by Robert Bryce
SMALLER FASTER INC.
AQUION ENERGY
Official Name Aquion Energy
Web site http://www.aquionenergy.com
Ownership Privately held
Headquarters Pittsburgh, PA
Finances By early 2013, it had raised more than $110 million in private equity and debt
2011 Revenue N/A
To make batteries dirt cheap, Jay Whitacre realized he was going to have to use materials that were almost as cheap as dirt.
To be sure, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that if you want to mass-produce anything at low cost, you must use cheap materials. But Whitacre is, in fact, a rocket scientist. He used to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When he embarked on his quest to make batteries that were cheap, stable, durable, and environmentally friendly, he had to forget traditional battery chemistries.38 Out went the usual suspects like lead, nickel, lithium, and cadmium. When he began testing various substances in his laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Whitacre set an almost absurdly low price threshold: none of his battery’s ingredients could cost more than $2 per kilogram.39
Those limits left Whitacre with just a handful of options. But by trading relatively expensive elements for dirt-cheap substances like water, cotton, salt, charcoal, and manganese—and by surrendering some ground on energy density—Whitacre has come up with what may be the most important development in batteries since Edison introduced the nickel-iron-alkaline battery in 1909.40
September 18, 2012: Battery designer Jay Whitacre at Aquion Energy’s Pittsburgh facility. The gray chest he’s standing behind will hold about 500 or 600 watt-hours of electricity and is designed for use in remote areas to power devices like vaccine refrigerators. Source: Photo by author.
Today, global spending on batteries totals about $56 billion per year.41 While the battery market is huge, and growing, Whitacre’s design, which he and his colleagues at Aquion Energy call an aqueous hybrid-ion cell, won’t ever be used to power your phone, your car, or your electric drill. It’s too heavy and bulky for those applications. Nor will it be deployed in a significant way in the next few years in Europe or the United States, where electricity is cheap and abundant. Nevertheless, Whitacre’s new battery will find plenty of customers.
Consider the history and chemistry of batteries, which have long been the energy sector’s killer app. Ever since the days of Alessandro Volta, who invented the battery in 1800, humans have been trying to find the best way to, in effect, put lightning in a bottle.42 Coal can be stockpiled nearly anywhere. Oil can be poured into low-cost tanks. Natural gas can be compressed or liquefied for storage. But storing electrons has always been the prize. No other form of energy is as valuable or flexible as electricity. But batteries stink. They always have. They are uniformly too heavy, too bulky, and most important, they’re too finicky. Just ask Boeing or Sony.
Aviation giant Boeing decided to use lithium-ion batteries in its 787 Dreamliner because of their high energy density. A lithium-ion battery can store about 150 watt-hours per kilogram, which is about two times as much as a typical nickel-cadmium and three times as much as a lead-acid battery.43 But Boeing’s decision to use lithium-ion batteries came with a heavy price. In January 2013, after a pair of 787s had onboard battery fires, the new jetliner was grounded for about four months.44 The resulting retrofits to the 787, as well as the reputational loss, cost Boeing tens of millions of dollars. One Boeing customer sought some $37 million in compensation from the company.45 In the wake of Boeing’s problems, other airplane makers, including Airbus, Bombardier, and Mitsubishi, opted to use nickel-cadmium batteries in their new airplanes rather than risk using lithium-ion.46
Lithium-ion batteries dominate the world of consumer electronics. But few consumers enjoy seeing their laptop computer go up in flames. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened a few years ago when a rash of laptop-battery fires forced Sony, the huge Japanese electronics firm, to recall about seven million lithium-ion batteries it had manufactured.47
Lithium-ion batteries have relatively high energy density, but they also degrade quickly in high temperatures. If they get fully discharged, they are ruined. And as Boeing and Sony have painfully learned, if the batteries are overcharged, or discharged too rapidly, they can catch fire.
