It's not often that energy storage and liquid metal batteries get airtime on Comedy Central.

But here's MIT professor Don Sadoway holding his own with conservative firebrand Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report on the potential of grid-scale batteries to balance out intermittent renewables and lower our dependence on foreign oil.

We've covered Sadoway's liquid metal battery technology and interviewed the professor about the potential of his invention. The technology has been spun out of MIT and received venture funding from Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, and French energy giant Total.

The firm's battery uses molten antimony and molten magnesium separated by an electrolyte. Sadoway claims that the all-liquid configuration is self-assembling and is expected to be scalable at low cost. 

Phil Giudice, the third employee of demand response firm EnerNOC and former Massachusetts undersecretary of energy, is CEO of the startup, which recently changed its name to Ambri.

Energy storage at grid scale remains a challenging target. In addition to cost, technology, and reliability hurdles, there are regulatory and utility structures which are not yet open to the concept of large-scale energy storage. But a little publicity can't hurt. Here's the video: