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<p><table class="image-container float_right" width="200"><tr><td><div class="image"></div><p class="source">Piston Cloud</p><p class="caption">Joshua McKenty</p></td></tr></table><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Set on disrupting each other's business, <keyword id="6390344" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Cisco">Cisco</keyword> and <keyword id="141089" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="VMware">VMware</keyword> are buying or backing startups to gain the upper hand in <keyword id="6356323" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Enterprise">enterprise</keyword> networking.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The latest beneficiary of this proxy war is <keyword id="1773073" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Piston-Cloud-Computing">Piston Cloud Computing</keyword>, which just </span><a href="http://www.pehub.com/184633/piston-cloud-raises-8m-from-cisco-data-collective-true-hummer-others/">announced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Cisco as an investor in a new $8 million round of financing.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/piston-cloud-computing-2012-5%20">As we previously reported</a>, Piston Cloud is awesome for a lot of reasons.</p>
<p>Its founder, <keyword id="1773074" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Joshua-McKenty">Joshua McKenty</keyword>, is an ex-NASA guy who created a super-important technology called <keyword id="1664678" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="OpenStack">OpenStack</keyword>. OpenStack is like an operating system for cloud computing, the catch-all term for the way more and more software is migrating up into the Internet. </p>
<p>OpenStack was built by a big consortium of IT vendors, including Cisco, and it sparked a major war in the IT industry between players like Red Hat, VMware, and Citrix.</p>
<p>(We also love Piston because they dressed employees up <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/piston-cloud-computing-2012-5">as characters from the game Clue</a> for their corporate photos.)</p>
<p>Cisco's investment in Piston is interesting because Piston is designing OpenStack software for enterprise use. It competes head to head with VMware's vCloud operating system.</p>
<p>VMware turned Cisco, formerly a close partner, into an enemy last summer when it spent $1.26 billion to buy a startup called Nicira. Nicira makes a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/software-defined-networking-startups-2013-1">software-defined networking product </a>that severely disrupts Cisco's bread-and-butter networking-equipment business.</p>
<p>Until last summer, Cisco and VMware were bosom buddies, with important Cisco products relying on VMware technology. They also own a successful joint venture <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/vce-is-a-company-that-is-will-soon-hit-1-billion-and-had-no-ceo-for-a-year-2012-7">called VCE</a>.</p>
<p>Since the Niciral deal went down, though, Cisco has been racking up ways to disrupt VMware. For instance:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cisco developed its own version of OpenStack, which lets it stop being a VMware customer, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ciscos-vmware-openstack-2012-10">sources told Business Insider</a>.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>A couple of weeks ago, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ciscos-parallels-vmware-2013-1">Cisco bought a stake in Parallels</a>, a company that has technology that competes with VMware's core virtualization software line.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>And today, it invested in Piston.</li>
</ul>
<p>Other investors in Piston's $8 million round include Hummer Winblad, True Ventures, and Data Collective.</p>
<p>CORRECTION: This story originally reported the funding amount as $9 million.</p>

This Rocket Scientist Is Helping Cisco Stick It To VMware-Again

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Two more IT giants have bought two more startups in a hot but strange market called OpenStack.</p><p>Cisco <a href="http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-piston">bought a company called Piston Computing</a>, whose roots go back to the very creation of OpenStack, when it was born as a project inside of NASA.</p><p>IBM bought <a href="https://www.blueboxcloud.com/insight/blog-article/ibm-acquires-blue-box-to-bring-private-cloud-to-the-masses">a Seattle startup called Blue Box.</a></p><div style="position: absolute; top: -1999px; left: -1988px;" id="stcpDiv">Nas</div><p>Neither Cisco nor IBM disclosed terms, and it's not clear yet whether all these acquisitions in this market are good-news exits for the startups, or more like fire sales.</p><p>Insiders tell us it's a bit of both.</p><h2><span>Why OpenStack matters to the big guys</span></h2><p>OpenStack is a free and open source cloud operating system<a href="https://www.openstack.org/"> jointly created by a who's who of vendors</a> in the IT industry. It was their way to compete with cloud giant Amazon, and with cloud software front runner VMware.</p><p>With OpenStack, users aren't locked in to one vendor (such as Amazon). They can use OpenStack in their own data centers, and easily move apps and data from their own data centers to any other OpenStack cloud computing service provider.</p><p>Red Hat's CEO recently told us he expects OpenStack to help generate Red Hat's "next billion dollars."</p><p>So naturally, OpenStack<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/openstack-vc-investments-are-slowing-2015-4"> launched a lot of startups</a>. But, strangely, it's been a mixed bag for them because they are competing with some of the largest companies in tech: HP, IBM, Red Hat, and so on.</p><p>This juxtaposition became clearer recently when an OpenStack startup called <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/openstack-startup-nebula-goes-out-of-business-2015-4">Nebula closed its doors</a>. Its co-founder was one of the creators of OpenStack when it was born as project inside NASA. The Nebula team was then<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hires-nebula-employees-2015-5"> hired by Oracle</a>, who swept in after Nebula shut down. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We understand that </span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hires-nebula-employees-2015-5">Oracle wasn't cheap about it</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, and offered employees annual salaries ranging from $200,000 to as high as $1,000,000. </span></p><p>That's one of the weird things about this market. The startups <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/openstack-vc-investments-are-slowing-2015-4">are floundering as VC money dries</a> up for them. But the big companies are getting into it with gusto, and there's a huge talent shortage.</p><p>About today's acquisitions, one person told us, "Neither had a chance to make it as a standalone player long term. OpenStack is a market with no intellectual property involved. That means you compete on process and scale ... small guys simply don't have the scale to compete anymore."</p><h2>Good for Blue Box</h2><p>A person in the OpenStack industry told us that "Blue Box did well" with its exit to IBM, though we haven't been able to confirm a dollar figure.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div>Blue Box offered OpenStack as a cloud service and that seemed to be a hit. It had at least 600 customers, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattschiltz">its CEO Matthew Schiltz said in his LinkedIn profile</a>. It had raised 26.6 million in 6 rounds including $4 million in January and $3.3 million in debt.</p><p>Still, it hired Schiltz as CEO about a year ago, a few months after it closed the $18 million round.</p><p>He's a startup CEO-for-hire with a history of selling his companies. He previously ran Symform (bought by Quantum), Tier3 (bought by CenturyLink). He also ran DocuSign back in the day.</p><h2>Piston seems to be an acqui-hire</h2><p>Piston definitely seemed to be an acqui-hire for Cisco.</p><p>According to one person who is close to that company, "Being an independent startup in a market of multiple 800-lb gorillas is an extremely tough position; regardless of almost anything (customer traction, product capability and maturity, etc) joining forces with a larger entity is the simplest way to 'Level Up' to this challenge."</p><p>Piston was loosely related to the now-gone Nebula. The two guys who worked on that cloud project at NASA, Chris Kemp and Joshua McKenty, each went off to found separate startups: Chris Kemp co-founded Nebula and stayed with it until it ran out of money and sold itself to Oracle last month.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Joshua McKenty co-founded Piston, stepped down from the CEO role after two years, spent another two-ish years as CTO before leaving his company to join Pivotal Computing, the EMC cloud company being run by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.</p><p>We understand this had to do with Pivotal making him an offer he couldn't refuse, instead of being pushed out at Piston.</p><p>Piston raised $22.4 million total, including taking on $3.5 million in debt. Its last funding round was for $6.4 million in April, that coincided with $2 million in debt. And now <a href="http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-piston">Cisco has bought it</a>.</p><h2>Eyes on Mirantis</h2><p>The industry will now be watching one of the more successful OpenStack startups in the industry: Mirantis.</p><p>Mirantis makes it living doing OpenStack consulting and offers its own OpenStack software, too. It's like the Cloudera of OpenStack. It's raised $120 million in 3 rounds, including a $100 million round in early 2014. So if Mirantis is ever sold, we would expect it to be a big exit.</p><p>We hear from people in the industry that Mirantis is routinely fending off acquisition offers but wants to stay independent and become a huge software company.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-stars-real-life-2015-4">Here's what 'Game of Thrones' stars look like in real life</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="NzaTRldDoXZcQw9XO6NGGy8J2dbDaF1A" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Cisco and IBM each bought a startup in this strange but really important cloud computing market