Other battery chemistries can also present difficulties. Lead-acid batteries are relatively cheap and have proven their utility over the last 150 years. (The design was invented in 1859 by the French physician Gaston Planté.)48 But lead has some serious downsides; it’s a potent neurotoxin and it’s heavy. Add in some sulfuric acid—used in the battery’s electrolyte—and the design’s environmental problems become apparent. Plus, lead-acid batteries can explode or catch fire. That’s what happened to a large lead-acid storage system in Hawaii. In August 2012, a bank of batteries located near a 15-megawatt wind project in Hawaii went up in flames. Although firefighters used about 1,000 pounds of chemicals to try to douse the fire, they were eventually forced to just let the batteries burn.49
Sodium-sulfur batteries, which are used to store electricity for use on the electric grid, are also finicky. Although sodium-sulfur systems have been installed in more than 170 locations in six countries, the batteries operate at high temperature, which, by itself, makes them risky. In September 2011, a bank of sodium-sulfur batteries caught fire at a factory in Japan’s Ibaraki prefecture owned by Mitsubishi Materials Corp. The blaze burned for more than two weeks before it was finally extinguished.50
As any chemist will tell you, the higher a substance’s energy density, the more reactive it is.51 A bucket filled with gasoline has very high energy density and can thus be made to ignite, or explode, with a small spark. A similar bucket filled with leaves or sawdust can also be set aflame, but the risk of explosion is almost nil, and any fire that starts will be far less dramatic than the one fed by a similar volume of gasoline.
When he began working on a new battery design, Whitacre, who has a PhD in materials science and engineering, understood the tradeoffs. If he pursued a battery with high energy density, it would tend to be unstable. Therein lies the genius of Whitacre’s design: his battery is made largely of salt water, which is stable, heavy, and thermally resistant. It’s hard to make water burn. The other feature (which some might call a flaw) of his design: it’s big and heavy. For decades, battery designers have worked to make batteries Smaller and Smaller, and in doing so, increase their energy density. That’s fine. But batteries work by getting ions to move from the anode to the cathode and back again. When you move lots of ions from one pole to the other, it can cause expansion and contraction as they enter the battery’s electrodes. The more ions that move from anode to cathode and back, the greater the energy density of the battery. As that energy density increases, the more problematic the swelling and shrinking becomes.
Rather than see weight and low energy density as a hindrance, Whitacre used them to his advantage. In September 2012, when I visited Aquion’s research and product-development facility near downtown Pittsburgh, Whitacre explained that by “having more mass, we are protecting ourselves from thermal swings.” He went on, explaining that his design “traded high energy density for durability and low cost.” The result: Whitacre’s battery is a relative giant when compared to those used in hybrid vehicles or all-electric cars.
Aquion Energy’s basic cell is called the AE12. A bank of eighty-four of Aquion’s cells fits on a pallet weighing 2,750 pounds (1,250 kilograms). That pallet-load of batteries holds about 12 kilowatt-hours of energy.52 By comparison, the lithium-ion battery pack in the all-electric Nissan Leaf automobile stores twice as much energy (24 kilowatt-hours) in a package that weighs about a quarter as much, 660 pounds (300 kilograms).53 Put another way, the energy density of the Aquion battery is less than 10 watt-hours per kilogram. The Leaf’s battery pack has eight times more energy density, 80 watt-hours per kilogram.54
But Whitacre doesn’t care about the automobile market. Hi
s goal is to make big batteries that are Cheaper and more durable for the stationary market. In one of the test labs, Whitacre showed me a gray plastic chest, which was about the size of a large kitchen trash can. The chest was stuffed with cells, a neatly organized set of wires, and a power management system. “We can attach this to a small photovoltaic system, and in a day or so we can hook it up to a vaccine refrigerator. We can store enough electricity in this chest, maybe 500 or 600 watt-hours, to keep that vaccine refrigerator running for days. Those things are very efficient,” Whitacre told me. “I was just explaining this to Bill Gates the other day.”
