The new University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering found a new way to power the first floor of the building by installing a 1.1 megawatt bank of high-end lithium-ion batteries.
Considering that the average AA battery generates around 1 watt-hour of electricity, there should be some 1.1 million such batteries installed.
In other words, for powering the University’s first floor, they need batteries that, put side-by-side, would cover the entire bottom of an 50 meter long Olympic sized pool.
The AA batteries needed to power the building have been donated by Winston Global Energy CEO Winston Chung, and are worth some $2.5 million.
The school hopes to expand the number of batteries to power the entire building. The next step is to install a bank of solar panels on the rooftop in order to charge the batteries.
I wonder why they didn’t think beyond batteries, to a more technologically-advanced hydrogen storage.
[via SmartPlanet]