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div>Once upon a time, venture capitalists were tripping over themselves to invest in a hot new cloud computing technology called <a href="http://www.openstack.org">OpenStack</a>. </p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It began with Piston, which raised $4.5 million in 2011 - considered a "massive" round  at the time. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other startups with their fingers in the OpenStack pie, like Mirantis, Nebula, Nicira, and Cloudscaling, received collective investments of more than $200 million. VC firm Storm Ventures says that collective investment in the space</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> had hit </span><a href="http://www.openstack.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/StormVentures_OpenStack_Infographic_ForwardPushMedia.png">$1.8 billion</a> by 2013. </p><p>Now, the dream may not be dead, but it's certainly on life support.</p><p>Venture capital support for OpenStack startups has all but dried up. In the last week, one of the once-hottest OpenStack startups, Nebula, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/openstack-startup-nebula-goes-out-of-business-2015-4">went bust</a>, and another one, Piston <a href="http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml">announced </a><span>that you could now use its core product to install hot software like Hadoop and Mesos in addition to the cooling OpenStack - a huge departure for the startup that was once described as "<span>best suited to deliver" OpenStack by investor <span>Lars Leckie of Hummer Winblad.</span></span></span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, bigger companies like Red Hat, HP, and Cisco are leveraging their own considerable market might, gobbling up lesser startups or squeezing them out of the market. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Worst of all, after seven years of development, there aren't many big companies apart from <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/2890873/cloud-computing/walmart-doubles-down-on-openstack.html">Walmart</a> willing to step forward and say that they're actually using OpenStack. </span></p><p><span>What happened to the cloud of tomorrow? Where has all the money gone?</span></p><h3><span>Harder than it looks</span></h3><p><span>The hard answer is that venture capital firms jumped the gun.</span></p><p><span>Originally developed by NASA and Rackspace Hosting, OpenStack was supposed to let anybody, anywhere turn their data centers into a super-efficient cloud similar to the one Amazon Web Services runs. The idea was that customers would do this within their own data centers first, saving lots of money on hardware and other resources. Eventually, as it took off, the biggest companies would begin to rent space in their OpenStack data centers, becoming service providers just like Amazon.</span></p><p>According to the dream, as the most popular open source project of all time, OpenStack would be guided by the community - from tiny venture-backed startups to companies like Citrix, Dell, and Intel - and given away for free, in an effort to stick it to the likes of Amazon and VMware. </p><p><span>But back when investment in OpenStack first started around 2010, the hype was way ahead of the technology, and OpenStack took a lot of work to get up and running with even basic features and low reliability.</span></p><p><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div>"I was horrified at all the hacks it took to get it to work," recalls Storm Ventures Managing Director Ryan Floyd on his first look at OpenStack several years ago. (Floyd led an investment in OpenStack startup Metacloud, which Cisco bought last year.)</span></p><p>Because installing OpenStack was hard, there was a tremendous opportunity for startups to make it push-button easy. This was the pitch from the recently defunct Nebula, as well as Piston. </p><p>But cloud computing infrastructure is a critical decision for the customer, and projects to change it could take as long as a year to get approved.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So the startups needed to move fast to show returns for their investors. Their customers needed to move slowly to make sure they weren't staking their company on unproven technology. That fundamental mismatch is a problem.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It doesn't help that some of these startups were building on shaky foundations.</span></p><p>"The OpenStack code was very immature when they started [Nebula]," says Greylock partner and OpenStack skeptic Jerry Chen.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But it wasn't entirely the fault of the startups. The non-profit organization responsible for guiding the open source OpenStack project bears its share of the blame.</span></p><h3><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A political battlefield</span></h3><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-piston-cloud-vmware-2013-2"></a></span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-piston-cloud-vmware-2013-2">Joshua McKenty</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> co-founded both the OpenStack project at NASA and the OpenStack startup Piston, and served on the board of the OpenStack Foundation, which oversees the software. (<span>He's now the Field CTO for Pivotal, which means he goes out to customer sites and helps them install their own next-generation computing infrastructure.)</span></span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He says that politics have hamstringed OpenStack startups for some time now. He says of the developers working on OpenStack, </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"They're not the people who are using it, they're the people from the vendors who are selling it." </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In effect, the Foundation has helped deliver the market into the hands of the big companies. McKenty describes the foundation as "aggressively anti-startup."</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There's a reason why things worked out this way. As the startup OpenStack products, like the ones from Nebula and Piston, failed to set the market on fire, companies looked to install OpenStack themselves. But it wasn't easy.</span></p><p><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div>And so companies with big service organizations - like Red Hat, Cisco, and HP - get the call to do the implementation. There was no big, sexy OpenStack product involved. They just did the hard work of making it work for their customers. </span></p><p>Red Hat had years of open source chops, since it makes its money from helping customers install and support the similarly free Linux operating system.</p><p>HP and Cisco also have years of experience catering to huge enterprises. HP snapped up Eucalyptus Systems to build out its OpenStack cloud business, and Cisco purchased OpenStack startup Metacloud (which, incidentally, was a Storm Ventures investment that made an 8x return for the firm, Floyd says). </p><p><span><span>Startups simply couldn't compete with these huge services businesses. </span></span></p><p><span><span>"If you want to take venture money, and want to scale quickly, you can't do services," Floyd says. </span></span></p><p><span>The OpenStack Foundation knows this, McKenty says, and has relied on those bigger companies to get OpenStack into more customer sites around the world. Sometimes, it's bent over backwards to serve the needs of those big companies.</span></p><p><span>McKenty recalls one OpenStack Foundation board meeting last year where Red Hat had the agreed-upon agenda thrown out the day before just so the company could bring in its lawyers to quibble with the board over a minor point in the software - a point that had been addressed and solved in a previous meeting, but not to Red Hat's advantage.</span></p><p><span>"The worst thing for OpenStack right now is Red Hat," McKenty says. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">McKenty left the OpenStack Foundation last September.</span><span><br><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></br></span></p><p><span>It's not all doom and gloom for OpenStack startups. One startup, Mirantis, raised $100 million last October to take on those big companies in the OpenStack services arena. Another Storm Ventures portfolio investment, SwiftStack, builds storage software built on part of the OpenStack code, and raised its own $16 million round also last October. </span></p><p><span>Floyd, for his part, is certain that OpenStack is something the market needs, and that its time will come around again for startups.</span></p><p><span>But where their used to be a vibrant, competitive OpenStack field, the conversation is now totally dominated by the big players. And if they were skittish before, the failure of the once-hyped Nebula to find additional funding is giving venture capitalists even more cause to stay far away from the market. </span></p><p><span>"At Greylock, we're looking for winner-take-most markets," Chen says. "The large vendors got what they wanted." </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span></p><p> </p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/daymond-john-biggest-mistake-5-million-dollars-business-shark-tank-2015-3">This 'Shark Tank' investor once made a $5 million mistake</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="Mzdms2dDpyen7Bvj0b0f_ziCslmTlSMl" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Investors were once tripping over themselves to get into a hot technology called OpenStack. What happened?

