Bottled Lightning

by Seth Fletcher

  Fortuitously, PolyPlus had already developed a process for coating lithium with multiple layers of different materials that were designed to make otherwise unstable combinations of materials—combinations that normally react and corrode or melt or catch fire—stable. “Instead of lithium touching that white ceramic piece, we put something between the two that allowed lithium to move between the two but where nothing would react. We tried that and what we saw was, ‘Wow, this looks really stable.’ And then at that moment one of our electrochemists and I started talking and we said, ‘You know, if this stuff is stable in air, we might be able to build a lithium-air battery.’”

  People had been talking about lithium-air for decades, but no one had ever figured out how to get around the fact that air contains moisture, and moisture attacks lithium. “All these discussions about lithium-air batteries, although interesting, had that basic flaw,” Visco said. “That if you were to build something, it would be a bit of a novelty. You’d never have anything practical.”

  To see if they did have something practical, they decided to subject their coated lithium metal to the most direct test possible. “We put water right up against it,” Visco said. “And we said, ‘Either it’s going to get attacked and fall apart, or maybe we’ll see something.’ And it actually shocked us. What we saw was extreme, very stable electrode potential. So then we said, ‘Let’s see if we can move lithium in and out,’ and it just worked like a charm. So we said, ‘Wow, this is a big thing.’” That year, 2003, PolyPlus went into stealth mode, and Visco and his colleagues spent the year writing patents.

  When they came out of hiding, they began talking about some of the most interesting far-horizon developments the battery world had seen in a long time. Naturally, they applied for funding from DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, and got it. They began working on two different lines of research. First was lithium-seawater batteries, which could be used to power oceanographic research vessels or military craft. The second was lithium-air. Within the lithium-air program they began studying both primary (one-use) batteries, which today Visco says are working very well and delivering charge capacities of 800 milliamp-hours per gram, as well as the real prize, rechargeables.

  PolyPlus’s lithium-air battery is an interesting tweak of traditional lithium-ion design. The negative electrode is made of metallic lithium, and the positive is air. Between the two is a ceramic barrier. “In our battery, things are switched around a bit,” Visco says. “It almost looks like a piece of glass, but it’s white.” But the metallic lithium anode is encased in a series of ceramic barriers that allow it to engage in the right reactions while keeping it completely isolated from moisture. “You can hold it in your hand, you can put it in a glass of water, and it’ll just sit there,” Visco said. “It’s completely stable. And as soon as you hook it up to a wire, it becomes active.”

  To show exactly how stable the coated lithium electrode is, Visco’s team built a lithium-water battery in which the water “electrode” is an aquarium inhabited by clown fish. The water in which those fish live acts as the positive electrode for the battery, which is connected to a green 3-volt LED. “In a sense they’re swimming inside a lithium battery, and they’re completely unperturbed.”

  As always, there are hurdles to clear. Visco’s team has the same problem as all lithium-air researchers, which is recharging—getting solid lithium peroxide to break back down to its constituent parts in an orderly fashion. And they have lithium metal to deal with. The way PolyPlus encapsulates their lithium-metal electrode makes it easy to handle, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to recharge. “No one has ever really shown [rechargeable lithium metal] to be doable yet,” Visco said. And that, in part, is why it’ll be a long time before PolyPlus’s lithium-air batteries are driving our cars. “Even if we commercialize a lithium-air battery, it’s going to take a long time before you see battery packs that are large enough and proven and tested enough that you would start thinking about transportation,” Visco said.

  Today electric cars come with too many caveats. Unless it has a backup gas engine, an electric vehicle will have to be a second car. Only when cities have installed charging stations in every parking meter and every parking garage will electrics truly be practical. Even then, it’ll take a nationwide chain of high-power, fast-charging stations or battery-swapping businesses—whatever sort of Jiffy Lube grows out of projects like Shai Agassi’s battery-swap company Better Place—before you can take a road trip in the thing.

