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DOE Wants 5X Improvement In Batteries In 5 Years
dcblogs writes "The U.S. Dept. of Energy has set a goal to develop battery and energy storage technologies that are five times more powerful and five times cheaper within five years. DOE is creating a new center at Argonne National Laboratory, at a cost of $120 million over five years, that's intended to reproduce development environments that were successfully used by Bell Laboratories and World War II's Manhattan Project. 'When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,' said U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, on Friday. The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research isn't designed to seek incremental improvements in existing technologies. This technology hub, according to DOE's solicitation (PDF), 'should foster new energy storage designs that begin with a "clean sheet of paper" — overcoming current manufacturing limitations through innovation to reduce complexity and cost.' Other research labs, universities and private companies are participating in the effort."
It's so refreshing having a Secretary of Energy that actually knows something about energy and physics, rather than somebody who just knows how to dig carbon out of the ground.
About time!
U mad bro?
For the record, I am cannibal, not gay...
...which is the nearly inevitable outcome of politicians making political decisions and political "investments" in things about which they actually manage to know less than nothing.
Rob H.
Negative Knowledge: Things you are certain of, which are absolutely wrong.
We're finally concerned with starting to cut our dependencies on oil? Nice.
The DOE should really google more...
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja209759s
Well, we can't all be renowned scientist and expert in battery technology "Rob H.".
What they really need to do is make it a spec for the next DoD project and it will get done. Making batteries for the sake of batteries isn't going to provide the payback that a usable product would. Didn't the Apollo program bring us the 8-bit microprocessor? How do you think the 8-bit micro would have turned out if we just made it without a purpose?
Karma: Bad
The government, picking winners and losers!
The free market should solve this problem just like it has already, with a dependence on millions of years of solar investment which is harvested at low cost from foreign locations!
This, too, will fail.
Wow, now we know how to do scientific and engineering advances. Just pile all the money from the extra taxes we will pay into the government's idea of what should work. Now that is going to be efficient use of capital, right?
Just as an aside. If you get a battery that is 5 times as powerful, you start to get to the point of having a nice little bomb in your pocket when something goes wrong. Ultra high energy densities is what makes batteries dangerous today when something goes wrong with a lithium ion and they smoke and ruin things.
With 5 times as much energy density, when they go poof, it might literally be a bang up mess.
. ...I want a pony. Betcha I get my wish first.
To think that there is not a HUGE amount of academic and commercial research in this area already is absurd. The previous 5 years has produced results that directly made a 10 hour iPad possible. If you want to spend tax dollars on this, make it an X-Prize like contest.
This plan, as laid out, smells like "Workfare for Scientists".
.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Industry has been pouring billions into research. How is $120 million over five years going to do anything?
Anyone who invents a technology ( and production process to keep it cheap ) to get a 5x improvement will be a billionaire over night. If you are going to do this, do it right and spend some real money. How about 250 million a year over 5 years? btw. The if the US government pays for it, the US government should patent everything and get a 5x return for the taxpayers.
Just because you want something, it doesn't mean you'll get it.
We'll see if $120 Million is enough to make a difference.
The problem with gasoline is that is has such great energy density, about 46 Mega-joules per kilogram.
The best batteries currently are Lithium with an energy density of 1.8 Mega-Joules per kilogram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
So are we ignoring the pointed fact that no amount of dollars can guarantee a technological revolution? Money has poured into battery development before and the financial incentive for being successful there is already immense. Funding development of original research is great but attaching a goal like that to it is foolish.
5 x more powerful and 5 x cheaper sounds like 25 x improvement to me.
I want 5X more salary in the next 5 years too.
Doesn't mean I'm going to get it however.
I hate power cords with a passion!
It would be great to see something like the microfusion cells, or small energy cells from the Fallout games. When I played FO1 and ran across those for the first time, I was intrigued and fascinated.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries
Sorry for a wiki link, too lazy to look up more sources. Basically we'd have better battery technology if Oil & Car companies didn't deliberately stifle technology
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
$120 million really doesn't sound like enough money to me to solve a problem that has been the bane of thousands of electronics companies for many decades....
Still, this is a VERY worthy cause. Batteries have improved a lot over the years, but not nearly fast enough to keep up with what we need. Especially important as we move ever closer to electric cars (I would just LOVE to have one).
