gas to be captured and directly recycled into liquid fuel.
"We are continuing to improve the rate and yield of the production," Liao said. "Other obstacles include the efficiency of light distribution and reduction of bioreactor cost. We are working on solutions to these problems."
Source: UCLA
 
4) Turning Heat into Electricity
 
by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office, November 25, 2009

Boston, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]heat
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/11/turning-heat-to
-electricity?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-December2-2009


MIT research points to a much more efficient way of harvesting electrical
power from what would otherwise be wasted heat.

In everything from computer processor chips to car engines to electric powerplants, the need to get rid of excess heat creates a major source of inefficiency. But new research points the way to a technology that might make it possible to harvest much of that wasted heat and turn it into usable electricity.

In the meantime, he says the technology now being developed by his company, which he expects to have on the market next year, could produce a tenfold improvement in throughput power over existing photovoltaic devices.

That kind of waste-energy harvesting might, for example, lead to cellphones with double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in, or power plants that put out more electricity for a given amount of fuel, says Peter Hagelstein, co-author of a paper on the new concept appearing this month in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, says existing solid-state devices to convert heat into electricity are not very efficient. The new research, carried out with graduate student Dennis Wu as part of his doctoral thesis, aimed to find how close realistic technology could come to achieving the theoretical limits for the efficiency of such conversion.

Theory says that such energy conversion can never exceed a specific value called the Carnot Limit, based on a 19th-century formula for determining the maximum efficiency that any device can achieve in converting heat into work. But current commercial thermoelectric devices only achieve about one-tenth of that limit, Hagelstein says. In experiments involving a different new
technology, thermal diodes, Hagelstein worked with Yan Kucherov, now a consultant for the Naval Research Laboratory, and coworkers to demonstrate efficiency as high as 40 percent of the Carnot Limit. Moreover, the calculations show that this new kind of system could ultimately reach as much as 90 percent of that ceiling.

Hagelstein, Wu and others started from scratch rather than trying to improve the performance of existing devices. They carried out their analysis using a very simple system in which power was generated by a single quantum-dot device - a type of semiconductor in which the electrons and holes, which carry the electrical charges in the device, are very tightly confined in all three dimensions. By controlling all aspects of the device, they hoped to better understand how to design the ideal thermal-to-electric converter.

Hagelstein says that with present systems it's possible to efficiently convert heat into electricity, but with very little power. It's also possible to get plenty of electrical power - what is known as high-throughput power - from a less efficient, and therefore larger and more expensive system. "It's a tradeoff. You either get high efficiency or high throughput," says Hagelstein. But the team found that using their new system, it would be possible to get both at once, he says.

A key to the improved throughput was reducing the separation between the hot surface and the conversion device. A recent paper by MIT professor Gang Chen reported on an analysis showing that heat transfer could take place between very closely spaced surfaces at a rate that is orders of magnitude higher than predicted by theory.  The new report takes that finding a step further, showing how the heat can not only be transferred, but converted into electricity so that it can be harnessed.

A company called MTPV Corp. (for Micron-gap Thermal Photo-Voltaics), founded by Robert DiMatteo SM '96, MBA '06, is already working on the development of "a new technology closely related to the work described in this paper," Hagelstein says.

DiMatteo says he hopes eventually to commercialize Hagelstein's new idea. In the meantime, he says the technology now being developed by his company, which he expects to have on the market next year, could produce a tenfold improvement in throughput power over existing photovoltaic devices, while the further advance described in this new paper could make an additional tenfold or greater improvement possible. The work described in this paper "is potentially a major finding," he says.

DiMatteo says that worldwide, about 60 percent of all the energy produced by burning fuels or generated in powerplants is wasted, mostly as excess heat, and that this technology could "make it possible to reclaim a significant fraction of that wasted energy."

When this work began around 2002, Hagelstein says, such devices  "clearly could not be built. We started this as purely a theoretical exercise." But developments since then have brought it much closer to reality.

While it may take a few years for the necessary technology for building affordable quantum-dot devices to reach commercialization, Hagelstein says, "there's no reason, in principle, you couldn't get another order of magnitude or more" improvement in throughput power, as well as an improvement in efficiency.

"There's a gold mine in waste heat, if you could convert it," he says. The first applications are likely to be in high-value systems such as computer chips, he says, but ultimately it could be useful in a wide variety of applications, including cars, planes and boats. "A lot of heat is generated to go places, and a lot is lost. If you could recover that, your transportation technology is going to work better." Try using case studies, success stories, testimonials or examples of how others used your product or service successfully. Solicit material from clients and vendors, or ask your readers to write. It's a win-win! You get relevant content, and they get exposure.
 
5) State of Rechargeable Batteries & Federal R&D
 
By Paul Werbos, PhD.  Global Energy Group.
 
Another IEEE input, this less certain but more exciting.
 