  There are problems with waiting on the infrastructure, however. Consider fast charging, which would allow electric-car drivers to dump their batteries full of electrons in a matter of minutes, making a recharge only slightly more time-consuming than a visit to the gas station. The math isn’t promising for the prospect of a major network of electron filling stations. “Let’s say you’ve got a battery that holds 25 kilowatt-hours,” Elton Cairns said. “If you want to charge that in fifteen minutes, then you’ve got to have a 100-kilowatt substation. If you’ve got something like the Tesla with over 50 kilowatt-hours and you want to charge that in fifteen minutes, you’re talking 200 kilowatts. Your house takes 1 kilowatt. If you want to have something like a gasoline fuel station that is all electrical, you’re talking about multimegawatts of power at that station. And I just don’t see that happening.”

  There are a couple of ways to react to this sort of discouraging calculus. One is defeatism. The other is research. “Infrastructure gains are the hardest there are,” IBM’s Wilcke said, “which is one reason [hydrogen] fuel cells haven’t worked.” That is exactly why Wilcke is now devoting his career to trying to find out whether the lithium-air battery can be made reality. With a breakthrough battery that can deliver a car five hundred miles on a single charge, only the most speed-addled road tripper would need fast charging or battery swapping. Everyone else will charge curbside at the hotel and then get back on the road the next morning. “I’d rather tackle a really difficult technical problem,” Wilcke said. “It’s confined to being a technical problem, and you don’t need a zillion dollars’ infrastructure.”

  “Society needs higher-energy-density solutions,” Peter Bruce said. “There aren’t many options on the table. We have to explore the options that we have. Lithium-ion batteries will be with us for many years to come, and they’ll be key technologies in vehicles.” The reason Bruce and others like him have hope for the prospects of a livable, comfortable postoil civilization powered by electrons snared from the sun and generated from the wind is that, as grim as the cost estimates and think tank forecasts can sometimes be, we are just getting started. “I think the good thing about lithium-air, lithium sulfur is that at least there are some options,” Bruce said.

  “There is somewhere we can go.”

  EPILOGUE

  The inner-city neighborhood that surrounds General Motors’s Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant is a showpiece of postindustrial urban blight, the kind of place whose condemned architecture would work well on an ironic postcard delivering greetings from Murder City. But inside the plant’s secure gates, one frigid morning the week before Christmas 2010, GM was initiating a new phase of rebirth. Under a fresh blanket of snow stood the first forty-five dealer-ready Chevrolet Volts. As five red transporter trucks rolled up, employees began clearing the windshields and rolling the cars on board, and the Volt’s entry into society began. This first shipment was bound for greater New York City and Washington, D.C.; by the end of the week another three hundred or so Volts would also be dispatched to California and Texas. The Volt’s public-relations team quickly posted photographs of the inaugural shipment online, and after clicking through the slide show, Chelsea Sexton wrote on Twitter what every veteran of the EV1 wars had to be thinking: “I’m liking this view of EVs on a transporter much better than the last time!”

  The Volt rollout had really begun a couple of months earlier, with early media test drives of “salable” prototypes—the last cars to be built before off
icial production, vehicles that to the untrained eye were indistinguishable from the ones that would go to customers. My drive came in October, and when I arrived at the Detroit airport on a Sunday afternoon, a GM engineer escorted me to a curbside row of Volts. As I settled into the driver’s seat of a shiny black specimen, I was struck by how far the car had come since my spin in a hacked-up prototype a year and a half earlier. It shouldn’t have been surprising that the Volt would end up as an attractive, fairly loaded production car, and yet in a way it was—probably because I had spent the previous three years thinking about the Volt as a science project rather than as a product that would eventually go on sale. As we drove away from the passenger pickup zone and reached a modest cruising speed, the Volt was frictionless and silent. Steering was silky and precise. The car launched from a stop with a punch that made it feel faster than it actually was. The next day, when I had a chance to get it to 85 mph on the freeway, it felt unshakable and nimble.

