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

by Steve LeVine

  Did such operational conditions truly explain everything? Argonne’s battery guys continued to grumble. They were not alone—Nissan and Samsung had come back to Envia with complaints that test cells provided by Kumar had swollen up with an apparent internal gassy buildup, and fresh samples had to be provided. In an unguarded moment, Envia cofounder Mike Sinkula had mentioned to Kapadia that their proprietary anode actually contained some Japanese material—it was not entirely Envia’s invention, as the company’s promotional material would easily lead one to believe. Kapadia was sufficiently concerned to run the claim by Purnesh Seegopaul, a materials scientist who served on the board. Seegopaul told him not to worry. “Great entrepreneurs bluff their way through. Look at Steve Jobs,” Seegopaul said.1 If Kumar was somewhat exaggerating, that was part of the game. Soon enough, Envia would invent an anode that was entirely its own. Plus, what was the probability that the skeptics were right? Kumar’s peers were vetting Envia’s material as part of federal grant rules. The world’s biggest automotive companies were evaluating his cathode. Crane had weighed in. If Kumar was exaggerating, it seemed he would already have been found out.

  Kapadia decided that Seegopaul was right: Envia continued to be ahead of everyone; such sniping was to be expected.

  • • •

  Chamberlain sank into a soft chair in the basement of the ARPA-E conference. The nearby cavernous exhibition hall was packed with the wares of ARPA-E winners, also-rans, and would-bes. He mulled over Envia’s recent history and decided that Majumdar’s high-profile announcement was politically driven. Department of Energy investments were a primary target of harsh Obama critics. The furor centered on Solyndra, a California solar power company that was awarded a $535 million stimulus loan and then filed for bankruptcy. Solyndra, critics said, exemplified the folly of “picking winners”—of favoring specific companies rather than general swaths of potential economic prosperity in which any enterprise might emerge a success. The loan, they said, was particularly suspect given that a Department of Energy official handling it was simultaneously a presidential campaign fund-raiser and married to a Solyndra lawyer.

  In fact, ARPA-E and other programs were picking winners. But that was what they were supposed to do. The question was whether they picked wisely. In any case, while the wisdom of the Solyndra loan was debatable, its origins were in the Bush administration. ARPA-E was modeled after DARPA, a Pentagon research agency whose mission was to fund highly unusual ideas that otherwise might never be tried out. Solyndra, with its bet on a niche thin-film technology, fit that operating principle. The solar market had turned against everyone.

  The politics remained unforgiving. In Washington, Republican congressmen held hearings accusing Solyndra executives and Obama officials of corruption. American voters would go to the polls in nine months. Obama could not be sanguine about reelection given these attacks and the listless economy. Against this backdrop, Envia was much-desired good news.

  The announcement was extremely welcome at Envia. Kumar and Kapadia suddenly had the rare attention of the world’s media. As Chamberlain said, “It doesn’t hurt to have a splash in The New York Times.”

  Chamberlain’s main preoccupation was the Hub proposal, Steven Chu’s initiative that would attempt to invent a new generation of batteries in collaboration with industrial partners who would manufacture them. The Department of Energy would select the site of the Battery Hub in a competition, and Chamberlain was working on the proposal in his hotel room. He said that about a hundred researchers and companies had expressed hopes of collaborating with Argonne. In addition to his core team, Chamberlain welcomed outside players because it was almost certain that three years or so down the road—if Argonne won—its plans would change, perhaps significantly.

  This was why, in twenty minutes, Chamberlain and Gallagher planned to stroll the ARPA-E exposition and attempt to strike affiliate agreements with battery exhibitors. When advances were made, Chamberlain would possess a directory of who could make good use of them. “If our core partners aren’t interested, we already have an audience that we can say, ‘This is for you,’” he said.

  Gallagher arrived and he and Chamberlain disappeared into the hall.

  Kumar stood a few feet away, beaming and clutching a glass of wine. Men from rival companies and reporters crowded Envia’s booth. Previously, Envia had been covered only by the Silicon Valley and energy blogs. Now The New York Times was calling.