And it isn't just the capacity and price that is important- safety and component scarcity and disposal concerns should be addressed too.
The DOE will go "D'oh!"
May as well, since they're planning on shutting most if not all of the Tevatron research down. There's a lot of highly skilled and qualified people with electrical and electronics knowhow as well as physics (at least those not running out to Sandia or flying off to Europe to continue research on the high-energy stuff). It would be a waste to not have them do something to pick up the slack, and this would also prevent the brain drain that would happen if they all ran off to different places. Looks like a good opportunity in a place where such jobs are still very-much needed.
Also it's not that far geographically from Motorola in regards to joint efforts geared towards electronics, or Ford's Chicago factory or Chrysler's Belvidere plant if automotive power systems research is something they'd like to do. With this in mind, it would be stupid to let it go to waste.
We all know that nine women can't make a baby in one month but Chu thinks that they can if they work for the government and he throws enough money at them.
Five years is conveniently after the current administration has left the building.
fucking time.
Be seeing you...
Perhaps the DOE knows we're going to run out of cheap hydrocarbon fuel faster than we can manage. 5x improvement in current battery storage density (per weight) will make affordable and practical electric vehicles pretty much pop up over night.
We can improve electric infrastructure. Petrol fuel transportation and distribution is actually pretty expensive and energy consuming we just take it for granted because it's already here and we've been doing it for a long time. Did you know the cost of actually shipping and moving fuel is one of the biggest factors in it's price? Fuel prices are high because refineries are on coast lines and those endless millions of galons have to be trucked everywhere. It's also one of the biggest lies of omission when petrol fuel proponents talk about pollution. They conveniently ignore the total energy cost/emission cost of the fuel distribution infrastructure itself.
Yeah, you'd still have to generate the energy. Even if you burn things to make it think about this: What's more efficient? A few large plant-sized generators or millions of little generators you have to carry around in cars? Also, is it easier to sequester and capture emissions in a few large fixed locations, or millions of tiny moving ones?
Electric is the way to go. The only missing link is good batteries. Once they come, we can build power lines and power plants we're good at that. Personally, I can't wait until the gas station is a thing of the past. A story to tell your children when they see an old TV show or something.
Libertarian badmouthing aside this is what we're supposed to do with public funds. Research that benefits everyone. (Really, don't you guys have jobs during the day? How's that bootstrap factory coming along? The big bad govt still on a conspiracy to keep you from building it?)
OMG Ponies
You know Slashdot has Karma when your Captcha is trauma. No, seriously, the captcha for this post is trauma.
It's great that we're creating and funding this research center, but $120 million spread over five years seems a bit low.
If they achieve their 5x capacity at 1/5 the price goals, it could impact not only all current autonomously powered devices, but create whole new categories of products that aren't practical with today's technologies and their associated costs.
If you ask me, batteries (and similar power storage devices), are *the* biggest bottleneck in modern technology. This is the place to spend our research money.
But demanding it wont make it happen.
Oh, and i want a desktop sized chocolate chip cookie synthesizer machine too. mmmm cookies..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"overcoming current manufacturing limitations through innovation to reduce complexity and cost"
Don't forget overcoming the patents own by big oil and reducing legal fees.
Okay so you create a battery that can be made cheaply and outputs X amount of Volts and Y amount of Amperage per gram of weight.
1 what does the discharge curve look like?? (how quick does it drop voltage/amperage)
2 exactly how toxic is the stuff inside?
3 what happens if it gets shorted??
4 how easy is it to recharge SAFELY??
5 what about heat??
it does no good to create a ZPM if dropping it causes an explosion in the C4 range or having a battery that has a sloped power curve (so that half power = half voltage).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Then the patent belongs to the people, which includes American business.
Everything the government develops, that isn't classified, is in the public domain, as it should be as *I* paid for it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The idea of molten salt batteries sounds quite intriguing to me, especially for bulk utility level energy storage. In this TED talk, MIT professor Donald Sadoway details his designs and describes the models he has already built. In short, the idea is to have two liquid metals, one less dense and one more dense. In the middle is a layer of molten salt. The less dense molten metal floats on the top. In the middle is the molten salt, and at the bottom is the more dense molten metal. The molten salt acts as the electrolyte in the cell, and the two different metals pass electrons around due to their different electron affinities.
