“Just a few bits and pieces here and there. But enough to know that we’re dealing with some serious next-level craziness.”

Allanon leaned back in his throne with a keyboard and trackpad on his lap. The three of them stepped behind him as he brought up the information on his massive collection of display screens. Burke noticed Nic look back at the dragon with his brows furrowed, as if the thing may wake up and breathe fire at any moment.

“You’ve heard of the Powerwall, right?” Allanon said.

“Of course,” Burke replied.

“Please remember to explain all this to Nic and me like we are mentally handicapped five-year-olds,” Carter said. “What’s a Powerwall?”

Burke rolled his eyes. “You’ve heard of Elon Musk and Tesla Motors, right?”

“The electric car manufacturer?”

“Yes, but they’re involved in other areas of research and development as well. They currently have the most practical and efficient home battery on the market. It’s called the Powerwall, and the commercial version is called the Powerpack, which looks like a big air conditioning unit. Powerwall is a home battery that charges itself using solar panels, or when utility rates are low, and then powers your home in the evening. It also works as a backup during power outages.”

“But Powerwall isn’t an off-the-grid solution,” Allanon said. “It uses solar energy and is about the most efficient battery for its size on the market today, but if you wanted it to power your house without being connected to the grid, you’d need to fill your garage with the things and cover your yard with panels, and you would probably still have sags and brownouts. Plus, that’s really not a viable solution, and it’s certainly nothing that the average homeowner could afford. So there’s a big race right now to design a battery that’s efficient enough to store up the energy necessary to power a home without being connected to the power grid.”

Allanon ran his fingers over the keys and all the displays connected to form one image of a schematic for a device the size of a large duffle bag. “I wasn’t able to recover enough to get the full picture of what you have here,” he announced, “but whoever’s hard drives these were, was working on the smallest and most powerful battery the world has ever seen.”

Burke’s eyes flew over the schematics, and he said, “It looks they were able to increase the energy density of Vanadium flow batteries by switching the electrolyte formulation to some kind of microbial bath and then created a sort of hybrid system by combining Vanadium flow battery concepts with zinc oxide nanowire.”

Allanon grinned from ear to ear. “That’s what I’ve postulated as well. The nanowire uses a Piezoelectric effect to convert sound-caused vibrations into electricity. I just read an article about scientists from Nokia and Queen Mary University of London using a similar technique. But they were only trying to generate enough power to charge up a cell phone. Basically the nanowire vibrates when exposed to any kind of ambient sound, so their battery actually recharges itself from ambient sound waves. These designs take the concept to a whole new level. The storage capacity and output levels are staggering.”