The MIT electrochemist thinks it is possible to build giant batteries using 50-100 fewer individual cells this way than would be possible with a conventional battery array, reducing cost and complexity.
In the mean time, silicon solar manufacturers, from silicon producers to those who take the silicon and turn it into cells and then panels, have built many more giant factories.
But building a giant battery using dry-cell technology would require thousands of individual cells - about the size of a soft drinks can - to be strung together in a massive installation.
They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build manufacturing plants--giant bio-vats that hold millions of gallons of cultured mammal cells--in order to develop new protein drugs to treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer's.