  “Hey, Atul!” Kumar shouted.

  Kapadia walked up.

  “It is crazy,” the Envia CEO said. He had been fielding most of the media calls. His objective was to parlay the coverage into a commercial frenzy among carmakers over the Envia material. With the 300-mile range forecast, the calls weren’t coming only from the media.

  Majumdar had defined the race as a determination to keep advances such as Envia’s in the United States. “If we don’t act now, many of these innovations will go overseas and be manufactured elsewhere in the world,” Majumdar said. Kapadia repeated that Envia in fact was in play. The Japanese automotive companies had initiated talks. After the Orlando conference, Kumar had also heard from eager managers at South Korea’s Samsung and the American-Japanese joint venture Dow Kokam. Kapadia said, “If America does not commercialize this technology first, the question [that] should be asked in Detroit and D.C. is, ‘Why?’”

  General Motors was his and Kumar’s first choice as a commercial partner. GM had invested first, winning it a two-year head start on everyone else. That was “thanks to Jon Lauckner’s foresight,” Kapadia said. Two days earlier, GM had awarded Lauckner a substantial promotion—he was now not only head of GM Ventures but also chief technology officer. Kapadia said that Lauckner needed to press his advantage if he was to win the industry rivalry to dominate electrics.

  Lauckner was still in the lead. A week and a half earlier, a GM team had called on Envia. Kumar presented his latest voltage fade results along with fresh tests showing that the start-up’s material met endurance criteria. Judging by the cells, the material could last fourteen years, longer than the ten years required under standard industry specs. A GM man said that an additional six-month test was required, but Kumar’s sense was that licensing was only a matter of time.

  Kapadia called Lauckner a “patriot partner.” When the Envia CEO traveled to Japan, Lauckner peppered him with e-mails. His main message was not to sell the company to a Japanese or Korean buyer. “He will do whatever it takes with Envia to serve GM’s purpose. And we like him for that,” Kapadia said.

  Envia had no intention of selling to a Japanese, Korean—or American—buyer. After months of consulting with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Kapadia had decided that an IPO was the best option for Envia’s investors. Envia would remain conservative—it would sell just 8 percent of the company on the market. The idea was to raise $60 million by selling two million shares at $30 each.

  Kumar hoped to use the money to make a manufacturing plant. But the pair’s goal wasn’t just the plant: it was the valuation. Such a sale would factor out to a company value of $750 million. It wouldn’t be quite the $1 billion of which he and Kumar had spoken, but it was a large sum. And perhaps, if a sufficient marketing effort was made, those shares might be sold at $40 each, which would achieve the aspired valuation.

  Everything seemed possible. The decisive factor again was Envia’s potential customer list—the four big carmakers from whom Kumar had received spec sheets. The Goldman and Morgan Stanley men had studied the prospect of licensing to these companies and said, “You must be kidding me. Don’t even think about selling the company.” Kapadia could and should take the riskier but potentially far more lucrative step of going public.

  The 400-watt-hour-per-kilogram announcement was the first step. Now, Kapadia said, the senior managers of all the major car, parts, and chemical companies would be querying their staffs, “Are you working with Envia or not?” Kapadia said. Envia
aimed to be to the 2010s what IBM was to the 1970s: the hottest stock on the market. By the end of the year, he expected to announce licensing deals with GM and Honda. They would move Envia into position to launch the IPO, which would take place “early ’14, late ’13,” he said. Though Kapadia aimed for IBM’s trendiness, he didn’t aspire to its size. “We will stay small. Even as a public company I don’t see us as more than one hundred people,” he said.

  Kumar and Kapadia beamed. “Success is a good feeling,” Kapadia said.

