Big Batteries Boomed In 2015 -- Thursday, March 3, 2016

Updates

March 7, 2016: I've written about this in the past; can't find it now. Automotive manufacturers and technology companies like Apple have spent decades and poured resources (money, people) into developing better batteries, with not much success to show for all that effort. The research will continue, but automobile manufacturers are moving their attention, time, and money to self-driving cars. This says it all: BWM stakes its future on self-driving cars.

BMW AG, which became the world’s largest maker of luxury cars by focusing on Autobahn thrills, is shifting gears to automated driving as urbanization and changing attitudes toward cars redefine transportation.

With sales growth lagging behind No. 2 Mercedes-Benz, BMW is under pressure to show it can still innovate. To that end, the company presented a concept called BMW Vision Next 100. The car includes an interactive windshield that can warn of bicycles, pedestrians or other road obstacles even if they’re blocked from human view.

The future car would interact much more with the outside world than the vehicles of today, BMW said, showing a video of how a light on the dashboard might do the equivalent of waving a pedestrian forward at a crosswalk by blinking green. The concept could be reality within 20 to 30 years.

Original Post

Bloomberg is reporting that "big battery installation" boomed in 2015.

Large-scale energy-storage systems, long considered the elusive link to integrating solar and wind power into electric grids, are slowly becoming a reality.

U.S. homes and businesses -- mainly utilities -- installed storage systems with 221 megawatts of capacity in 2015, according to a study released Thursday by Boston-based GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association. That’s about enough to power a city the size of Cincinnati, Ohio, for an hour and is more than triple the 2014 total.

The U.S. has about 580 megawatts of energy storage installed now, up from 80 megawatts in 2008.

The increase comes as power companies struggle to incorporate energy from wind and solar farms, where production ebbs and flows based on breezes and sunshine.

This story will only get bigger as the years roll by.

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 Cleveland and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

From "the big batteries" to "the big bopper" we now turn to the question of why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland. Yes, Ohio.

I am probably the only person in my age group (45 - 75) that does not know why the R&R HoF is in Cleveland. I never thought of looking up the answer to that question but then through simple serendipity I found the answer. While reading The 50s: The Story of A Decade, the second in a series, by The New Yorker, I came across "Rock 'N' roll's Young Enthusiasts" by Dwight Macdonald, November 29, 1958.

This is absolutely fascinating. Where were we in 1958:

The great symbol of rock 'n' roll, of course, is not Alan Freed but Elvis Presley, the Southern back-country boy who began his big-time career only two years ago and who, before he was draftet, last March, received fifty thousand dollars for three brief TV appearances.

As Freed stands for the blues-rhythm-Negro element of rock 'n' roll, so Presley stands for the country-music element -- hillbilly songs, folk tunes, and cowboy ballads, most of them composed in Tin Pan Alley and all of them heavily corned with sentiment. Of the current rock 'n' rollers, Presley is by far the most vulgar, to use the word in its good sense (earthy) as well as in its bad (coarse).

Imitators on the order of Jerry Lee Lewis, recently extruded from England when it became known that his bride and travelling companion was thirteen, are just vulgar-bad. but Presley has a Greek profile, an impress physique, lots of animal magnetism, and a not disagreeable singing voice; in fact, it was rumored that he had some talent before Hollywood and television got hold of him.

Because of his uninhibited pelvic movements and the vulgar-good-bad way he sings his "leerics," most parents taken an even dimmer view of Presley than of other rock 'n' rollers. For somewhat the same reasons, he has the most enthusiastic teenage following in the business. Wherever he sings, "I LIKE ELVIS" buttons sprout like mushrooms after rain.

Now, back to Freed.

• the term, "rock 'n' roll" was coined by Alan Freed
• he was still the high priest of rock 'n' roll in 1958 when this article was written
• began plugging "race records" in 1949 on Station WJW in Cleveland 
• "race records" as they were called then called were "rhythm" and "blues" numbers that appealed especially to Negroes (from the article)
• Freed thought whites might also go for this kind of music if it had a broader name, so he called his program "The Moondog Rock 'n' Roll Party."
• the original Moondog, a Times Square personage, enjoined Freed from using that name
• no one has contested his right to "Rock 'n' Roll"
• Freed gave the first of several Moondog Balls; overwhelming attendance, enthusiasm
• 1954, Freed moved to WINS, New York City
• 1957, Columbia released Rock Around the Clock, starring Freed
• 1957, Freed put on a Christmas show at the New York Paramount; biggest crowds in theatre's history
• 1958, when The New Yorker article was written: 4,000 Alan Freed Clubs here and abroad; receives a thousand fan letters a week

And that's why the R&R HoF is in Cleveland.

This is a very small snippet of this history at the "Cleveland Rocks" page of the R&R HoF website.

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A theme song for one of the 2016 GOP presidential candidates:

Dragnet For Jesus, Wynona Carr