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div>There have never been companies like Airbnb and Twitter before. The bad news is that no company has ever had the problems of Airbnb and Twitter, either.</p><p>When you install a new app on your iPhone, for instance, you don't really think about it. You download it, you open it, it just works. </p><p>But when you're dealing with the huge and constantly changing computers that run giant web services, rolling out new software can be crazy difficult, and hard to run efficiently.</p><p>Some estimates place average data center utilization as low as just 5%. That's a lot of waste.</p><p><span>Imagine how much harder it would be to get anything done on your iPhone if you had to choose which of its two processor cores you had to run each and every app on. That's what installing software at the data center level can be like.</span></p><p>Which takes us to <a href="http://www.mesosphere.com">Mesosphere</a>. This startup, founded by two ex-engineers from Airbnb and Twitter, wants to make it just as easy to install software in the data center as it is to put an app on your phone, helping any company get up to size.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Mesosphere obviously scratches an itch for many in the tech sector: An early preview edition of the Mesosphere product got 3,800 <keyword id="6356323" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Enterprise">enterprise</keyword> signups, and it raised its first two funding rounds within six months of each other to the tune of $47.5 million, with investments from big name VCs like Andreessen Horowitz.</span></p><h2><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The promise</span></h2><p>Mesosphere calls its product the Data Center Operating System (DCOS), because it wants to do for the data center what the Windows operating system did for the PC - make it easy for anybody to use, without needing to be a computer scientist. </p><p>It says DCOS can increase data center utilization by two to three times right when you install it. Big marketing startup Hubspot, one of Mesosphere's earliest customers, is using it to save 65% off of its monthly Amazon cloud hosting bills. After all, Amazon's, Microsoft's, and Google's clouds are just big data centers. </p><p>"From our experience as engineers, it's just a better way to do this," says ex-Airbnb tech lead and Mesosphere co-founder/CTO Tobias Knaup.</p><p>Today, Mesosphere announces the launch of its core business model: A subscription service based on how many processor "nodes" you use DCOS to manage. So long as you pay, you get the updates to DCOS, Windows Update-style. </p><h2><span>Back to the beginning</span></h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Mesosphere has its origins in the Apache Mesos project, a popular piece free software for managing large "clusters" of servers.</p><p>A diverse set of large tech companies like Apple and Yelp use Apache Mesos behind the scenes to deal with an ever-growing collection of servers. </p><p><span>Mesos was created by Benjamin Hindman, then a PhD student at UC Berkeley. Once Mesos started to get some attention and grow its fanbase, Hindman took his talents to Twitter, where he put Mesos to work behind the scenes at the social network to help them grow.</span></p><p><span>In 2013, Hindman connected with Knaup, who had been struggling with similar growth issues in his role as tech lead at Airbnb. The two decided that Mesos would be the underlying core to a new kind of operating system - DCOS. </span></p><h2><span>It just (doesn't) work</span></h2><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span>The potential here is to turn an entire data center into one big computer that's easy to run and manage. </span></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Knaup goes so far as to say that if he quit Mesosphere and founded another startup today, he'd make sure it was an application that runs on top of Mesosphere DCOS. </span></p><p>There have been plenty of companies that try to streamline things with data center automation, <span>including recent Cisco acquisition Piston</span>.</p><p>But it's never been easy: Deploying hot technologies like data processing software Hadoop or Google-made container management platform Kubernetes in the data center can take days and cause lots of headaches. That's a problem if you're a growing company that needs to scale up quickly, but they're easy to deploy with DCOS, Knaup says.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div>With DCOS, "a lot of these hard problems are already solved," Knaup says. "A minute and a half later, you have Kubernetes." </p><p>Plus, if you're into that kind of thing, Mesosphere DCOS lets you launch applications inside Docker containers, which can make them even easier to manage still.</p><p>And a final benefit, Knaup says, is that a data center running Mesosphere DCOS is more stable, and that it can keep apps running even if a single server fails.</p><h2>The future</h2><p>The public cloud, including services from vendors like Amazon and Microsoft, is also a major focus for Mesosphere.</p><p>Mesosphere DCOS, the software, doesn't care whether the servers are in your own data center or hosted with Amazon Web Services. Which makes it ideal for those who want to take advantage of the high scale of the cloud, without giving up the control of (or the cash investment in) their own data center.</p><p>The industry term for that kind of "both-and" approach is called hybrid cloud, and it's going to be something you hear lot more about soon.</p><p>"Close to 100% of the companies [we talk to] are looking at hybrid," Knaup says.<span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span></p><p class="tagline">Disclosure: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, is an investor in Business Insider.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/students-compete-robotics-worldwide-championship-science-2015-5">This robot competition inspired students and will get you excited about the future</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="s2NW5zdDqpwKs80Md0kBRnZ994Dd_X8Z" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

