The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World

by Steve LeVine

  Isaacs had another order for his subordinates: “Win the damn Hub.”

  • • •

  Amine—the lab’s wheeling-and-dealing, big-thinking risk taker—didn’t think Argonne would lose. He thought it would win the Hub and then rapidly pivot to En-Caesar. En-Caesar, which did not entail competition but savvy and nerve, meant much more money and an elevated opportunity to decipher the battery. He calculated that if ten teams of scientists backed by a lot of money worked on the electrochemical and physics challenges in a consolidated manner, the big leap “will go fast.”

  This combination of grand, practical thinking was the glue between Amine and Chamberlain. Both had worked in industry, Amine in Japan, Chamberlain at American chemical companies. Both knew “that any innovation has to move,” as Amine put it. It could not be filed away because it would soon be forgotten. Amine was just then aiming inventions at two companies and was confident both would provide funding to help develop them further. This was Chamberlain’s proactive approach with En-Caesar, too—he did not wait but went out and obtained informal industry funding commitments.

  That was how you survived. You needed a stream of funding, without which there was barely any use in even conceiving an idea. Government or industry investment—both had to be fought for. So you collaborated with someone rather than not working at all. You sought connections with funders constantly and you delivered on your promises in order to keep the flow going.

  The two big projects—the Hub and En-Caesar—were not only about surviving. In the view of both Chamberlain and Amine, the powerful combination of the two could win the long game against the Asian giants.

  Both men were also contemplating the personal payoffs to come. Chamberlain was already superlatively ambitious, but the Hub offered another dimension of opportunity. A battery guy in the Bay Area had remarked that if he managed to oversee the big leap in batteries, he would be made in Silicon Valley—everyone would know his name. That notion—that he might “stand out in Silicon Valley”—fixed Chamberlain’s attention. He had failed to do so when he was raising money for his start-ups, but his Bay Area friend might be correct that the Hub could finally attest that he had done it before.

  23

  Team Argonne

  Scientists had been working for two centuries on the battery. It was a hard problem. If you did not believe success possible—if you would not sit down with your colleagues and work it out in the open—a super-battery would never happen. Chamberlain was certain that it was possible. But he had to transform the department into a team.

  The push for collaboration went from him, to his Argonne bosses, up the chain to and including Steven Chu, with his dream of recreating Bell Labs, and, when you considered the nation’s priorities, all the way to Obama. But for a lot of the battery guys, it was still hard to foresee how the mantra of teamwork would gel as a practical matter. Successful collaboration simply didn’t add up to hard proof of inventive work done well.

  The idea of a system that glorified teamwork grated on Thackeray. It was not a natural state in the pursuit of science. It was “being thrust down onto us by DOE,” an enormous management mistake that did not take account of “the odd people” who populate labs everywhere, those who “probably operate a little bit better in their own little orbit.” In Thackeray’s view, the team system was going to produce new varieties of the same, preselected battery chemistries while probably failing to mine “all the other stuff that’s lying on the outside.” To get at potentially breakthrough unconventional batteries, you needed “enough time to develop a new idea and see how it goes.”

  In Thackeray’s experience, scientists tended to be individuals—individual thinkers—and highly competitive. They flourished only in the right environment, which meant recognition when they were successful. “If you give your idea and then somebody else just takes it and runs with it, what are you left with?” he said. Chamberlain had to convince Thackeray and other lab scientists that their intellectual property would be husbanded and not subsumed into the maw of general ideas—or be outright stolen. Otherwise, Thackeray said, you would end up with “people not trusting one another and making outrageous sorts of remarks.”

  Thackeray meant the accusations of theft that led to Amine’s inclusion on the NMC patent. But he was also referring to his own intention to stay outside the team system regardless of what Chamberlain and the Department of Energy desired. When Chamberlain’s deputy, Tony Burrell, attempted to promote Chamberlain’s teamwork mantra, Thackeray dismissed him. “You know,” he said, “he’s not a battery guy. He’s still got quite a lot to learn.”

  Perhaps the teamwork idea would have been accepted without question a few years back. But Thackeray thought that the NMC licensing success had irreversibly changed Argonne’s culture. “It’s unfortunate that money talks,” he said. But the fact was that now “everyone would like to become part of this licensing.” And that reinforced the notion of individualism.

  The Hub was an important aim, and teams and collaboration sounded worthy. Doubts gnawed at some of the core guys underneath Thackeray and Amine as well, men who had been around the lab for two decades, years in which success meant not collaboration but shining in individually executed projects. Would there be a patent or a paper, one with your name in the lead position, the only place it counted? If not, as seemed likely, how would you explain yourself in the all-important “Annual Merit Review” in Washington, the official vetting of every scientist in the system, where, before large audiences, you justified your existence in the laboratory? How would you validate your work? “Ummm . . . I’ve been collaborating with those other thirty guys.” It did not seem a credible proposition. It went to the bedrock of modern Western tradition, which was to reward individuals. The Nobel Prizes, after all, went to individuals or up to three-person teams, not to sprawling groups. You could not change this psychology by fiat.

