MIT invents cheap energy storage?
When I saw the claim that a new, cheap means of energy storage had been found, my first response was 'says who'.
Then I discover that the claim comes from MIT, which makes something of a difference. Claims of this sort tend to fall short of reality. When the claim comes from the MIT press office it is rather more credible than when it comes from Fred Blogs working out of his garden shed.
While I was at Oxford the 'discovery' of cold fusion was the daily topic of conversation in the Nuclear Physics Lab coffee room for months as news came in from the nearby Rutherford labs attempts to duplicate the result.
The first computer security related angle to the story is: provenance matters, especially on the Internet where anyone can join the conversation.
But the second angle is that energy management is trickiest problems in data center design. In the case of a mission critical data center, energy security is part of the total security consideration. As a well known security expert put it to me, the electricity grid is the ultimate 'just in time' system. There is very little storage in the system and what little there is tends to be far from the places where it is used.
