Batteries That Breathe

Using oxygen as a cathode could give lithium batteries 10 times the energy
By NEIL SAVAGE / FEBRUARY 2011
AIR SUPPLY: An oxygen cathode increases energy density but makes it hard to recharge.
With the launch of the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, it's been a big year for electric vehicles, but their batteries still have a fairly limited range without a recharge. For a car running on today's lithium-ion batteries to match the range provided by a tank of gasoline, you'd need a lot more batteries, which would weigh down the car and take up too much space.
But what if you could take away one of the electrodes in a battery and replace it with air? Researchers estimate that a lithium-air battery could hold 5 to 10 times as much energy as a lithium-ion battery of the same weight and double the amount for the same volume. In theory, the energy density could be comparable to that of gasoline.
"No other battery has that kind of energy density, so far as we know," says Ming Au, principal scientist at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), in Aiken, S.C. Au was one of several scientists who reported new research into rechargeable lithium-air batteries during the fall meeting of the Materials Research Society, in Boston.
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COOL ROOFS!

July 23, 2010 – Vol.15 No.18

COOL OFF WITH COOL ROOFS.
by Bruce Mulliken, Green Energy News

The walls of my red brick house are hot to the touch in the record-breaking heat of the summer of 2010. I could probably fry an egg on my home’s gray slate tile roof. (If there was a nice frying pan flat spot, of course.)

Just a few months ago when warm moist air from the south met with cold air from the north, that same tired 60-year old roof held a 4-foot drift of record-breaking snow. The roof was damaged later by ice, and it leaked below.

Halfway through the year the planet is now on track to be the hottest yet in modern times.

The planet’s getting warmer because too much energy in sunlight is being trapped by heat reflective gases that man has put there in his foolish assumption that the thin layer of air we live in could somehow absorb those gases without complaint.

We need to find ways to artificially reflect more sunlight back into space.

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