  Chamberlain was never going to change Thackeray and Amine. They had too much leverage and could and would simply say no. Because of their reputations, they would escape any repercussion, too. Although others in the lab were on less solid ground, some of them felt the same. At one meeting, Daniel Abraham, a lab veteran, said flatly that he was not prepared to distribute his data openly to the department at large. What was his advantage in doing so?

  Yet that was precisely what Chamberlain was proposing. Everyone needed to think big. The Hub needed to be about teamwork. He was going to “bring this up and hit it right on the head.”

  He summoned a grand departmental meeting in the basement auditorium.

  “I want to start by reminding everyone of the mission we’re on,” Chamberlain said, pursing the fingertips of his hands. “And that’s the electrification of vehicles, and then the extension of that would-be improvement in efficiency to the electric grid.” Standing before a full auditorium, he said the mission had three components, all of them anchored in security.

  First was economic security. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries produced more than $10 billion in global revenue. As the vehicle market grew, the market for lithium-ion batteries would exceed $100 billion—by most people’s estimates, that would happen within five or six years. These estimates excluded manufactured materials used to make the batteries, not to mention the market for automobiles themselves, which was enormous. Companies elsewhere in the world—in China, in Japan, in South Korea, for example—were gearing up to capture that business, to create jobs for their societies. That was one reason Argonne was on a mission to create a lithium-ion battery industry in the United States.

  Another was energy security. “So we import a lot of oil, a little over a billion dollars a day,” he told the silent room. “Some of that is from friends, some from enemies. So that’s not a secure position.” And the third component was environmental security—if the United States could move away from fossil fuel consumption, climate change would be less of a threat as well.

 
; “So in the big picture,” Chamberlain said, “I wanted to remind you of the mission we’re on.” Altogether, he said, this mission was in the service of an investor—“the American taxpayer.”

  You were not required to join this mission if you preferred not to—it was not an obligation of employment at Argonne. Not at all. But he did not then—nor in any of the other dozens of times that he offered his researchers a way out—sound convincing in this respect. He was calling for an unequivocal commitment. Either you were in or you might be out.

  The mandate sounded terrifying. There were historical examples of group glory in science, but they were few, grandiose, and by now trite because of overuse—the Manhattan Project, Apollo. But it was up to Chamberlain to prod the group to trust that the team approach he planned was not a cliché. That they should be calm as they went along. Their careers and their chances for scientific achievement would not be derailed. Instead, they would have greater opportunity to do big things and be recognized for it.

  Chamberlain seemed to sense that he had the researchers with him. The way he described it—the big science that was going to be done in teams, the big breakthroughs that might be made—why, that was why they were in science. He went on.

  If there was a Hub competition and Argonne won it, he said, “we could really catapult ourselves” into a position to achieve the mission. Just a week earlier, Argonne had conducted a “Director’s Review,” in which the heads of other national labs stopped by to review the preliminary Hub proposal. “I don’t know how to say this exactly,” Chamberlain said, “but they were really excited. They were using words like ‘blown away,’ and ‘ecstatic.’ And I will tell you, I was nervous. I wasn’t sure. The biggest weaknesses that were identified were the way we were portraying the message—the way we built the story, which is very different from the guts of the science, which they were happy with. We’re still, in my view, way ahead of the game.”

  If Argonne did win, more and more companies would seek a piece of the multibillion-dollar battery market. They would realize they lacked the research capability. They would look around, kick over stones, and then turn to Argonne.

  “That’s what we are in the middle of right now,” he said. That was what collaboration could bring to Argonne, and to the country.

  24

  Fire

  Ah, crap,” Chamberlain said. He was reading a news bulletin on the Internet—a Chevy Volt had caught fire while undergoing federal crash testing in Wisconsin. The vehicle had been through the usual harsh examinations, which included ramming a pole into its side, and had already achieved the top five-star rating. Three weeks later, as the car sat on the lot, the battery burst into flames. It engulfed the Volt along with three other vehicles parked nearby.

  Fox News blamed Obama. Neil Cavuto, a Fox commentator, said the Volt was part of a gigantic social disaster that would lead to divorces “when someone forgets to plug it in,” not to mention a conspiracy. “Someone bought off Motor Trend to say it was car of the year,” Cavuto said. “You have to be a dolt to buy a Volt.” The vehicle had nothing to do with Obama and in fact was conceived during the George W. Bush administration. But by embracing electrics, Obama infuriated the right.

  The carping grew when two more fires occurred during tests just six months later.

  The thing about large lithium-ion battery packs was that if you were not going to use them for a long time, you were advised to drain them of electricity. When fully charged, they could be unstable. In the case of the first fire, the ramming pole had punctured the battery pack, resulting in a leak of coolant, a short circuit, and ultimately the fire. It was not a novel occurrence—cars often exploded during the crash tests, especially when they carried a tank full of gasoline. You had to destroy something in order to discover how safe it could be. But nuance was lost in the news coverage. As oil is associated in the public mind with crude-soaked seals, the Volt seemed doomed to correlation with fire. The fires threatened to sink GM’s flagship electric.

