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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.
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
. ...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".
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"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.
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
I must have missed the part where the government is requiring these new, powerful batteries to be used in wrist watches.
$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.
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.
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?)
Even worse, what about something with nearly 100x the energy density? I mean, imagine how dangerous an automobile would be with that amount of energy on board, in the hands of clueless idiots who can't drive?
Oh, wait...
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).
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Funny story... coming back from a photo assignment, I discovered while on the freeway why you do not put fully charged high current rechargeable batteries in the same pocket as a handfull of change. (sniff ... "What's that... OH MY GOD." And then try to pull off the road safely while your pants are literally on fire.)
Well, I can see the humor *now*. It wasn't funny at the time.
But seriously, a lot of current systems (your car's gas tank, for instance) have a significant amount of stored up energy. The companies that don't put adequate safeguards in place will pay out in the courts and perhaps go out of business. I don't see this as a valid concern. The pants on fire thing, that was me being an idiot. I got a good lesson out of the experience. And a small scar.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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)
No, they're somewhat orthogonal improvements. So, it's really more like a 7x improvement...
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I hope it "fails" just like solar research has - about a 90% cost reduction in 30 years.
The free market should solve this problem ...
Free markets can solve many problems, but they don't solve everything. There are plenty of examples of market failures, and this is one of them. If someone invents a battery that is 5x cheaper and better, they will make a lot of money. But the benefits to society at large will be MUCH larger. We will save hundreds of billions on oil we will no longer need to import, hundreds of billions more on defense spending cuts since we no longer have to protect oil shipping lanes, many billions more from time-shifting baseload electricity, and even more billions from reduced AGW. But very few of these savings will flow into the pocket of the innovator. So government intervention in the market is justified.
But there are still important free market principles that can be applied here. If the government just hands out grant money, little is likely to be achieved. It is much better to set this up as a competition, and offer specific monetary prizes for meeting certain milestones. Look at the Ansari X-Prize and the DARPA Grand Challange as models. They were able to accomplish a lot by drawing in diverse talents and rewarding success.
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.
True, demanding something doesn't guarantee you get it. On the other hand, *not* demanding something *does* guarantee you won't get it.
If nobody in the government demanded a satellite based navigation system, there wouldn't be GPS. If nobody in the government demanded a robust, survivable way of transporting data packets between heterogeneous networks, there wouldn't be the Internet. If nobody in the government demanded a way of automating a wide variety of computations, the computer as we know it wouldn't exist. Same goes for the polio vaccine -- if you don't think that's a big deal ask someone brought up before the Salk vaccine was introduced.
Unlike the iPad or the filtered cigarette, these things were not going to be invented by the private sector (at least not soon) because once you discounted the probable profits by risk, uncertainty and delay, they weren't attractive private investments. On the other hand, the immense public need for these things justified the government investment in removing the initial uncertainties. Once the risky and uncertain parts of the problem are solved, then private investment is clearly a more efficient vehicle for making marginal improvements, which add up quickly. Kind of like shifting responsibility for low Earth orbit launches to private companies.
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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?
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.
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)
I hope it "fails" just like solar research has - about a 90% cost reduction in 30 years.
But the cost fell too quickly, leaving politically connected manufacturers with stranded costs. So now we have government action to raise the cost again.
Many companies have spent more than $120M and not achieved a doubling in capacity.
If the private sector has failed, that's a good reason to do public sector research.
Public sector money gave us the internet. Private sector gave us AOL and MSN. Whatever happened to those?
Public sector gave us a man on the moon. Now 40 years later, it's seen as an achievement for a private company to get into space.
The public sector is far better at the big multi-year stuff than the private sector.
Public sector gave us a man on the moon
At what, 4.5% of GDP? Sure, if you spent $675B on batteries, you'd get good improvements. But not $125M.
BTW, AOL provided nearly all the Internet access for normal people for many years, something government never addressed. Frankly, most of the development was a function of Moore's Law, but if Xandu had won instead of ARPANET, we probably would have been using hypertext on our Commodore 64's.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
The free market should solve this problem ...
Of course it could. The only problem is that we don't have free markets today. The markets (and information flow) are dominated by a small group of organizations with political influence.
You're ignoring the net present value of all the profit opportunities lost as technologies like GPS or the Internet take decades to emerge. It's beneficial to private industry for the government to take on high risk, long term payback applied research, and if you look at the *actual* budget data (instead of arguing from theoretical principles like a philosophe), you'll see that public applied R&D is *not* breaking the budget.
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What I object to is your repeated statements that that is the only way we could have gotten those technologies. That's not only unreasonable, it's historically wrong.
The problem isn't government, it's you and people like you.
I'll set aside the silly personal attack and address your point.
You are arguing against a strawman position. My point is that the government invested in the technologies I mentioned because there was a significant public need that would have been unmet. I don't deny that in most of these cases (excepting the Internet because of net neutrality) the technology might have eventually emerged, but the problems they addressed would have gone unsolved, probably for decades. The people working on those problems were right to use public money to solve them.
That those needs were met by public funded research is a historical fact. The onus is upon you to show that the Internet and GPS might exist by now without government investments in technology. These two technologies probably alone justify all the money the US has spent on applied research *ever*, and are huge generators of private business opportunities.
I was using irony to make the point that throwing advanced battery research into the same category as teleportation or desktop cookie synthesizers is silly. Those examples address two of three criteria that in my opinion justifies public research investment (1) advancement is feasible and (2) there is an important public need for the technology. The original post I was responding to was just an intellectually sloppy ideological harangue.
The third criteria is that the progress needed requires levels of investment that are unlikely to come from private investment, typically because of uncertainty about when the investment might start paying back. Battery technology is kind of a borderline case here. Clearly there are many incremental improvements that can be made, and its an important area of commercial research. But an improvement of the magnitude being discussed seems unlikely to emerge on its own soon. I am skeptical that any one research program can outpace private development, but the value of incremental progress on this is so high that it's probably worth covering some approaches that are a bit futuristic for private investors.
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