Wait, what? Yes, Whitacre had a meeting with the Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist to talk about Aquion’s progress. Such is the life of Whitacre, who might be the hottest property in the battery world. He’s not a rock star or a billionaire. Not yet. But by early 2013, Aquion Energy had raised more than $110 million, including a significant chunk of cash from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, where Al Gore is a partner.55 Whitacre’s chat with Gates must have been convincing. In April 2013, Gates was among a group of investors who put $35 million into Aquion. (Gates has also invested in other energy storage companies, including LightSail Energy and Ambri.)56
Although Whitacre and Aquion have gained plenty of exposure and raised a large amount of money, the company isn’t home free, not by a long shot. Moving from the laboratory to mass production is always fraught with challenges. In late 2013, Aquion began large-scale manufacturing of its batteries at a factory outside of Pittsburgh that was formerly used to build televisions. The company’s goal is to produce batteries with a total capacity of 500 megawatt-hours per year.57 That sounds like a lot. But keep in mind the enormous scale of global electricity demand and the minuscule amount of electricity that we are currently able to store.
If you were somehow able to collect all of the world’s car batteries and string them together, you’d only have enough storage for about 1 terawatt-hour, or 1 trillion watt-hours.58 In 2012, global electricity generation was about 22,500 terawatt-hours.59 In other words, all of the world’s automotive batteries combined can store only enough electricity to power the globe for about thirty minutes.60
The potential rewards for a company that can build a Cheaper battery are enormous. In 2012 alone, the value of global electricity sold was approximately $2.2 trillion.61 A Cheaper, more durable electricity storage system would help make that trillion-dollar system work better. A Cheaper battery would help turn the intermittent energy that is produced by wind turbines and solar cells into more reliable power. A Cheaper battery would allow conventional electricity producers to store some of the energy they produce at night, when demand is low, and sell it during the day when demand is high. Such a system would reduce fuel costs and wear and tear on generation facilities and would be worth tens of billions of dollars per year to electricity providers all over the globe. It would also be attractive to precision manufacturers and other operations that demand highly reliable supplies of electricity.
Whitacre and his colleagues at Aquion believe their biggest near-term opportunity is in remote and island economies where electricity costs are high because they have to rely on diesel-fired generators for electricity. By combining battery storage with the diesel units and solar-photovoltaic systems, Aquion could dramatically reduce the cost of electricity in those regions. Another possible application: cell-phone towers, which need to continue operating even when the electric grid falters.
By marketing a battery that is safe, durable, and contains less toxic materials, Aquion will likely have an advantage over competitors. But the key advantage, of course, is that their battery should be Cheaper. And Cheaper always counts.
Ending this section of the book with a profile of Aquion and Jay Whitacre is appropriate because the company and the scientist are fine examples of American innovation and entrepreneurship in the energy sector. Energy policy and innovation are the primary themes of the next section, which also explains why the United States is particularly well positioned to dominate the Smaller Faster future.
PART IV:
Embracing Our Smaller Faster Future
20
GETTING ENERGY POLICY RIGHT
Everything in our society—in fact, everything that happens inside of us—begins with the transformation of energy. No symphonies can be imagined or played, no planes can take off, no crops can be harvested without some form of energy being transformed into another.
We turn the food energy in tortillas into the sugars our muscles need to play a Woody Guthrie tune on the guitar. Internal-combustion engines convert the chemical energy in diesel fuel into the motive power that delivers more tortillas to the supermarket. We convert the photonic energy that hits our solar panels into electricity that feeds the lamps that illuminate our street signs.
Energy is the master resource. Therefore, we must make certain that our energy policies are in line with the trend toward Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper. Policies that promote low-density, expensive energy are destined to fail because they ignore both physics and economics. For decades, the catastrophists have been claiming that our future lies with renewable energy. In doing so, they have been supporting the increased use of sources that have fatally low power density: wind and biofuels.
