Divine Intervention

Here is the Jon Stewart clip on this weekends Duel

between the Veep and the para wingless farm raised quail hunter.

It is not nearly so funny, if it ever was, now that the blamed victim

is back in the IC unit with buckshot in his heart.

On a positive note,

Here is an encouraging story from MIT on another ultra capacitor.

Researchers fired up over new battery
Deborah Halbert
February 8, 2006

Just about everything that runs on batteries -- flashlights, cell phones, electric cars, missile-guidance systems -- would be improved with a better energy supply. But traditional batteries haven't progressed far beyond the basic design developed by Alessandro Volta in the 19th century.

Until now.

Work at MIT's Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) holds out the promise of the first technologically significant and economically viable alternative to conventional batteries in more than 200 years.

Joel E. Schindall, the Bernard Gordon Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and associate director of the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems; John G. Kassakian, EECS professor and director of LEES; and Ph.D. candidate Riccardo Signorelli are using nanotube structures to improve on an energy storage device called an ultracapacitor.

Capacitors store energy as an electrical field, making them more efficient than standard batteries, which get their energy from chemical reactions. Ultracapacitors are capacitor-based storage cells that provide quick, massive bursts of instant energy. They are sometimes used in fuel-cell vehicles to provide an extra burst for accelerating into traffic and climbing hills.

However, ultracapacitors need to be much larger than batteries to hold the same charge.

The LEES invention would increase the storage capacity of existing commercial ultracapacitors by storing electrical fields at the atomic level.

Although ultracapacitors have been around since the 1960s, they are relatively expensive and only recently began being manufactured in sufficient quantities to become cost-competitive.

Today you can find ultracapacitors in a range of electronic devices, from computers to cars.

However, despite their inherent advantages -- a 10-year-plus lifetime, indifference to temperature change, high immunity to shock and vibration and high charging and discharging efficiency -- physical constraints on electrode surface area and spacing have limited ultracapacitors to an energy storage capacity around 25 times less than a similarly sized lithium-ion battery.

How does it work?

Storage capacity in an ultracapacitor is proportional to the surface area of the electrodes. Today's ultracapacitors use electrodes made of activated carbon, which is extremely porous and therefore has a very large surface area. However, the pores in the carbon are irregular in size and shape, which reduces efficiency.

The vertically aligned nanotubes in the LEES ultracapacitor have a regular shape, and a size that is only several atomic diameters in width. The result is a significantly more effective surface area, which equates to significantly increased storage capacity. "

Affordable utra capacitors can change everything.

Electric cars that have the range of the best cruisers,

and the speed and power of a muscle car would be possible.

Plug-In Hybrids would become absolutely dominant.

If Electric Utilities employed these devices extensively,

Their distribution grids could become muscled up with electrical storage,

and smartened up with smart grid switching and control.

The intermittancy of wind and solar would cease to be an issue

for utility planners and policy makers.

With the large scale deployment of ultra capacitance,

Electric Utilities could defer building power plants for years,

as they employ their excess night time capacity to charge for the day.

That would give us the time and energy for the carbon plant moratorium.

So we can develop third generation photon to electon power paints,

So we can stop adding to our climate change problem,

So we can stop fighting over the last glops of oil,

So we can quit funding our armies and our armaments industry,

So we can start feeding and caring for the poor and hungry,

So we can begin being a family .

An Earthfamily.

*


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"Divine Intervention Diptych" courtesy of Wayne Epperly