  34

  The Old and the Young

  One afternoon in the summer of 2012, Kevin Gallagher and his wife, Sabine, put out hummus, turkey sausages, and carrots in their backyard in Downers Grove, the suburb of choice for young Argonne researchers since the move from the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Lynn Trahey, a chemist with whom Gallagher shared an office, sipped a glass of home-brewed beer. Mike Slater, a postdoctoral chemist with a goatee and ponytail, juggled bowling pins. It was a few weeks after ARPA-E’s summit and Gallagher was still irritated about Envia. He did not desire a public argument over the matter but said again that Kumar’s 400-watt-hour-per-kilogram disclosure was just show. Gallagher was disposed to irritable pessimism—Thackeray said that was to be expected since he was an engineer. But he defended his suspicions on the basis of the girth of Kumar’s electrodes: in order to deliver the performance that Envia claimed—meaning that an electric car could travel three hundred miles on a single charge—he would have had to densely pack the lithium into an unusually thick cathode. That was the only way. The problem was that thick electrodes were a blunt-force method—they could deliver the distance, but only in the lab. They probably could not be placed with confidence into a three-hundred-mile electric car. Being so fat, they would suffer early and fatal maladies and die long before the ten-year life span required for such batteries. They might even shatter. The future, Gallagher said, was slender electrodes—cathodes less than one hundred microns thick, or slimmer than the diameter of a human hair. In its rush to the market, Gallagher said, Envia had unveiled an attention-grabbing but flawed product that still required fundamental improvement.

  Gallagher had grown up in a Detroit suburb called Trenton and by curious coincidence graduated not only from the same Georgia Tech doctoral program as Chamberlain, but also from the same elementary school. Both played the trombone and had a natural confidence. Chamberlain took a liking to Gallagher, who was fifteen years younger. He called him “the next generation.” A lot of the other battery guys went along with that appraisal of Gallagher, who had curly brown hair, dimples, a compact, athletic build, and a smooth manner of speech. His first job out of college, before he decided to seek a Ph.D., was applying the adhesive to Scotch tape in a factory in Hutchinson, Minnesota, a town outside Minneapolis. He was the first to say that he could lose his temper. He had punched a man only once, and that wasn’t really a man but his older brother Sean, whom he smacked in the face when they were boys. But when he did anger, it was when he felt one or more of his principles under attack. Chamberlain said that they were alike in this respect as well.

  Perhaps Gallagher’s outsized ire about Envia was another sign of the general malaise in batteries at the moment. Or possibly it was his idealism—he more than any of the battery guys was uncomfortable with the carnival aspect of batteries.

  Lynn Trahey called Gallagher “K-Funk.” She had joined Argonne three years earlier as a postdoc from Berkeley. Scientists in the United States were not only largely foreign born, but also mostly men. So Trahey was an anomaly on both accounts—she was the only female staff scientist in the Battery Department. She had been a cheerleader and played varsity doubles tennis in high school. As a graduate student, she wore a purple- and green-dyed ponytail. Trahey’s current toned-down style appeared aimed at reducing her conspicuousness among these mostly plain men. She tied her hair back, unadorned. She dressed like one of the guys in loose-fitting jeans and sneakers. She seemed to overcompensate as well, in slangy and coarse phrases. “I avoid the small bathrooms near the Y-wing auditorium,” she said once. “I think that’s where old guys must go and take a long shit. I’ve seen rolled-up newspapers behind the pipe.”

  None of it worked. Trahey still stuck out. The guys behaved bizarrely around her. They spoke inexpressively, almost robotically. Except for Gallagher and Mike Slater, a lot of them simply stayed away. While colleagues behaved awkwardly, she was ideal for public relations exercises. At Berkeley, her professors dispatched her on community-outreach visits to neighborhood schools and senior-citizen groups. She would show up and attract favorable press for the department. Chamberlain employed Trahey to the same advantage. He featured a photograph of her posed in protective glasses on the department’s home page and in a handful of press releases.

  Another of the battery guys who conversed with Trahey was Dieter Gruen, the German-born physicist who had been at Argonne since the Manhattan Project days. Gruen was developing a concept for a lithium-sulfur battery and this summer asked Trahey’s help with an experiment. Gruen had no funding for his idea; Trahey did, and, in an e-mail, he asked whether she would mind carrying out his experiment on the beam line.

  Trahey was sitting in the office with Gallagher. She had already done one experiment for Gruen “to be nice,” she said, but now “he is taking advantage.” Gruen’s work “is not in my budget.”