REJECT WIND AND BIOFUELS
In promoting these subsidy-dependent sources, degrowthers have given momentum to landscape-destroying energy projects that can supply only a tiny fraction of the world’s energy needs while doing next to nothing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Over the past decade or so, I’ve written extensively about the problems with wind and biofuels. But since 2010, when I published Power Hungry (which cast a sharply critical eye on the foolishness of wind energy), and since 2008, when I published Gusher of Lies (which exposed the absurdities of the corn ethanol scam), those two forms of energy have continued to get both mandates and subsidies. The fundamental problem with both wind and biofuels is that they are not dense. Producing significant quantities of energy from either wind or biomass simply requires too much land. The problem is not one of religious belief, it’s simple math and basic physics.
Energy is the pillar upon which economic growth is built. We need to pull the blinkers from our eyes when it comes to energy and recognize that cheap, abundant, reliable energy creates wealth. If we want to grow our economy, we cannot rely on the mirage of wind and biofuels.
WIND ENERGY’S INCURABLE DENSITY PROBLEM
The next time you read an article stating, or hear a pundit claim, that we can run the world using wind energy, remember this figure: 1 watt per square meter. That’s the power density of wind energy.
The punch line is this: even if we ignore wind energy’s incurable intermittency, its deleterious impact on wildlife, and how 500-foot-high wind turbines blight the landscape and harm the landowners who live next to them, its paltry power density simply makes it unworkable. Wind-energy projects require too much land and too much airspace. In the effort to turn the low power density of the wind into electricity, wind turbines standing about 150 meters high must sweep huge expanses of air.1 (A 6-megawatt offshore turbine built by Siemens sports turbine blades with a total diameter of 154 meters that sweep an area of 18,600 square meters.2 That sweep area is nearly three times the area of a regulation soccer pitch.3)
By sweeping those enormous expanses of air, wind turbines are killing large numbers of bats and birds. A 2013 peer-reviewed study estimated that wind turbines in the United States are killing nearly 900,000 bats and 573,000 birds per year, including some 83,000 birds of prey.4 Another 2013 study, done by some of the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s top raptor biologists, found that the number of eagles killed by wind turbines has skyrocketed, and that increase has occurred alongside the rapid increase in wind-energy capacity. In 2007, the United States had 17,000 megawatts of installed wind capacity.5 That year, the biologists were able to verify two eagle kills by turbines. By 2011, installed w
ind capacity had nearly tripled to 47,000 megawatts, and the number of verified eagle kills by wind turbines had increased to 24.6 Thus, over a time period when wind capacity tripled, the number of eagle kills increased twelvefold. Between 1997 and mid-2012, at least eighty-five eagles, including six bald eagles and seventy-nine golden eagles, were killed by wind turbines. That tally did not include the ongoing eagle slaughter at California’s Altamont Pass, where about one hundred golden eagles are killed by turbines every year.7
Every one of those kills was a violation of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. But it wasn’t until late 2013 that the wind industry was finally brought to justice. On November 22, 2013, the Justice Department announced that it had reached a $1 million settlement with Duke Energy. Duke pled guilty to criminal violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for killing 14 golden eagles and 149 other protected birds at two company-owned wind projects in Wyoming.8 In addition to the wildlife toll, wind turbines create audible noise as well as low-frequency noise and infrasound that is injurious to human health. Although the wind industry continues to deny the existence of a problem, numerous studies, as well as a wealth of news clippings from around the world, show that the noise problem with wind turbines is real and widespread. (See Appendix E.)
There are hundreds of examples of the growing global backlash against Big Wind. To cite just one: in July 2013, more than 2,000 protesters marched in Ireland to oppose a wind-energy project that could result in the installation of more than a thousand wind turbines in that country’s midlands region.9 From Ireland to New Zealand and Massachusetts to Wisconsin, there is growing outrage among rural and semi-rural homeowners about the encroachment of massive wind projects. The European Platform Against Windfarms now lists some six hundred signatory organizations from twenty-four countries.10 In the UK—where fights are raging against industrial wind projects in Wales, Scotland, and elsewhere—some three hundred anti-wind groups have been formed.11 Meanwhile, here in the United States, about 150 anti-wind groups are active.12 In Ontario, Canada, the epicenter of the backlash against Big Wind, there are fifty-five anti-wind groups.13