These guys quit Airbnb and Twitter to help other startups grow much faster

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Steve Kovach, Business Insider</span></p><p class="caption">LinkedIn also has a ping pong table at its office.</p></div><p></p></div>It seems that tech companies in San Francisco are no longer settling for just offering their employees breakroom snacks and discounts on gym memberships.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/02/cool-tech-company-perks.html?page=all">According to a survey of the city's largest tech companies in the San Francisco Business Journal</a>, employees are getting sneakers, on-site haircuts and paid time off to go volunteer.</p>
<p>Here are some of the coolest perks, according to the survey of 115 companies: </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Dropbox:</strong> On-site haircuts; complete music studio equipped with drums, piano, amplifiers, etc.; board game nights; ping pong; console gaming rooms; DDR (yep, a real machine); Starcraft; pool.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>StubHub:</strong> Free ticket raffles for sporting events, concerts and theater events in the local area.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>DocuSign:</strong> A "tranquility room" with soft lighting and water fountain for mothers or people who want to chill out; Nerf guns.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Taulia Inc.:</strong> Brand-new pair of orange sneakers on two-year anniversary.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>SoundCloud:</strong> Global exchange program - employees have opportunity to live and work from another office for a quarter (offices include Berlin, London, NYC, San Francisco and Sofia, Bulgaria).</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Piston Cloud Computing:</strong> A beautiful, awesome hat of your choosing (bowler, fedora, panama) that is adorned via a hatting ceremony.</p>
<p>See the rest of the cool perks <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/02/cool-tech-company-perks.html?page=all">here</a>.</p>

Forget Salaries - Check Out The Amazing Perks San Francisco Tech Workers Are Getting