  “Why don’t we get rid of the old people” at the lab? Gallagher said. “I’d like to see their output. I’ll bet it’s low.” He said that if you calculated the average age of the department’s researchers, you might be surprised as to how elderly the staff was as a whole. Gallagher and Trahey agreed that their older colleagues were costing too much money.

  Trahey said, “The reason there are so few jobs is these people won’t leave. These guys suck up all this money that could go to other things.” It particularly galled her that Gruen was paid at the lab’s top salary rank. “He is a 710!” she said.

  Such grousing poured out of the pair. They suggested that battery science was a young person’s game. But were the ideas developed by over-the-hill scientists under scrutiny, or was it simply their ages? Judging by space and budget, it was true that the department could be insufferably cramped and the funding slender for fresh minds leaving the universities. But experience had its place, too. John Goodenough, the eighty-nine-year-old father of lithium-ion batteries, still ran his lab at the University of Texas. No one discussed pushing Goodenough into retirement.

  Nor did Trahey and Gallagher speak that way of Goodenough’s former protégé, Thackeray, who apart from also being a 710 was, at sixty-four, no longer a young man either. Sometimes Thackeray hinted at health problems but said it wasn’t anything serious. That was understating it, as he had been treated for leukemia the previous year. But he said it was “not the aggressive form” and was more or less under control. “I’m not as well as I was ten years ago but I’m hanging in there,” he said. Thackeray said he had no plans to retire soon and wondered how he would find time for a planned memoir of his South Africa days. As of now, he was occupied with voltage fade and administrative duties associated with managing two research groups. It could be some time before he got to the book.

  Gallagher in fact owed his job to one of the old people. Paul Nelson had worked at Argonne since 1958. He was eighty-one years old, erect and fit. A few years before, a couple of the senior managers along with Dave Howell, the top battery boss at the Department of Energy, had decided that Nelson possessed a special skill that ought to be passed on—he had developed novel software that could rapidly assess whether a given new battery formulation would actually work in a vehicle. They searched awhile for an apt protégé before Gallagher’s CV arrived in the mail. They hired him more or less on the spot.

  Nelson had witnessed much of Argonne’s battery history—the struggles with high-temperature sulfur batteries in the 1970s, the recruitment of Thackeray and Amine, and the advent of
lithium-ion. By the early 1990s, he was nearing retirement age. At Argonne, that meant time to move on. A mere glance around told you that no one would appreciate his management advice. But Nelson did not want to move on. He was only in his early sixties and, as he saw it, had many productive years to go. He knew how to obtain an invitation to stay. If you proved your worth again as a pure scientist, you could be welcome back at the bench. Such arrangements were useful for Argonne because it tapped the product of a seasoned mind at a much smaller, part-time wage—really a symbolic sum. But you could stay in the game.

  That’s what Nelson did. He detected an opening in the assembly line that battery science had become: propose a new chemistry, obtain funding, prove (or fail to) that it worked in coin cells, write a paper, garner any accolades, then move on to the next thing. At no point was your idea typically tested for practicality—no one checked whether it could produce a superior battery. It was as though experimentation was the final product.

  Nelson wanted to make it otherwise. Reality testing should assume a native role in the process. For the final three or so years of his tenure as Battery Department head, Nelson tailed off his supervisorial time and started to hone his skills at the computer. By the time he retired in 1995, he was adept at modeling and design, a new discipline in which you recreated an invention from scratch on the computer screen. Shifting to half-time, he ultimately developed the appraisal software, which, starting with a few grams of a material, could determine how it would perform in a complete automobile battery pack. He would calculate the weight and volume of all the ingredients—the lithium needed at the pack level, the electrolyte, steel, plastic, and so on—and extrapolate whether a lab-scale success would work for the decade or so a battery might be used out in the world. That was powerful, because no such system existed at the time. Nelson then expanded his work to also estimate the cost of manufacturing all these materials. He began to factor the price of the composition and the economies of scale—how much would be saved when you were producing, say, one hundred thousand batteries versus just a few hundred?