Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and .... Obama's Batteries
2010 is now more than half over, and cleantech continues to progress at a startling rate during this hot summer. The Gulf oil spill flow is stopped for now; but there is more.
Last week, for example, President Obama made another visit (his fourth) to a manufacturing facility in Holland, Michigan where electric vehicles and advanced batteries are dreamed of and made. Moreover, the Department of Energy also released last week a report on the massive, billion dollar governmental efforts to promote electric vehicles and advanced batteries.
Putting battery technology into perspective, also, is a new book, The Battery, How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution, Henry Schlesinger, Harper-Collins, 2010. This is a very readable book, designed for the general reader (although Schlesinger arguably spends too much time detailing how battery technology developed from 1800-1950 compared to explaining the more recent and current developments integral to our lives).
More perspective: ...
Predictions made six years ago about commercial development of lithium ion batteries for large battery systems appear to be proving true. See, Lithium Batteries, Science and Technology, Kluwer Academic, 2004 (Eds. Nazri, Pistoia) (“Li-ion electrochemistry has now demonstrated its ability to be used in large batteries for a very wide range of applications. … There is no doubt that this system will very soon find its place in the industrial battery market. …Ultimately, Li-ion large batteries are expected to be competitive with the today’s common systems on the basis of life cycle cost.” p. 684)
At the center of this summer's cleantech storm are lithium-ion batteries.
These batteries were first developed in the early 1990’s in Japan at Sony (and Asahi Chemical) to provide a safer alternative to the existing lithium batteries. In fact, I am reading the Schlesinger battery book on an iPad powered by a lithium ion battery, which proves the point how better batteries influence our daily lives in important ways. America has not turned out to be the center of lithium-ion battery commercialization. For example, Schlesinger writes “Sony was soon joined by South Korean manufacturers and even Chinese companies as the Far East became the center of Li-ion battery manufacturing.”
Now, Obama wants to change that. The USA will make batteries!
This reminds me of the two years I spent in Japan (1992-1993) doing research for the Japanese phone company, NTT, on lithium battery materials. I wondered how long it would take for the US to figure this out that batteries are important to our future.
Do not forget: nanotechnology plays a central role in achieving better power density from batteries, along with other critical battery properties. Some good news is that leading scientists continue to develop new battery concepts based on nanotechnology. See, e.g., Lee et al., “High-Power Lithium Batteries from Functionalized Carbon-Nanotube Electrodes,” Nature Nanotechnology, 5, 531-537 (2010). Battery markets are expected to drive further commercial developments of carbon nanotubes.
The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) strategy plan – worth billions of dollars in future spending - is currently being updated if not revised. Hopefully, Obama’s batteries will be central to the mission.
And also note: the summer's Tom Cruise action movie, Knight and Day, even featured advanced battery technology as the center of the spy action!
Batteries, apparently, have become a new icon in American culture, taking its place alongside baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and - wow - the cars they empower!