  But then the carmaker defused the crisis atmosphere with a wily combination of candor—spokespeople came out quickly with as many details as they knew—and a spirited campaign of customer service: company representatives called every Volt owner in the country personally—some 6,100 of them—with an offer to buy back their car, replace their leased vehicle, or temporarily lend them a GM model of their choice. A few dozen took up the offer. But mainly they didn’t. The image was of a proactive company that believed in its product and was taking charge of its reputation.

  It was about this time that Chamberlain was shopping for a new car. He and his wife Kathy liked their old Honda sedan and favored buying another—their son Fletcher was about to turn sixteen and would be given the old car. The new vehicle would be Chamberlain’s. Considering that NMC was in the Volt, it would not have taken much to prod him at least to take a look at it, but the math caught his and Kathy’s eye: they were spending about $240 a month on gasoline and the Volt would cut that down, perhaps to zero. They still planned to buy another Honda but decided to stop by GM, too.

  The GM man asked Chamberlain a couple of questions. Then he tossed him the keys.

  “Why don’t you drive it for a few days?” the salesman said. “Take it home.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, I just need a copy of your license.”

  The salesman had required only a sentence or two to read him. Chamberlain returned three days later.

  “You did a terrible thing,” he said. “Now I want one.”

  Chamberlain said that it wasn’t only his personal connection to the car that decided him. Notwithstanding the opinion of Fox News, he agreed with the assessment of Motor Trend, which was that the Volt was “a game-changer.” The Volt was the future, he said, “something that is amazing.”

  He chose jet black.

  The evening arrived to pick up his new car. He haggled a final time with the salesmen over whether to lease or buy, especially since, over time, the battery would certainly weaken. At last he said he would buy. He thanked the voluble salesman, Jim Vegetabile. “Well, I told you I was gonna take care of ya,” Vegetabile said. “See, some people don’t believe you when you have a different kind of last name. They don’t know it’s real.”

  Chamberlain climbed into the Volt. A smile crossed his face. “I’ve never had a payment this big on a car in my life.” He began to fiddle with the LCD display.

  “Listen to that music. We need to turn this off. How do we turn that off? There we go. Listen to this. Oh God, this is sweet. All right, now how do I get out of here?”

  He was nervous.

  “I’m damn excited,” Chamberlain said. He pushed the starter button and moved quietly into the night.

  Chamberlain had calculated that if he did use a lot less gasoline for the commute to Argonne, he would, over the life of the car, save enough to justify the monthly payments to which he was now committed. One wondered whether the car was actually more a fashion than an economic statement.

  “I’m not into that,” he said. “Honestly, it’s a toy.”

  The LCD told him his foot was not on the pedal—he was gliding. While he was doing so, the car was converting energy from the wheels to charge the battery. Chamberlain was watching all this but he was also late to pick up his daughter Abby, who was rehearsing for a Christmas concert at school.

  Eyeing a green ball central to the display, Chamberlain saw that he was at “Level 1” energy efficiency, which was good. A friend had told him that the Volt originally accelerated so quickly that GM installed a governor to slow it down. That was because, unlike conventional vehicles, electrics have no gears. “They have to really kind of chill that out or else people would be killing themselves,” Chamberlain said.

  One feature that impressed him was that GM had designed the Volt with flexibility to be equipped with any propulsion system. A later iteration could be fitted w
ith natural gas, ethanol, hydrogen, or any other technology. That was important, because no one knew which direction fossil fuels were moving.

  The green ball was far from the optimal center—Chamberlain had failed to discipline his acceleration and braking. His pedal style was inefficient, the car was telling him. The LCD said that he had 31 miles left on the battery and 269 miles in the gas tank.

  He reached Abby’s school. Chamberlain tried to connect to the Volt’s Bluetooth software while he was waiting. He couldn’t figure out how. He eventually found the correct button, but the battery was quickly discharging, drained by the seat-heating mechanism. Its capacity was still limited.

  In the subsequent days, Chamberlain experienced seductive quiet. At once, daily neighborhood noise—lawnmowers, telephone repair vehicles, semi-trailers, and rushing traffic—became much more conspicuous, and much less wanted. The car rode smoothly and attracted shouted, admiring comments from passing cars. At night, Chamberlain plugged it in at home. During the day, he charged it at Argonne. The Volt was sanctuary.

  25

  A Chance to Win the Lottery

  To win the Hub, Argonne had to convincingly explain how it would invent the battery that finally challenged the energy density of gasoline. To get there, it had pulled together many of the best battery scientists from across the country—Venkat Srinivasan from Berkeley, Yet-Ming Chiang from MIT, and Yi Cui from Stanford, not to mention Thackeray and Amine, plus the chief technology officers of companies like Dow Chemical, the lithium-ion battery company A123, and Johnson Controls, one of the world’s largest makers of lead-acid batteries. But in directing the team, Chamberlain had the tricky task now of negotiating how to divide the anticipated spoils of blockbuster inventions. If the partners were not confident that their contribution to breakthroughs would be fairly credited and compensated, they were unlikely to put in the colossal effort that would be required to produce the better battery.