When building these cells, they would use common cheap materials, so that the cost of this type of battery would be trivial compared with the amount of energy it can store. The fact that the cell is molten is actually an advantage. We spend huge effort in our current electrochemical cells trying to keep them cool. This type of cell would thrive on heat...indeed the energy used in charging and discharging it would help keep the metals and the salt molten.
Clearly this type of cell would not be used to power your laptop or cellphone directly, but it could be used to store energy from solar panels on your rooftop, or to store energy from large solar power plants for use in the night. As always, I am sure there are bugs to work out, but really, this sounds incredibly promising.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
How else are you supposed to fight with giant robots?
6 years from now we will be hearing about a DOE battery project being canceled without being completed, because it's 5 years behind schedule and $700 million over budget.
The major bonus of a 5 times longer battery life is that your MSFT Surface Tablet will have a life of 20 hours on a battery charge, instead of the current 4 hours, so you'll actually be able to use it. ... what, too soon?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... except every other device will be able to do 40 hours of battery with the same battery technology
I want a freakin' dinosaur but nobody'll give me $120m/year to make it happen.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Argonne has been a center for battery research and testing going back to 1976 . They have teams of materials scientists, chemists and physicists who have been working on various aspects of improving battery systems for many years, with a lot of published researched and patents. They also has one of the top 5 supercomputers in the world on-site, an entire center devoted to nanotechnology research, the biggest x-ray source around (for materials property research), and all sorts of other resources that make this more than "just another place" to do this work.
This grant is all about combining and focusing the efforts of all sorts of other public institutions and private manufacturers, with leadership from what is truly a "critical mass" of smart folks who work at the Argonne campus.
It is not likely to be any one "magic bullet" but lots of little improvements in each aspect of battery technology, gaining a percent or two here, a few more percent there, that when combined together will result in impressive gains. You know, like... science.
Right. 5 years to develop 5X cheaper and 5X more energy dense? How gullible are you?
The free market doesn't solve all problems, but any company that could deliver this would make hundreds of billions of dollars. Why aren't they doing it? Because nobody knows how!
This $120 million is good research, but it isn't going to deliver. Dr. Chu will certainly be glad that the deadline is past the time that he will be out of office.
Even if it does this project does work out, five years is just long enough for Jeb Bush to cancel it at the behest of the oil industry during his first presidential term.
If nothing else it's a step in the right direction.
And with it being a government project lots of companies will be able to make use of all the research.
maybe china will now invest a much, much larger amount into development, thus killing any hope this program has, so we blame obama a'la solyndra. cuz it'd be his fault. /rollseyes
Battery technology has been a slow evolution and after 200 hundred years quantum leaps of performance are most expensive. The free market is working on this one, any money thrown at this just makes the market less free and less level. Wish the DOE would work on a standard "US Nuclear Power plant" design for the 21st century so all these batteries can be charged with the cheapest power possible on actual cost and pollution products basis.
This is not "like science", man, this is like Marxism. Remember, Marx said and Lenin confirmed it - quantitative accumulations transform into qualitative changes. I say this is a badly covered plot to leak Communism out of these batteries and into our freedoms. We should kill it with fire before it self-combusts.
at the same time though everyone else's batteries would last a week or more
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Everybody knows that the laws of physics are written in Washington DC, right? Pass a law, and reality must bend.
Well, everyone in Washington DC thinks so, anyway.
... I'd like a rainbow colored unicorn that shits cheeseburgers.
you know you're in a communist shithole. What the fuck is it the US governments business what kind of batteries we have???!!!
humans!
And the machines take over placing all of us into our own little virtual world.
The fact that gasoline cars have a typical efficiency of ~15%, while electric cars exceed 80%, means the real competition is 6.9MJ/kg versus 1.44MJ/kg. The 5x improvement requirement was obviously intended to match the effective density of gasoline.
The real problem is the myth that every person in the country needs a car that can drive halfway across it in a single day. We are all stuck with the lowest common denominator, so everyone who DOESN'T need that particular feature ends up polluting way more than necessary. Gasoline may have higher energy densities today, but it also has the most inefficiency, pollution, greenhouse gases, noise, fire hazards, and price volatility of any available (vehicle) fuel. And that's without mentioning the fact that the performance of gas engines is *terrible* when compared to properly sized electric motors. Just look at the Tesla Model S--dead silent, no emissions, priced competitively with gas cars in its class, and does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
If this lab can achieve their target, we will drop gas cars in a heartbeat and our carbon emissions will plummet. It's an absolutely crucial piece of the global warming puzzle, which is why it deserves the attention of an Apollo-style research blitz.
