The University of California Riverside has one very dedicated alum who puts our measly $50 annual donations to our alma maters to shame. Winston Chung, founder and CEO of Chinese energy heavyweight Winston Global Energy recently gave the college more than $2 million worth of rare earth lithium-ion batteries equalling 1.1 megawatts of power and measuring the length of an entire 164 foot olympic sized pool! The school will use the batteries initially to power the first floor of their engineering building but the plan is to eventually expand their use to allow the building to generate all of its own juice, moving it off the power grid entirely in the near future.

Solar panels on the roof of the engineering building will be providing the batteries with most of their energy to store and use. Though actually powering the entire building by battery would prove very expensive at this point in time, the donation is more of an enormous opportunity for the school of engineering to study, test, and experiment with alternative energy.

Chung will also be funding six $100,000 research grants for the school of engineering faculty that will hopefully improve cell phone, laptop, and electric vehicle technology significantly.

+ University of California Riverside

+ Winston Global Energy

via Dvice

images via University of California Riverside

One Response to “University of California Riverside Gets an Olympic Pool-Sized Battery to Power Its Engineering Building”

chris offspring says:

November 16, 2011 at 3:00 am

Are you sure it’s “1.1 megawatts of power” and not “1.1 megawatthours of energy”?
Because a battery of the size of a coin could output 1.1 megawatts. Not for long, but it could.
But this coin sized battery could never hold 2.2 megawatthours.