<p>Matching output to demand is hard with wind and solar power. The answer is to store surplus juice on the grid until it is needed</p>
<p>ON OCTOBER 28th a battery factory opened in Concord, North Carolina. That was good for an area which has seen dark economic times, but the event made few headlines. Perhaps it should have made more, though, for this factory's owner, Alevo, a Swiss company, is not in the business of manufacturing cells for torches, mobile phones or even laptop computers. Rather, it is making batteries that can store serious amounts of electricity--megawatt-hours of it. And it plans to sell them to power-grid operators.</p>
<p>To start with, the new batteries will be used to smooth the consequences of irregular demand through the day by absorbing electricity during troughs and regurgitating it during peaks. If that pans out, it will eliminate the need for gas-powered "peaker" stations which fire up quickly when needed, but are expensive to run. It would also allow non-peaker stations to operate more efficiently. Alevo reckons that if a grid as big as America's Western interconnection (which supplies the west of the United States and Canada) were to use 18GW-worth of its batteries the grid could save $12 billion a year. Though the company has no North American contract yet, it does have an agreement to deploy its batteries in Guangdong, China.</p>
<p>Smoothing the operation of existing grids, however, may be only the beginning. In the longer run, optimists believe, batteries like these, or some equivalent technology, are the key to dealing with the problem not just of irregular demand, but of irregular supply. As the unit cost of solar and wind energy drops ever closer to that of power from fossil fuels, the fact that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine becomes more and more irksome. It is not just the great power-gap that is night which matters. As the chart below shows, even during the day--and even in deserts--the amount of sunlight can vary from minute to minute. And the wind, of course, is equally fickle.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Cheap grid-scale storage would overcome these irregularities. Renewables could then compete on cost alone. And there are many ideas for how to make this happen. Some, such as Alevo's, are ready to be sold. Others work in laboratories but have yet to be scaled up for use in the real world. Others still are little more than twinkles of varying plausibility in their inventors' eyes. But if even one of them is up to the task, then renewable energy may, at last, be able to stand on its own, rather than having to be subsidised and regulated into existence.</p>
<p>At the moment, grid-scale storage is dominated by pumped hydro. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, an American think-tank, 140GW-worth of this is installed around the world, with a capacity of 1.4TWhr. Pumped storage requires friendly geography. You need two reservoirs separated by a good gap of altitude. But it is then just a matter of linking them with pipes and using turbines that, if turned by falling water, generate electricity, but, when fed electricity, turn the other way to pump that water whence it came. Send it uphill when power is cheap, and let it flow down when there are spikes in demand, and you have a nice little business.</p>
<p>Not everywhere, though, has compliant hills and valleys. And pumped storage takes a long time, and a lot of money, to build. Technologies that start small, but can be scaled up as needed, are often a better answer.</p>
<h3>Batteries now included</h3>
<p>The immediate future of grid-scale storage, then, probably lies with real batteries rather than topographical ones. At least, Alevo thinks so. At full capacity, the firm's factory in Concord should be able to turn out 16.2GWhr-worth of them a year. And Alevo is not alone. Tesla is building an even bigger factory near Reno, Nevada (see "Brain scan: Tesla's electric man") to make batteries for its electric cars and for local and grid storage.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Several stations that use batteries to regulate the output of wind farms have already been built, or are under construction. In Sendai, Japan, Toshiba is creating one based on lithium-ion batteries. This should open in 2015. It will have a maximum power of 40MW, and will be able to run at that rate for half an hour. The Notrees Battery Storage Project, which opened in Texas in 2013, uses lead-acid batteries--sophisticated versions of the type found in petrol and diesel cars. It has a maximum power of 36MW and could run for 40 minutes at full tilt. Another Japanese project, of 34MW, in Rokkasho, uses sodium-sulphur batteries. And one in Alaska, of 27MW, uses nickel-cadmium ones.</p>
<p>As that list suggests, many types of grid-scale battery technology are available. Alevo uses electrodes made of lithium iron phosphate and graphite. These are connected by an inorganic sulphur-based electrolyte, a combination, the firm claims, that is particularly propitious because cycling between charged and discharged states produces only a 1°C change in the battery's temperature. This should eliminate the risk of overheating, to which some sorts of lithium-based cells are prone.</p>
<p>There are types of battery that actually require high temperatures to work. In sodium-sulphur cells of the sort deployed at Rokkasho both of those elements need to be liquid, meaning the battery has to be maintained at a temperature of 300-350°C. And an approach being developed by Donald Sadoway of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would use two sorts of liquid metal, separated by a liquid electrolyte. The clever thing about this design is that, by picking a dense metal such as a mixture of antimony and lead, a light one such as lithium, and an electrolyte whose density falls between the two, the three substances will float as separate layers in a container, rather as oil separates from vinegar in a salad dressing.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Despite their superficial differences, one thing all these batteries have in common is that the energy they contain is stored chemically within their electrodes. This has a consequence, at least for those with solid electrodes. The constant change in the electrodes' composition as they are charged and discharged gradually wears them out. This limited lifespan is one reason using batteries for grid-scale storage is still pricey. Indeed, Alevo's claim that its batteries can undergo more than 40,000 cycles of charging and discharging without noticeable loss of function is an important part of its sales pitch.</p>
<p>An alternative approach, known as a flow battery, does not suffer from this difficulty. A flow battery's energy is stored in its electrolytes (of which there are two, separated by a membrane), rather than its electrodes (see illustration 1). Not only does that stop the electrodes wearing out, it also means that there is no upper limit, based on the sizes of those electrodes, on how much energy such a battery can store. Its capacity depends instead on the size of the tanks used to hold the electrolytes.</p>
<p>Flow batteries are a much less developed technology than standard batteries, but they are beginning to become commercially available. Many of those on sale at the moment (by firms such as Gildemeister of Germany and UET of Washington state) use vanadium-based electrolytes. Vanadium is a good material because its multiple ionic states mean it can be used to store energy without having to involve other reagents, and thus complicate the design.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, vanadium is expensive. But systems that use cheaper materials are being developed. Several firms are trying zinc and bromine in electrolytes and others iron and chromium. Ideas still in the lab include flow batteries based on cheap organic compounds called anthraquinones. If these prove robust enough to commercialise, they will be strong competitors in the grid-scale storage market. But they will not be alone. For batteries are not the only route to the destination.</p>
<h3>Pumped up</h3>
