Your Next Battery Is a Capacitor

Benjamin Franklin may have had it right in the first place. When he conducted his famous kite flying experiments, he was trying to capture electricity and store it in a battery. In terms of Colonial technology that meant Leyden Jars. A Leyden Jar is a glass jar with foil conductors wrapped both inside and outside. The glass in-between forms a dielectric insulator that allows electric charge to be stored in the conductors. Charge it up with static from shuffling your feet across the floor or atmospheric charge from a thunderstorm and you have stored electricity that can be useful later. You can even link multiple Leyden Jars together in a "battery" of jars to get a really big charge. That's where the idea of a battery started.

Fast forward from the days of Ben Franklin to this year. The latest iteration of the capacitor is the Graphene Ultracapacitor created by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. Ultracapacitors are physically small but powerful capacitors. By replacing big glass bottles with nanometer thin dielectrics, capacities on the order of farads can be produced in something the size of your thumb. Compare that to the Leyden Jar which has a capacity measured in picofarads, a million millionth of a farad.

The thing about farad level capacitors is that they start acting like batteries. A Leyden Jar or a capacitor typically found in electronics filtering applications will give you a good jolt, but it won't power a cell phone more than momentarily. In high school electronics class, a popular prank was to charge up a capacitor using a DC power supply and then leave it laying on the desk for some unsuspecting victim to pick up. Oh, the ROFL joy we experienced every time that happened. It was great amusement until the day one of the dimmer students plugged an electrolytic cap into a wall outlet. In seconds the end cap exploded with a loud bang, spewing aluminum oxide powder up his arm. I'm not sure who was more shocked: The student who thought he'd been shot or the teacher who laid down the law for all of us.

Fortunately, this was in the days before capacitors with more than a couple hundred microfarads at a hundred volts or more were too expensive and too large to be used in most applications. Nowadays you might vaporize a piece of wire with a larger ultracapacitor. Or, you could put all that capacity to good use running your electronics. Capacitors and batteries can both be used as power sources. Capacitors have an advantage in that they charge very quickly. But until recently, they've had the disadvantage of being able to pack less power in a given size package. With the development of new material technologies such as graphene, it may not be long before your cell phone, computer, watch and even hybrid vehicle are all powered by high technology versions of Ben Franklin's Leyden Jars.

Holy Guacamole, It's Green Hosting

The unlimited power sucking days of the Internet may be nearing an end. It's not just SUVs and old incandescent light bulbs that are sending polar bears to a watery grave. Every one of us who publishes a Web site or operates an online business contributes a little to the rising fever of Mother Earth. But what can we do about it short of pulling the plug on the very technology that puts food on our tables? What we need is a lean, green hosting machine.

Eco-hosting is a new idea that comes from the recognition that non-polluting electric power sources are in short supply, while our appetite for electricity is insatiable. Throwing another shovel full of coal on the fire isn't the answer it used to be. That's especially true now that we know that even scrubbing fossil fuel emissions of the uglier smog and acid rain pollutants still leaves the CO2 dilemma. While we might feel a little squeamish about plugging in another toasty server farm, lots of people are feeling so squeamish about global warming that bringing new power plants online is getting contentious. Hydro is pretty much all dammed up. Nukes are scary. What's left? I know. Alternative energy!

Wind and solar energy used to be laughable. But while everybody was yucking it up over the decades, the cost of both energy conversion technologies has been getting more and more competitive. Joke's over. You've got Google powering its Googleplex with solar panels and oilman T. Boone Pickens singing the praises of windmills in Texas. The alternative energy bandwagon is electrically powered and picking up steam... so to speak.

A company that's positioned itself out in front of the eco-parade is one with a really green name. I mean REALLY green. It's Good Avocado.

You read right. Good Avocado is the name of an eco-hosting company. No avocados come lately are they, either. This company has been offering eco-friendly hosting solutions for almost ten years. Now you might be wondering what makes a hosting company eco-friendly. In this case it's based on 100% carbon neutral operations "generated" by buying wind and solar offsets. Plus they plant a tree for every account they establish.

Green? Yes. But what makes them a good Web host avocado? This group is as smart as they are responsible. Their hosting technology is based on a cluster of servers called the AvocadoFarm that can ramp up with more traffic capacity to maintain consistent page load times and a 100% uptime guarantee. You know that the vast majority of web hosting companies wouldn't dare make such an offer, much less meet it.

You don't pay a premium for this hosting performance or the satisfaction of doing your part to support a better environment. Hosting packages and reseller accounts are competitively priced and come with lots of professional grade goodies like a brandable interface, Ruby on Rails, ability to host unlimited websites, and as many email accounts and MySQL databases as you can use. With 300 GB disk storage and 1,000 GB bandwidth you should be pretty well set no matter how big your business grows. Sound good, perhaps even great? Have a closer look and perhaps take a bite of Good Avocado Professional Hosting.