In brief, I may have been guilty of UNDERSTATING the near-term potential
of advanced batteries. If we limit ourselves to batteries already in mass production,
proven to meet the requirements of vehicles (e.g. in 10-40 kwh batteries), 
the existing line of batteries from Thunder Sky is already enough to prove we
can already do a whole lot better than the NAS envisions for the future. 
My numbers for Thunder Sky ($2000 for 10kwh) are not speculative; one of the companies my wife
 is part owner of went out and bought some of the batteries, for the price they
advertized to us, and tested them in great detail. I have seen them with my own eyes in busses
and scooters and one old car (Mao's old limo).  The BYD car is also out there on the market for anyone to see...
and I doubt that Warren Buffet would have put so much money into the company without doing
a whole lot of due diligence. There are probably other batteries available right now
for mass purchase (though not so public) which are just as good.  
 
BUT THAT'S WHAT'S BEEN OUT THERE FOR YEARS ON THE MARKET ALREADY.
 
What about the near-term future?
 
An IEEE guy told me today about one new breakthrough
we should be checking into:
 
 
 
This immediately reminds me of Lonnie Johnson, an NSF grantee in Atlanta,
who has had a breakthrough this year with rechargeable lithium-air batteries.
If manufacturing plants in the US can deliver batteries at 3 to 10 times the
storage per dollar as the best batteries now available (all Chinese, Korean or Japanese),
there are interesting implications. If we can get 3 times as good as Thunder Sky
without using any lithium, that also has some security implications.
 
Some important immediate thoughts:
 
1. Federal R&D really needs to capture these kinds of possibilities, whatever they may be.
 
2. I do not know whether the zinc one really is three times the miles/$ of Thunder Sky.
Those words on the web site should not be taken at face value, since I don't
yet see WHICH Li-ion they are comparing against. Even within the realm of iron phosphate
lithium ion batteries, miles/$ seem to vary by a factor of two or more, depending on some
related technologies I shouldn't talk about too much. Still, the words might well be correct,
since these guys are focusing on electronic device markets, where the capabilities
of the best Asian batteries are better known than they are in the automotive sector.
 
3. Johnson does appear to have three times the miles/kilogram as these
(Swiss American) guys, probably because lithium is lighter. That's crucial
to aviation applications (Yes, a real possibility now), but miles/$ is far more important
for cars and trucks, and it may be some time before we REALLY know what that is for these new
technologies.
 
4. Roughly speaking, cost of manufacturing a battery is a matter of materials cost and
materials processing cost. UNLESS there are some heavy catalyst costs (something
we need to look at), zinc is probably much cheaper than lithium and just as easy to work.
(Just a guess!!!!). I don't think there are major catalyst costs with the Johnson version,
but I still need to study the web page of the zinc people more closely. If manufacturing process
costs start to dominate, costs will depend more on things like labor costs and automation capability --
areas where there is enormous room to reduce costs over time in this sector, in part by using some
technologies I have patents on myself.
 
5. Some sad realities we must face up to -- when I say that a great breakthrough has been achieved
by a guy whose name is Lonnie, who is an Afro-American with strong ties to Tuskegee, there are some
folks who unconsciously assume this can't be the world's number one leader in this scientific field.
A lot of the "top tier' press picks up much more on stories like a recent project in Technion,
where they haven't done anything to make thier metal-air battery rechargeable... perhaps because
there is an unconscious bias here. I remember a time years ago when I proposed some reviewers
for an NSF panel, 60% of whom had names like "Mary Lou" and "Jennie." I still remember the filter who
said: "Paul, we want the top people. How could the top people be people with names like Mary Lou and Jennie?"
To keep up with reality, we really need to be conscious of such nonsense enough to get rid of it
from our thinking. Or, more precisely, if we are really engaging with the ground-level realities, these
kinds of biases should be reduced automatically; if they don't, we should re-examine ...
 
6. The zinc project seems to be focusing on the smaller scale market for now, to get started.
(1 kwh, like laptops instead of cars?). That's legitimate. After all, that's how the Asians
became leaders in Li-ion. It would be transferrable to larger sizes. How soon will
they get to mass production of batteries suitable for cars? This may be a case where
federal action at many levels could be very important.
 
7. With Johnson's stuff, Argonne has verified the breakthrough in its testing, but I think
he is a little behind in going to mass production with all the bells and whistles (e.g.
battery management for assured long lifetime). Those are low risk tasks, in principle,
IF he continues to have the funding stream and so on that he needs.
 
8. Of course, these are only two examples. I now wonder whether rechargeable
aluminum-air would be as hard as I thought last week... and there is the Techion
metal-air effort...
 
9. Notice how fuel cell technology is crucial both to this new stream of battery work,
and to Johnson's "JTEC" technology. It is very common that the real benefits
of an R&D effort are with the unexpected spinoffs. We really need to keep that
in mind in everything we do. There are probably mainly "failures" which
generated more value to society than low-risk "successes"!!
 
 
 
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