<p>If the engineers at Gravity Power in Goleta, California, get their way, even pumped storage is in line for a makeover. Their approach, it should be said from the outset, is one of the most twinkly of the twinkling eyes in the field. Even if it ultimately fails it shows the originality of thought that is being brought to bear on the problem.</p>
<p>Instead of two large reservoirs at different altitudes on a hillside, Gravity Power proposes two water-filled cylindrical shafts--one wider than the other--dug into the ground (see illustration 2). The shafts will be linked top and bottom to form a circuit, with a combined pump-turbine, similar to the ones used in conventional pumped storage, in the upper link. The wider shaft will contain a huge cylinder, made either of the rock the shaft is cut through or of concrete, to act as a piston.</p>
<p>When the pump-turbine is opened, the piston sinks, driving water around the circuit and through the turbine, generating power. Spin the device the other way using electricity, and the reversed water flow pushes the piston up again.</p>
<p>How much energy this arrangement can store depends on how deep the shafts go. And that is where it gets tricky, for some serious civil engineering will be needed if the idea is to work. Gravity Power proposes the shafts descend hundreds of metres. This will require large thicknesses of suitable rock--in practice this will probably be limestone, which is soft enough to cut into--so deployment will be limited not so much by geography as geology. And making a good seal between piston and shaft will hardly be trivial. So it will be expensive. A unit 700 metres deep, with a main shaft 26 metres across and a return shaft (or penstock) of about a tenth of that, would cost $170m. It would, though, be able to store about 200MWhr of energy, with an output of 50MW. Building one that size is years away, but the firm hopes to start work in 2015 on a demonstration plant near Penzberg, in Germany, with a depth of 140 metres, a capacity of 500 kWhr and an output of 1MW.</p>
<p>Nor is Gravity Power's approach the only one to rely on underground spaces and friendly geology. Another is to fill a subterranean cavern with compressed air. For that, the cavern needs to be hermetically sealed and this means using an underground salt dome that has been hollowed out by solution mining (ie, the salt has been extracted with hot water).</p>
<p>Given such a cavern, compressed-air storage is a bit like classical pumped storage, except with a gas, rather than a liquid. Air is pumped into the cavern, increasing its pressure, and then let out to drive a turbine. But there is a catch: gases heat up when compressed and cool when they expand. For compressed-air storage to work, therefore, the air released from the cavern has to be heated (usually by burning natural gas), otherwise it would freeze the turbine. That makes compressed-air storage inefficient--one reason there are only two grid-scale examples of it in the world (one in Germany, the other in Alabama).</p>
<p>This would change if the heat of compression could be captured, stored and recycled. And that is the goal of LightSail Energy, a firm based in Berkeley, California. LightSail has developed a small, but still grid-scale, compressed-air system that sprays water into the compression chamber, to cool the air as its volume shrinks. The air is then stored in a set of tanks with a total volume of 42,000 litres, and the water, with its heat load, is put into two tanks that have, in total, about a quarter of the volume of the air tanks.</p>
<p>At the moment, this device can store 700kWhr of energy, but that should rise to 1.1MWhr when (as is the plan) it is pressurised to 300 atmospheres instead of the current 200. That is a fraction more than one of Alevo's battery packs, which store 1MWhr. For comparison, the Alabama salt dome can store 2.9GWhr.</p>
<p>If heat is to be stored at scale some inventors would prefer to simplify the process, get rid of the compressed air, and concentrate on sequestering the heat itself. Isentropic, a company in Fareham, Britain, plans to employ the compression and expansion of a gas (in this case, argon) to create heat and cold respectively in two large containers of gravel--one of the cheapest solid heat-storage media imaginable. Once again, a pump-turbine is involved. It does the compression and expansion when electricity is abundant, and when it is scarce the gas flow, and thus the heat flow and therefore the whole process, is reversed.</p>
<p>Nor are these ideas the end of the list. Several firms, from giants such as ABB of Zurich, to minnows such as Berkeley Energy Sciences, a neighbour of LightSail, are pushing giant flywheels as at least part of the answer. Another suggestion--for filling in the shortest irregularities in supply, those lasting a few seconds or minutes such as are caused by the passage of a cloud in front of the sun--is to use supercapacitors, which store electricity as an actual electric charge, rather than converting it into chemical or physical potential energy of a non-electric form. At the other end of the scale as far as the size of the gap in supply is concerned, namely the nocturnal hours when solar energy cannot operate, several research groups are trying to use molten salts (usually sodium and potassium nitrates) to store heat gathered during the day and then, at night, raise steam for generators with it.</p>
<p>And there is one further idea around that, though it relies on new storage technology being developed, does not rely on that technology being developed specifically for grid-scale storage. This is to use the fleet of electric cars that its proposers hope will take over from ones driven by internal-combustion engines over the course of the next couple of decades.</p>
<p>In the imaginations of such people, the batteries of these cars (which would, when idle, be attached to the grid in order to charge them), could be employed as a giant storage network, to be plundered with the car owners' permission at times of peak demand. It is an intriguing thought--but the overlap between those times and the times cars are most likely to be on the road might scupper it in practice. As might the answer to the question about how ubiquitous electric cars will actually become. For that will depend on the future success and affordability of batteries.</p>
<p>The path from startup to success is littered with corpses, and an awful lot of business models depend for their putative profit on what is, according to your point of view, either a subsidy or a factoring in of the economic externalities (in the form of climate change) imposed by fossil fuels. In particular, Germany's Energiewende and California's Renewable Energy Programme have, by requiring a large fraction of those jurisdictions' electricity to be renewable, helped fuel the boom.</p>
<h3>Your bill, sir</h3>
<p>The world would no doubt be a better place if the externalities imposed by fossil fuels were properly accounted for in the price of electricity. But that is a hard sell, not least because of disagreements about those externalities' true size. In the meantime, it is better if grid-scale storage can be rolled out without taxpayer support.</p>
<p>That is the main reason for watching the example of Alevo. It says it can make money even in unsubsidised grids, because it has been ruthless about reducing manufacturing costs and simplifying the technology as far as possible.</p>
<p>This is a businesslike approach. If it works, and others prove able to mimic it, then the cost of running a grid, and thus the price of electricity, will fall. That alone will be a good thing. But success will change the very nature of such a grid, enabling it to absorb more wind and solar power even if this is a consequence unintended by the grid owners. How much more is yet unknown, for fossil fuels (particularly natural gas) are getting cheaper too. But renewables will no longer be fighting the battle with one hand tied behind their back.</p>
<p>The world would no doubt be a better place if the externalities imposed by fossil fuels were properly accounted for in the price of electricity</p>
<p>Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist</p>
<p></p>

