The Weekly Screed (#569)

The Century of the (Super)Battery
by David Benjamin

PARIS — Depending on your point of view, the journey of EE Times/EE
Life editorial director Brian Fuller across America in a Chevrolet Volt
was either a great adventure or the cushy assignment of the year.
In my view, it represented EE Times’ most significant investment
thusfar — thanks to the sponsorship of Avnet — in perhaps the most
important technology of the 21st century: electric power storage,
specifically in the form of long-life batteries.

Fuller and his videographer brother Kirk, driving coast-to-coast in an
electric car with internal-combustion backup, was something of a leap
of faith. They faced swathes of America in which there exist no power
stations to plug in their Volt and recharge the juice in the vehicle’s
288-cell, 16-kilowatt hour battery pack. Right now, 48 of 50 states,
according to Car and Driver, have fewer than ten such stations each.
This left Brian and Kirk using the Volt’s cute backup 83-hp internal
combustion engine a lot more than they might have preferred. Indeed,
after the switch from battery (range 35 miles) to gasoline power (an
additional 300-odd miles), the Volt averages around 30 miles per
gallon. This isn’t bad but, compared to, say, a 1972 Honda Civic, it’s
embarrassing.

When I heard about Brian’s “Drive for Innovation” experiment, I found
myself focusing not on the current Chevy Volt’s limitations but on the
surprising speed of its development. When I first read about Volt
prototypes less than two years ago, I understood that an operating,
affordable consumer Volt was still far, far away. It wouldn’t hit the
market, in any substantial volume, within the decade.

That prediction was over-cautious. Today, there are enough Volts on
the road —along with competitors like Nissan’s Leaf, various hybrids
and an electric Ford Focus due out in limited production next year —
that it might be safe to suggest that the electric car is here to
stay.

Advancing the cause is the federal government’s commitment to R&D in
power storage technology, batteries in particular. It started with a
$69-billion clean-energy package and the revival of General Motors
(creator of the Volt). There’s a $7,500 tax credit to purchasers of
electric cars, and the Obama administration has invested in battery
development throughout America’s 20 National Laboratories. In the
current issue of Washington Monthly, Eric D. Isaacs, director of the
Argonne National Laboratory, notes that his team pioneered the
technology in the 2011 Volt battery, which was licensed for
manufacture by Korean chemical giant LG Chem.

Perhaps the most encouraging facet of the Volt and its overly large,
short-range, too-expensive ($10,000) lithium-ion battery pack is
Isaacs’ lament that researchers have until now failed miserably in
producing an air-cathode battery. If this technology could be
conquered, it would multiply tenfold the storage capacity of long-life
batteries — from Volt’s 35-mile range to 350 miles.

Isaacs limns the R&D problem: “But first, we have to discover a way to
make a battery that ‘breathes in’ oxygen from the air to discharge
electricity, then ‘breathes out’ again to recharge. Then we have to
convert those discoveries into battery systems that can be affordably
mass produced, we have to put these technologies into cars that
consumers want to buy , and we have to do it all before our
international competitors catch up.”

This tall order shrinks in the light of one glowing, indisputable
reality. The United States, over the years, has proven better at
accomplishing this sort of grand technological leap than anyone else
on earth. For a century, we have been the world’s engineers.

Right now, the political world, globally, is fixated on budget crises
and demands for austerity. Leaders from California to Greece to Japan
are reluctant to invest in any sort of long-term R&D, lest “our
children and grandchildren” end up too poor to pay the bill.

But today, there’s no better way for public and private investment to
enhance the future of those proverbial descendants than in research
that can, and will, vastly multiply the capacity for electric power
storage. Battery power has greater potential to positively alter the
future of American competitiveness — and American freedom — than any
other technology in the 21st century.

In his book on this subject, Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries,
Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy, Seth Fletcher quotes an
analyst anticipating the moment when the price of the “current
generation” of batteries slips below the price of oil (which this week
crept beyond $100 a barrel): “It’s game over for gasoline.”

When the game does end for gasoline, it’s also over for the House of
Saud, and for the grip of the oil and gas lobby on the U.S. Congress.
These two blessings alone merit an all-out American effort to win the
R&D race for what Fletcher, a senior editor at Popular Science, calls
the “superbattery.” The superbattery means energy independence, a
mission that ought to be regarded, by our national leaders in
government and industry, as equivalent to our greatest achievements of
the past.

Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America built — among many grand
projects — Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority, not to
mention the Manhattan Project. Under Dwight D. Eisenhower, America
created the interstate highway system. Under JFK, and his successors,
NASA took over the space race, bypassed the Soviet Union and put three
Americans on the moon.

All of these triumphs, and dozens more, began as engineering
challenges. The search for a battery vastly more powerful than the
mutant Energizer in today’s Chevy Volt is an engineering challenge of
equal, if not greater, importance, although its cost is likely to be a
fraction of what we spent on electrifying the South or criss-crossing
America with highways.

By inventing a superbattery, we will, for example, place both the
automobile and trucking industries on an entirely new economic
foundation.

By extending the technology of power storage beyond car batteries into
the “green” areas of solar, wind and biomass, we will reconfigure the
entire U.S. electric grid.

If we do it right, we can create, restore or repatriate literally
millions of jobs, and careers, in energy industries — both those that
exist today and those derived from brand-new technologies.

We will, slowly perhaps but certainly, reduce the suffocating impact
of carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in the
atmosphere. We could clear the air, improve public heath and mute the
uproar over climate change.

We might even be able to play all 12,000 songs on our iPod without
once recharging the battery!

The beauty part of battery research is that it triggers (so far)
barely any political rancor. As far as I can tell, there’s no liberal
or conservative position on batteries (except for the minor matter of
recycling old ones). Developing power-storage technologies that will
allow most cars and many power plants to run on emissions-free
electricity is a refreshingly technological solution to a social,
environmental and political dilemma.

It’s a fix that gores no one’s ox — unless funds now flowing to this
vital area of research are bottled up or cut off by politicians with
ties to the obvious special interests. As proven by that $7,500 tax
break for Volt, Leaf and Focus buyers, resources of such magnitude for
an outcome so visionary — do not derive entirely, nor have they ever,
from the chicken-hearted, short-sighted “market.”

Although we’re not all aware of it, taxpayers are already underwriting
superbattery R&D — just as we underwrote the Golden Spike, the New
York Public Library and the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field. Taxpayers
will be asked for more — pennies, really — before the research
succeeds. We should be glad to pay up, if only for the sake of kissing
BP, Halliburton, OPEC and the Koch brothers goodbye.

Some of the greatest advances in civilization have been the work of
engineers. The next great engineering advancement is visible. It’s in
the lab and it is tantalizingly close to solution. How soon the answer
emerges depends partly on the sheer ingenuity of the researchers
involved, but it also depends on the resources that will be provided —
or denied — as the race enters the home stretch.