You may not have heard of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Richard E. Smalley, but you've likely heard of his most famous discovery, the buckminster fullerene, a carbon structure with properties of enormous strength, shock resistance, and possibly superconductivity. Why are we writing about him on an eco-tech blog? It turns out another one of his interests involved another kind of carbon, CO2.

In a posthumously-published editorial - he passed away in 2005 - in the Houston Chronicle this weekend, Smalley focuses on the problem of energy demand. With rising carbon dioxide levels, peak oil production around the corner and rising population, he says that we need tbetter ways to store energy. This is especially true of technologies like wind and solar, which rely on the whims of mother nature. Rather than work this problem on the gigawatt scale, Smalley recommends that we think locally. He believes that the problem is simply too big to address on the gigawatt scale, but, he says, "if you imagine attacking the energy storage problem locally, at the scale of a house or a small business, the problem becomes vastly more solvable."

Smalley lays out a vision of 100 million local sites, storing energy using batteries, hydrogen technology, and flywheels in order to buffer energy usage for hours or even days. An article by Reuters highlights the efforts of three companies working on this part of Smalley's vision. VRB power is ramping up production of a long-lasting vanadium-based battery, ITM power is developing a hydrogen electrolyzer, and U.S.-based EnerDel is hoping that its lithium ion battery will make its way into Th!nk City's 100 mile range electric car.

He also recommends creating a more efficient electrical grid, saying, "Instead of taking a hundred megawatts over a thousand miles, I need to take a hundred gigawatts over a thousand miles and do it cheaply". This would require super-efficient transmission lines. One material he suggests could do this herculean job is the carbon nanotube, a type of fullerene. Of course the nanotube electrical grid makes electrolyzers and batteries look easy. But Nanocomp Technologies seems to be getting the hang of it. They are able to make man-sized (6ft x 3ft) sheets of nanotube material now and hope to be making 10 x 10 ft sheets (NY apartment-sized?) by summer.