We've Almost Solved the Biggest Problem With Solar And Wind

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Matching output to demand is hard with wind and solar power. The answer is to store surplus juice on the grid until it is needed</p>
<p>ON OCTOBER 28th a battery factory opened in Concord, North Carolina. That was good for an area which has seen dark economic times, but the event made few headlines. Perhaps it should have made more, though, for this factory's owner, Alevo, a Swiss company, is not in the business of manufacturing cells for torches, mobile phones or even laptop computers. Rather, it is making batteries that can store serious amounts of electricity--megawatt-hours of it. And it plans to sell them to power-grid operators.</p>
<p>To start with, the new batteries will be used to smooth the consequences of irregular demand through the day by absorbing electricity during troughs and regurgitating it during peaks. If that pans out, it will eliminate the need for gas-powered "peaker" stations which fire up quickly when needed, but are expensive to run. It would also allow non-peaker stations to operate more efficiently. Alevo reckons that if a grid as big as America's Western interconnection (which supplies the west of the United States and Canada) were to use 18GW-worth of its batteries the grid could save $12 billion a year. Though the company has no North American contract yet, it does have an agreement to deploy its batteries in Guangdong, China.</p>
<p>Smoothing the operation of existing grids, however, may be only the beginning. In the longer run, optimists believe, batteries like these, or some equivalent technology, are the key to dealing with the problem not just of irregular demand, but of irregular supply. As the unit cost of solar and wind energy drops ever closer to that of power from fossil fuels, the fact that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine becomes more and more irksome. It is not just the great power-gap that is night which matters. As the chart below shows, even during the day--and even in deserts--the amount of sunlight can vary from minute to minute. And the wind, of course, is equally fickle.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div>Cheap grid-scale storage would overcome these irregularities. Renewables could then compete on cost alone. And there are many ideas for how to make this happen. Some, such as Alevo's, are ready to be sold. Others work in laboratories but have yet to be scaled up for use in the real world. Others still are little more than twinkles of varying plausibility in their inventors' eyes. But if even one of them is up to the task, then renewable energy may, at last, be able to stand on its own, rather than having to be subsidised and regulated into existence.</p>
<p>At the moment, grid-scale storage is dominated by pumped hydro. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, an American think-tank, 140GW-worth of this is installed around the world, with a capacity of 1.4TWhr. Pumped storage requires friendly geography. You need two reservoirs separated by a good gap of altitude. But it is then just a matter of linking them with pipes and using turbines that, if turned by falling water, generate electricity, but, when fed electricity, turn the other way to pump that water whence it came. Send it uphill when power is cheap, and let it flow down when there are spikes in demand, and you have a nice little business.</p>
<p>Not everywhere, though, has compliant hills and valleys. And pumped storage takes a long time, and a lot of money, to build. Technologies that start small, but can be scaled up as needed, are often a better answer.</p>
<h3>Batteries now included</h3>
<p>The immediate future of grid-scale storage, then, probably lies with real batteries rather than topographical ones. At least, Alevo thinks so. At full capacity, the firm's factory in Concord should be able to turn out 16.2GWhr-worth of them a year. And Alevo is not alone. Tesla is building an even bigger factory near Reno, Nevada (see "Brain scan: Tesla's electric man") to make batteries for its electric cars and for local and grid storage.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Several stations that use batteries to regulate the output of wind farms have already been built, or are under construction. In Sendai, Japan, Toshiba is creating one based on lithium-ion batteries. This should open in 2015. It will have a maximum power of 40MW, and will be able to run at that rate for half an hour. The Notrees Battery Storage Project, which opened in Texas in 2013, uses lead-acid batteries--sophisticated versions of the type found in petrol and diesel cars. It has a maximum power of 36MW and could run for 40 minutes at full tilt. Another Japanese project, of 34MW, in Rokkasho, uses sodium-sulphur batteries. And one in Alaska, of 27MW, uses nickel-cadmium ones.</p>
<p>As that list suggests, many types of grid-scale battery technology are available. Alevo uses electrodes made of lithium iron phosphate and graphite. These are connected by an inorganic sulphur-based electrolyte, a combination, the firm claims, that is particularly propitious because cycling between charged and discharged states produces only a 1°C change in the battery's temperature. This should eliminate the risk of overheating, to which some sorts of lithium-based cells are prone.</p>
<p>There are types of battery that actually require high temperatures to work. In sodium-sulphur cells of the sort deployed at Rokkasho both of those elements need to be liquid, meaning the battery has to be maintained at a temperature of 300-350°C. And an approach being developed by Donald Sadoway of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would use two sorts of liquid metal, separated by a liquid electrolyte. The clever thing about this design is that, by picking a dense metal such as a mixture of antimony and lead, a light one such as lithium, and an electrolyte whose density falls between the two, the three substances will float as separate layers in a container, rather as oil separates from vinegar in a salad dressing.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>Despite their superficial differences, one thing all these batteries have in common is that the energy they contain is stored chemically within their electrodes. This has a consequence, at least for those with solid electrodes. The constant change in the electrodes' composition as they are charged and discharged gradually wears them out. This limited lifespan is one reason using batteries for grid-scale storage is still pricey. Indeed, Alevo's claim that its batteries can undergo more than 40,000 cycles of charging and discharging without noticeable loss of function is an important part of its sales pitch.</p>
<p>An alternative approach, known as a flow battery, does not suffer from this difficulty. A flow battery's energy is stored in its electrolytes (of which there are two, separated by a membrane), rather than its electrodes (see illustration 1). Not only does that stop the electrodes wearing out, it also means that there is no upper limit, based on the sizes of those electrodes, on how much energy such a battery can store. Its capacity depends instead on the size of the tanks used to hold the electrolytes.</p>
<p>Flow batteries are a much less developed technology than standard batteries, but they are beginning to become commercially available. Many of those on sale at the moment (by firms such as Gildemeister of Germany and UET of Washington state) use vanadium-based electrolytes. Vanadium is a good material because its multiple ionic states mean it can be used to store energy without having to involve other reagents, and thus complicate the design.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, vanadium is expensive. But systems that use cheaper materials are being developed. Several firms are trying zinc and bromine in electrolytes and others iron and chromium. Ideas still in the lab include flow batteries based on cheap organic compounds called anthraquinones. If these prove robust enough to commercialise, they will be strong competitors in the grid-scale storage market. But they will not be alone. For batteries are not the only route to the destination.</p>
<h3>Pumped up</h3>
<p>If the engineers at Gravity Power in Goleta, California, get their way, even pumped storage is in line for a makeover. Their approach, it should be said from the outset, is one of the most twinkly of the twinkling eyes in the field. Even if it ultimately fails it shows the originality of thought that is being brought to bear on the problem.</p>