I want the same thing as the DOE too.
you know you're in a communist shithole. What the fuck is it the US governments business what kind of batteries we have???!!!
Doubleplusgood duckspeak!
Tell them we will want two things for this increase: 1.) A lot more money than is ordinarily awarded in times past (I mean, a paltry $1 million for this kind of increase? That wouldn't cover one fiftieth of the materials cost alone for all the experiments needed to be run to achieve such a thing), and 2.) A lot of people of kind of wary of giving the military what they want when we've been involved in some, how do I put this lightly, questionable wars in recent years? That's a moral thing, as well as a money thing, and needs to be addressed.
I am John Hurt.
In WW2 it was advance technology fast or the other guys could kill everyone you love. That's a pretty big motivator to cut the red tape and bullshit, and pull as a team. His will they recreate that here?
Manhatten project cost over $20 billion (in 1996 dollars) for a three year project to build 4 bombs (Gadget, little boy, fat man, and number 4). $24 million per year is not going to do much.
Well, its better if every house and person has some power, even if its a small amount after a massive nuke attack. Your grid is toast.
But if I was Leader#1, I would tell the banks to Foff, give back the 5 trillion $, and make every single house and office building 100% solar powered, use excess power to suck water out of the air to make fresh water locally. Use extra power to suck N from air and H from water to make liquid fuels (amonia)
I mean really, for the benefit of 300m people is better, than some stupid 50b benefit for a few corporations, they can get fuekd, and go supply high power to industry/factories.
The general citizen should have free power + free water.
Thats the only way society will advanced, not getting huge $900 bills a quarter, and living poor because power costs are huge. Give back people a bit of luxury, and minimum life standards. Dont just say its a free market, bad luck if your poor . Id be the first to feed those wallstreet crooks to the sharks or zombies.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
...Then why should I not expect that said battery will cost 10 times as much as what I'd currently pay for? Doesn't matter for squat that it can be made if I have to pay more per amp-hour or kilowatt-hour.
Those big mofo engines did the trick.
The design is all public, why cant china just dupe it with 10x the work force, and be on the moon in 2013.
A couple of iPads and an i7 server is all you need ;)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You mean like... THE INTERNET? http://www.sadtrombone.com/
When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,
Everything I know about management, I learned from X-Com (UFO)
They should make this a ten year program and invest a hundred times as much. Even if we only managed to double the power output of the best batteries or cut the cost of them in half it would make a huge difference.
For example, I was just reading about the new Chevy Spark electric with a 20kwh battery and guesstimated (because they didn't say) 60 mile range. Oh, and it will probably be about $40k (before any tax incentives, etc). Now, since the regular car is less than $15k, I would say that range of 120 miles for the same price or a car with the same range but half the battery cost - $25k would be a pretty good deal. Even better if you could build a $25k electric car with a 120 mile range, which is nowhere near the goals that this program is talking about.
you know you're in a communist shithole. What the fuck is it the US governments business what kind of batteries we have???!!!
Yeah. If the government is so great, why didn't they invent the Internet.
Hope they can re-discover the secret of blue energy (without all the strings attached) :))
r
Let the energy storage industry go belly due to unwise stock trading, then get the CONgressMEN to use taxpayer funds for a .0002% increase in efficiency. FTFY
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Another wasted 120 million. This is not a project that need tax payer funding, Any battery company would already be researching this because it would make them rich. Just another way to give friends of the government tons of money, like Solendra. (sp?)
or go to the moon? or, like, spinoff tech from NASA? or develop a highway system? and what about a navy? Why don't we have a fucking navy? and weather satellites? and a weather service? and how come there's no social safety net?
I'm tellin' ya, they just sit there like logs, the gummint does.
* (ps... tons of fail too, not saying they're perfect... just found the GP's obvious butthurt fuckery annoying.)
gay cannibal.
Just a cotton pickin' minute.
If we are going to put public money toward research like this, why do we even have a patent system? The mere existence of this project pretty much snuffs out the only credible argument the pro patent people had left.
