Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumWhy We Don’t Have Battery Breakthroughs
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/534866/why-we-dont-have-battery-breakthroughs/[font size=4]A promising advance that came to nothing suggests what it will take to make cheap batteries for electric cars.[/font]
By Kevin Bullis on February 10, 2015
[font size=3]Electric cars are quick and quiet, with a range more than long enough for most commutes. If you want a car with extremely fast acceleration, the Tesla Model S is hard to beat. And, of course, electric vehicles avoid the pollution associated with conventional cars, including emissions of carbon dioxide from burning gasoline. Yet they account for a tiny fraction of automotive sales, mainly because the batteries that propel them are expensive and need to be recharged frequently.
A better battery could change everything. But while countless breakthroughs have been announced over the last decade, time and again these advances have failed to translate into commercial batteries with anything like the promised improvements in cost and energy storage. Some well-funded startups, most notably A123 Systems, began with bold claims but failed to deliver (see What Happened to A123?).
The Powerhouse, a new book by journalist Steve LeVine, chronicles the story behind one of the most dramatic battery announcements of recent years and explains how it came to nothing (see The Sad Story of the Battery Breakthrough that Proved Too Good to Be True). The announcement was made in February 2012, at a conference in Washington, D.C., where a crowd of researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors had come to hear the likes of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton expound on the importance of new energy technologyand also to tap into one of the newest funding sources in Washington, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E. Founded in 2009, ARPA-E had been tasked with identifying potentially transformational research. The head of that agency, Arun Majumdar, was ready to unveil one of its first major successes: a battery cell, developed by the startup Envia, that could store twice as much energy as a conventional one. The cost of a battery that could take a car from Washington to New York without recharging, Majumdar said, would fall from $30,000 to $15,000. Electric cars would become far more affordable and practical (see A Big Jump in Battery Capacity).
Within months, GM licensed the technology and signed an agreement to support its development, gaining the right to use any resulting batteries. The deal was potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Envia, LeVine writes. But soon Envia was getting frustrated messages from GM engineers who couldnt reproduce the startups results. The year after the announcement, the deal was scuttled. Envias impressive battery had been a fluke.
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PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)every issue seemed to contain an article about some amazing breakthrough
that was going to revolutionize the world. Almost all have seemingly
disappeared.
dumbcat
(2,120 posts)were bought up by the evil oil companies and they are locked up in a closet in New Jersey with all the 100 MPG carburetors. I have read this so many times on the internet that it must be true.
FBaggins
(26,743 posts)It isn't as though you can place an order for "three technological advances with a side of fries please... oh, and super size the advances!"
Advances are to be expected, particularly where profits drive investment... but you can't schedule them.
If gasoline were at $5/gal and expected to only go higher... the investments would be much larger and the chance of quick advances would improve (or if the government would just cough up the cash)... but you still can't put it on a calendar.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)A number of breakthroughs have been announced. However, they havent come to fruition.
FBaggins
(26,743 posts)It's as PoliticAverse pointed out. This is the common story for all types of expected advances... they just don't always pan out.
I suspect that this is a normal part of the cycle. There's an initial excitement of a potential breakthrough... but that's usually the PR/funding push when the inventor tries to ramp up from lab results to real-world applicability. Commercial viability is a different thing entirely.