  The car, in short, was fantastic. Yet every step of the Volt rollout process met with some form of backlash. The week of my test drive, the fury was fueled by an esoteric revelation about the nature of the car’s blended power train: that in some circumstances, at high speeds with the battery depleted, the gasoline engine could connect (via a small electric motor) to the gearset that drives the wheels. I was in the room when GM engineers explained the arcane mechanics of this process to a group of about thirty reporters, and the news seemed pretty uncontroversial. But almost immediately a vastly oversimplified version of the story reached the outside world, and by lunchtime, the blogo-sphere had gone insane. A writer for Edmunds.com posted on Twitter: “Rumors are true. GM lied to the world. Volt’s engine does power the car’s wheels. It isn’t a true EV as promised.” A wave of geeky outrage rolled across the car blogs so quickly that soon The New York Times was addressing the matter.

  GM’s public-relations people should have been accustomed to this kind of reaction. When GM finally announced the Volt’s $41,000 price tag in late July 2010, critics complained about the steep figure and declared the car, which was still nearly five months away from dealerships, a failure. An Op-Ed in The New York Times called the Volt “GM’s Electric Lemon.” Because of the Obama administration’s bailout of GM, a revisionist history of the origins of the Volt soon took hold in certain political circles. According to this story, the Volt had been the Obama administration’s idea, and the car’s creation was a necessary condition of a government rescue of GM. In November, George Will wrote a column in which he called the Volt a “government brainstorm.” The tax credits that support the Volt and other electrified vehicles were “bribes.” President Obama was, in Will’s sarcastic words, “Automotive Engineer in Chief,” and the federal bailout of GM and Chrysler was a case of “government and its misnamed ‘private sector’ accomplices foist[ing] state capitalism on an appalled country.” When Motor Trend announced that the Volt had won its Car of the Year award, Rush Limbaugh screamed that it would be the “end” of the magazine. “How in the world do they have any credibility?” he cried. “Not one has been sold.”

  In a response published online, Motor Trend’s Detroit editor, Todd Lassa, pointed out that no Volts had been sold because the car was not yet for sale, and told Limbaugh that if he would bother to drive the Volt, he might enjoy it. “Just remember: driving and Oxycontin don’t mix,” Lassa wrote.

  Ultimately, though, the polarization over the Volt seemed largely confined to the spheres of auto journalism and professional political hackery. When GM auctioned for charity the second Volt to exit the assembly line, the winning bid of $225,000 came from a man with impeccable red-state credentials: Rick Hendrick, the North Carolina car dealer who owns the NASCAR Sprint Cup team Hendrick Motorsports. When production of the Volt began, on schedule, on November 11, the reception was mainly enthusiastic. Interest in the car had grown so intense that by early December GM had announced that it was looking for a way to “double or triple” Volt production. That same week, GM’s new CEO, Dan Akerson—the former telecom executive who took the job when Ed Whitacre stepped down unexpectedly in August—announced that GM would soon add one thousand electric-vehicle engineering and development jobs on top of the approximately two thousand people already working worldwide on the Volt and its future brethren. Finally, the success of the “New GM’s” initial public offering on Wednesday, November 17, signaled a new era for the company. Investors devoured 478 million common-stock shares, and GM raised $20.1 billion in the largest IPO in American history.

  While the Nissan Leaf was a riskier proposition than the Volt, its arrival in late 2010 was drama-free. Although Nissan insisted that the Leaf and the Volt were completely different types of vehicles—one was a pure EV, the other a variation on the plug-in hybrid—the comparison of the two was inevitable, and the slow striptease that was the Leaf launch adhered to almost exactly the same schedule as the Volt’s. The week after driving the Volt in Detroit, I joined a group of reporters at Nissan’s North American headquarters outside Nashville, and on winding two-lane highways amid the horse farms of rural Tennessee, the Leaf was a pleasure to drive. On the highway, it easily sailed to the brink of 90 mph, and at such speeds it remained quiet, sturdy, and smooth. The reviews of the car were positive, and a month and a half later, Nissan gave a press conference in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza to mark the world’s first sale of a Leaf, to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Olivier Chalouhi.