It's taken decades from initial R&D to the current batteries. Some of the stuff that was only working in the lab when I was a student 20+ years ago is now becoming commercially available and there's a lot of very interesting stuff in development now. The time lag is mostly due to limited resources being spent on R&D so a very small number of people are working on one technology at any time. Many of the things available now were improved after a long series of tests only because there were not enough people working on them to do some things in parallel.
So to sum up, putting a bit of extra effort into some promising designs could produce results very quickly.
Sure, it would be great if the DOE decided to spend billions per year on this...but this better than nothing, isn't it? Additionally, it's not the amount of $ spent that matters, it's how it's spent.
Not saying there is a magic formula, but there are tons of examples (drug research and defense spending), where throwing more and more money at a problem doesn't necessarily yield better results than smaller, more targeted funding.
Yeah, this is asking for a lot, and it probably won't meet its goals, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. Take the example of thermoelectrics -- solid state devices that can turn a heat difference in to electricity or vice versa. Efficient thermoelectric devices could be super useful, either for efficient, light weight refrigerators that never break (since they have no moving parts) or for a way to turn any source of heat -- including waste heat from your car -- in to electricity. The reason you don't see them everywhere is because they're currently not efficient enough to be worth it.
I realize the following is gated, but access it if you can and see the first plot. (Coincidentally, the author was Chu's deputy and is an excellent researcher.)
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/303/5659/777.full
Otherwise, see figure 3 here:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.0888.pdf
The effectiveness of a material for thermoelectric devices is captured in one parameter called ZT -- the figure of merit. For about three decades, bismuth telluride was the best know material, with a ZT of a bit under 1 -- corresponding to about 10% of the Carnot efficiency (the theoretical maximum efficiency). To be competitive with conventional refrigerators, ZT has to be about 3 or larger.
In the early 90s, the DOD decided they wanted better thermoelectrics, so they started throwing money at the problem. You can see the result in the linked figure. Within a decade, ZT for the best materials shot up to about 2.5 at room temperature and 3.5 at higher temperatures -- to the point where they're starting to be useful.
More work is still needed before you'll see these commercially, but this is an example where government spending is and will be paying dividends; these are devices that will be generally useful, but languished for decades before the government gave research a kick. Battery funding could produce similar results.
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/kurt-zenz-house/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology
I, for one, am glad our government has set such lofty goals, because I really want a RTG power pack for my cell phone. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator )
Batteries have continually improved but only marginally and at a slow pace. While this program is a step in the right direction, it's unlikely to achieve its goals. That being said, we need lofty goals to reach for and this one is certainly worthwhile.
The greatest achievement over the last 10 years has been the continual improvement of energy usage in devices, etc. 10 years ago laptops could barely last 2 hours on a single charge, now we have laptops (ultraportables) that can last over 7 hours.
We could always threaten to kill the scientists if they don't produce a battery in five years.
The motivation in WWII probably isn't what you think it was... Scientists always want to do the neato next thing. What changed during WWII is any batshit crazy idea was listened-to, and given truck-loads of funding, on the off-chance it would work, saving bazillions on the battle-field, and the Manhattan project did just that.
Other WWII projects you don't hear about quite so much, include trained-pigeon guided-bombs, and gigantic aircraft carriers built out of ice, for use in the Pacific tropics. They spent some government money, but turned out to be dead-ends. Oh well.
I doubt there's any problem motivating the individuals to try and develop something new... What's really got to happen is that something is needed to seriously motivate the money men, to spend the cash on something that may pay of big, or might accomplish nothing.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
gaining a percent or two here, a few more percent there, that when combined together will result in impressive gains
They are claiming a 5x increase in capacity in 5 years, so they will need a major discovery that adds hundreds of percent, not a few.
Furthermore this isn't like getting to the moon. People knew that was possible, they knew more or less what was involved and the effort threw vast sums of money at the problem so they could try multiple different things at once. That is why people are sceptical about this claim that they can do it in such a short space of time with some unknown new technology that hasn't even been predicted by current scientific understanding for a mere $120m.
Good luck to them anyway though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Six times improvement in six years I could accept.
I think it is not really about density, but how fast you can recharge it.
It would be great to see something like the microfusion cells, or small energy cells from the Fallout games.
My 7 year old daughter says she wants a small pony that didn't eat or "po-po" and it could live in her bedroom...
