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" The most popular alternatives to fossil fuels for generating electricity--wind and solar--don&amp;#039;t look so good once the sun sets and the wind dies down. To provide a home with reliable power, either technology must be coupled with an energy-storage system. For now, that means a bank of lead-acid batteries. But there&amp;#039;s a better way, according to research scientist Grover Coors. &amp;quot;The problem [with lead-acid batteries] is they tend to fail after a few hundred charge-discharge cycles,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;We need a battery that cycles so many times we lose count.&amp;quot; Sodium-sulfur batteries are a promising alternative, but only for industrial settings--they operate at temperatures around 600 F, far too hot to sit in anyone&amp;#039;s basement.      ENERGY: WIND-AND-SOLAR-POWER BATTERY     INNOVATORS: Grover Coors, John Watkins; Ceramatec BRILLIANT IDEA: A whole-house battery that could help make home generation of electricity a mainstream alternative.     Coors was the chief scientist at CoorsTek, an advanced ceramics company founded by his great-grandfather, the brewer Adolph Coors, when the company bought a ceramics R&amp;amp;amp;D firm last year. Coors knew that the new subsidiary, Ceramatec, was working on a material that could form the electrolyte heart of a sodium battery cool enough for residential use. Coors and fellow researcher John Watkins built a promising prototype by sandwiching the material-- a sodium super-ionic conductor--between a sodium metal anode and a still-undisclosed aqueous cathode. Now they hope to develop a $2000 refrigerator-size unit that can yield 5 kilowatts for 4 hours before recharging--and keep it up for 10 years. If they succeed, it could help bring at-home generation of electricity from the margins into the mainstream. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a4618/4332917/>