  That the Leaf was able to sneak into the marketplace with so little backlash suggests that electric cars aren’t nearly as controversial as is General Motors—that the shrieking debate over the Volt had less to do with the underlying technology than it did with the fact that the Volt is a GM product. After all, by the end of 2010 the question wasn’t whether the automobile would be electrified. It was how quickly that would happen, and what mark on the spectrum between pure gas power and pure battery power made the most sense. Other automakers may have been more cautious with electrification plans than either GM or Nissan, but they soon got on board. Ford, for example, announced that it would release a purely electric version of its Focus at the end of 2011, and that a plug-in hybrid would follow in 2012. Toyota announced that in 2012 it would begin selling a plug-in version of the Prius. At the Los Angeles Auto Show in November 2010, Mitsubishi revealed a North American version of its i MiEV electric car, which it said would arrive in the United States a year later. In September, Volkswagen AG chairman Martin Winterkorn had told Der Spiegel that excitement over hybrids would fade once people realized that it was a “bridge technology.” “The next big step is the electric car,” he said. Two months later, Audi declared its intent to lead the “premium” EV market by 2020. Even Porsche approved production of a hybrid supercar, the 918 Spyder, and announced that the car was only a first step in a large electrification program.

  The auto industry’s momentum was welcome news for companies such as A123 Systems, which in September 2010 opened a 291,000-square-foot automotive-battery plant in Livonia, Michigan. In a talking point surely designed to needle the competitors at EnerDel, the company claimed that the Livonia facility was “the largest lithium-ion facility in America.” On opening day, the plant employed three hundred people, but A123 estimated that in about a year, between the Livonia plant and another Michigan facility, it would be responsible for creating some three thousand jobs in the state—jobs that, without the help of government incentives, would have been created overseas.

  Because the company built the plant in part with their $249 million stimulus grant, the plant’s opening ceremony became a political event. Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm, and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu joined Yet-Ming Chiang and the rest of A123’s executives in Livonia that day, and President Obama called in to deliver a few remarks. “This is important,” Obama told the gathered parties, “not just because of what you guys are doing at your plant, but all across America, because this is about the birth of an entire new industry in America—an i
ndustry that’s going to be central to the next generation of cars.” He made a point of contrasting his administration’s nurturing stance toward companies like A123 with those that had come before. “For a long time, our economic policies have shortchanged cutting-edge projects like this one, and it put us behind the innovation race,” he said.

  In an interview with CNBC, A123’s CEO, David Vieau, asserted his optimism about the company’s prospects: in the 2012–2013 time frame, he said, the EV and plug-in market would begin taking off. By 2015, it would have expanded “dramatically, independent of the price of gas.”

  As 2011 began, the first mass-market electric cars since the dawn of the twentieth century were sitting in dealerships. The dream of founding a domestic lithium-ion battery industry has begun to yield real jobs and real factories. Still, the question remains: Will this last? Is this book the story of the beginning of something enduring—a new era for transportation, energy, and American high-tech manufacturing? Or will it turn out to be a portrait of another false start, an anomalous couple of years in which, once again, scientists and entrepreneurs and government attempted to seed an energy revolution, only to see those seeds die when “business as usual” resumed?

  Judging by the major, bank-breaking commitments of automakers around the world—not to mention the eagerness of rising world powers such as China to dominate the new industry—the gradual electrification of the automobile appears inevitable. It won’t happen immediately. Until battery technology improves still further, purely electric cars like the Nissan Leaf will remain limited in long-haul America. But as the Chevy Volt demonstrates, electrification isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition—smart engineers will use the best battery technology available at any given time to displace as much petroleum as possible, and when those batteries run out, gasoline will continue to get the job done.