Seriously, I hope the $ will be spent on basic research - which private enterprise doesn't do, not on development - which the government does a shitty job on, witness solar cells and electric cars...
Jevons Paradox One would actually see a higher consumption of batteries, and even energy. If this plan is intended to save energy, I prefer finding something that's really renewable, or cutting the nonsense of measuring economy by growth.
is the operating temperature of molten salt in molten salt batteries.
And I thought lithium-ion batteries were a curse.
Why not just set up an organization to slowly release advancements made for military uses while giving time for the industry to adapt? Just seems simpler and more cost effective.
Our current generation of batteries has a tendency to explode in the right conditions. What happens when you pack five times the energy density of a lithium cell into your new device, and then something goes wrong?
Wikipedia gives the energy density (Megajoules/kg) of lithium batteries as 1.8, and that of dynamite as 4.6. (Gasoline is ~46) At that point I'd be happy if an electrical discharge were the worst of my concerns.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Well, the APS is not THAT helpfull for stuff like that, and companies also rent time at facilities like Spring 8 or ESRF for this kind of research.
Supercomputers are nice, but you are not going to be able to skip the peer review just because you are from a new insitute.
Nanotech research center of course helps.
But you miss the point. Of course its a good thing to push that money into research, as public research can have more freedom in its options than corporate research.
But the goal is just a sad joke. 120 million over 5 years. For a factor 5 improvement in power and a factor 5 improvement in price. Over 5 years.
Thats so ridiculously idiotic, because it is impossible. Even if it was not even a 1% of the current R&D spending on batteries, it would still be a setup for failure.
Why not give it realistic goal, like 50% improvement in power at half price?
120 million is just a crapshot, especially on that short notice.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
In 1903 the electric car with a lead acid battery had a range of about 30 miles. At that time the war between electric and gas was more real than it is now. Here are are over 100 years later and we have the Nissan Leaf electric car with a range of 50 miles. This represents an increase in efficiency of .36% per year.
You can't legislate chemistry, or physics. This is as stupid as the "mandate" that the 2015 CAFE standards represent.
Now ignorant fools with no knowledge of engineering will blather on about the progress in computers, or advances made during world wars, or other such nonsense.
There is no correlation. The chemistry that makes a battery hasn't changed much in the last million years.
This is simply another excuse to bribe people who then give you money to get elected. All the high minded talk about the government setting lofty goals and inspiring us all is complete baloney, and if you buy into this nonsense I have some great investment deals for you, I promise I'll get you a one million percent return while saving the planet, saving the whales, reducing CO2, and making a car that gets 1 thousand miles per gallon on ordinary cooking oil. Send me money today, or the ice caps will melt, the oceans will rise, the skies will burn, and the end will come much sooner than you think.
Murphy was an optimist
No, charging speed is not the real issue, and here's why:
One, when battery improvements let the average car's range go past 120 miles per charge, the vast majority of daily trips and commutes can be done on a single charge, only needing to charge overnight.
Two, charging speed is fundamentally linked to battery capacity. If the capacity increases, so does the charging speed. So a larger battery can be charged at a higher miles-per-hour rate even though it still takes the same 6 hours to go from empty to full.
Three, cars like the 2012 Nissan Leaf have an undersized 3.3kW charger (~10 miles per hour). The batteries will support higher rates, and the 2013 model will have a faster 6.6kW charger (~20 miles per hour). The batteries could likely support even more, but charging stations with a >7kW electrical service are rare, outside of the 20-minute fast chargers. So it's actually not the batteries limiting the recharge rate so much as the rest of the design of the car/thermal systems.
Time was that a government research project could actually be accomplished within a specified period of time. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo project are two examples. Why should battery improvements be any different than mandating CAFE standards? How does Chu know that a matter of time a few million dollars are all it's going to take? $120 million is chump change by today's standards. This sounds more like a political goal than a practical one. Seems to me that there are too many uninformed people in Washington that think there's always some corporate conspiracy preventing them from reaching their utopian technological goals. This isn't to say that it's not a worthy goal but IMHO, if you really want to make this happen, then you do it Manhattan Project style (walk walk walk walk Manhattan Project style). You hire the top people in the field away from their current jobs, bring them together in one place, isolated with no distractions each competing to solve one problem.