<p>Instead of two large reservoirs at different altitudes on a hillside, Gravity Power proposes two water-filled cylindrical shafts--one wider than the other--dug into the ground (see illustration 2). The shafts will be linked top and bottom to form a circuit, with a combined pump-turbine, similar to the ones used in conventional pumped storage, in the upper link. The wider shaft will contain a huge cylinder, made either of the rock the shaft is cut through or of concrete, to act as a piston.</p>
<p>When the pump-turbine is opened, the piston sinks, driving water around the circuit and through the turbine, generating power. Spin the device the other way using electricity, and the reversed water flow pushes the piston up again.</p>
<p>How much energy this arrangement can store depends on how deep the shafts go. And that is where it gets tricky, for some serious civil engineering will be needed if the idea is to work. Gravity Power proposes the shafts descend hundreds of metres. This will require large thicknesses of suitable rock--in practice this will probably be limestone, which is soft enough to cut into--so deployment will be limited not so much by geography as geology. And making a good seal between piston and shaft will hardly be trivial. So it will be expensive. A unit 700 metres deep, with a main shaft 26 metres across and a return shaft (or penstock) of about a tenth of that, would cost $170m. It would, though, be able to store about 200MWhr of energy, with an output of 50MW. Building one that size is years away, but the firm hopes to start work in 2015 on a demonstration plant near Penzberg, in Germany, with a depth of 140 metres, a capacity of 500 kWhr and an output of 1MW.</p>
<p>Nor is Gravity Power's approach the only one to rely on underground spaces and friendly geology. Another is to fill a subterranean cavern with compressed air. For that, the cavern needs to be hermetically sealed and this means using an underground salt dome that has been hollowed out by solution mining (ie, the salt has been extracted with hot water).</p>
<p>Given such a cavern, compressed-air storage is a bit like classical pumped storage, except with a gas, rather than a liquid. Air is pumped into the cavern, increasing its pressure, and then let out to drive a turbine. But there is a catch: gases heat up when compressed and cool when they expand. For compressed-air storage to work, therefore, the air released from the cavern has to be heated (usually by burning natural gas), otherwise it would freeze the turbine. That makes compressed-air storage inefficient--one reason there are only two grid-scale examples of it in the world (one in Germany, the other in Alabama).</p>
<p>This would change if the heat of compression could be captured, stored and recycled. And that is the goal of LightSail Energy, a firm based in Berkeley, California. LightSail has developed a small, but still grid-scale, compressed-air system that sprays water into the compression chamber, to cool the air as its volume shrinks. The air is then stored in a set of tanks with a total volume of 42,000 litres, and the water, with its heat load, is put into two tanks that have, in total, about a quarter of the volume of the air tanks.</p>
<p>At the moment, this device can store 700kWhr of energy, but that should rise to 1.1MWhr when (as is the plan) it is pressurised to 300 atmospheres instead of the current 200. That is a fraction more than one of Alevo's battery packs, which store 1MWhr. For comparison, the Alabama salt dome can store 2.9GWhr.</p>
<p>If heat is to be stored at scale some inventors would prefer to simplify the process, get rid of the compressed air, and concentrate on sequestering the heat itself. Isentropic, a company in Fareham, Britain, plans to employ the compression and expansion of a gas (in this case, argon) to create heat and cold respectively in two large containers of gravel--one of the cheapest solid heat-storage media imaginable. Once again, a pump-turbine is involved. It does the compression and expansion when electricity is abundant, and when it is scarce the gas flow, and thus the heat flow and therefore the whole process, is reversed.</p>
<p>Nor are these ideas the end of the list. Several firms, from giants such as ABB of Zurich, to minnows such as Berkeley Energy Sciences, a neighbour of LightSail, are pushing giant flywheels as at least part of the answer. Another suggestion--for filling in the shortest irregularities in supply, those lasting a few seconds or minutes such as are caused by the passage of a cloud in front of the sun--is to use supercapacitors, which store electricity as an actual electric charge, rather than converting it into chemical or physical potential energy of a non-electric form. At the other end of the scale as far as the size of the gap in supply is concerned, namely the nocturnal hours when solar energy cannot operate, several research groups are trying to use molten salts (usually sodium and potassium nitrates) to store heat gathered during the day and then, at night, raise steam for generators with it.</p>
<p>And there is one further idea around that, though it relies on new storage technology being developed, does not rely on that technology being developed specifically for grid-scale storage. This is to use the fleet of electric cars that its proposers hope will take over from ones driven by internal-combustion engines over the course of the next couple of decades.</p>
<p>In the imaginations of such people, the batteries of these cars (which would, when idle, be attached to the grid in order to charge them), could be employed as a giant storage network, to be plundered with the car owners' permission at times of peak demand. It is an intriguing thought--but the overlap between those times and the times cars are most likely to be on the road might scupper it in practice. As might the answer to the question about how ubiquitous electric cars will actually become. For that will depend on the future success and affordability of batteries.</p>
<p>The path from startup to success is littered with corpses, and an awful lot of business models depend for their putative profit on what is, according to your point of view, either a subsidy or a factoring in of the economic externalities (in the form of climate change) imposed by fossil fuels. In particular, Germany's Energiewende and California's Renewable Energy Programme have, by requiring a large fraction of those jurisdictions' electricity to be renewable, helped fuel the boom.</p>
<h3>Your bill, sir</h3>
<p>The world would no doubt be a better place if the externalities imposed by fossil fuels were properly accounted for in the price of electricity. But that is a hard sell, not least because of disagreements about those externalities' true size. In the meantime, it is better if grid-scale storage can be rolled out without taxpayer support.</p>
<p>That is the main reason for watching the example of Alevo. It says it can make money even in unsubsidised grids, because it has been ruthless about reducing manufacturing costs and simplifying the technology as far as possible.</p>
<p>This is a businesslike approach. If it works, and others prove able to mimic it, then the cost of running a grid, and thus the price of electricity, will fall. That alone will be a good thing. But success will change the very nature of such a grid, enabling it to absorb more wind and solar power even if this is a consequence unintended by the grid owners. How much more is yet unknown, for fossil fuels (particularly natural gas) are getting cheaper too. But renewables will no longer be fighting the battle with one hand tied behind their back.</p>
<p><br id="__tmp">The world would no doubt be a better place if the externalities imposed by fossil fuels were properly accounted for in the price of electricity</br></p>
<p>Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist</p>
<p></p>

You Searched For "Piston Cloud Computing" and got 7 results

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These guys quit Airbnb and Twitter to help other startups grow much faster

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Forget Salaries - Check Out The Amazing Perks San Francisco Tech Workers Are Getting

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We've Almost Solved the Biggest Problem With Solar And Wind

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