Description
Battery and energy supply and storage technology (B|ESST) is a core system integration technology needed to eff ectively mitigate environmental risk. Electrochemical energy storage has been identifi ed as a critical enabling technology for advanced, fuel-efficient, light and heavyduty vehicles (USABC, 8/31/15). Battery energy productivity, however, remains an anomaly in the tech cycle (McCann, 5/03/14). It is a technically vexing gap between the present and a low-carbon future (Loh, 5/01/15). Advances in battery technology have not been able to keep up with Moore’s Law of computing power doubling every two years, which has defined technological development for the past 40 years (Day, 5/03/14). Th e energy density of rechargeable batteries has risen only sixfold since the early lead–nickel rechargeables of the 1990s (Van Noorden, 3/05/14). Battery storage capacity currently doubles only every 10–15 years. Getting it down to every fi ve years is the aim (Cleevely, 5/03/14).
The battery, like the light bulb, is at its heart an archaic device (Levine, 10/12/12). Rudimentary batteries were in use over 2000 years ago in Mesopotamia (Day, 5/03/14). Th e basic chemical process in batteries has not changed significantly since then. Today’s battery production process also uses more energy than the battery itself will stock and return duringits use (Lewis, Park, and Paolini, 4/23/12). Th en there are the polluting by-products of the battery production process and battery recycling, as well as unwanted reactions (i.e., discharge, self-discharge, and re-charge rates) that affect battery efficiency.
Lithium is the lightest solid and has a power density and energy density per unit mass equivalent to gasoline. But it is also highly reactive and unstable and ineffi cient in terms of the cycling (Coulombic) efficiency required of rechargeable batteries. Th is suggests significant, perhaps, inordinate risks in launching such technology in battery and energy supply and storage chemistry. Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, with their flammable liquid electrolyte, never overcame its original flaws (Martin, 4/14/15). Th e incidence of Li-ion battery (LiB) “thermal runaway” causing fires to break out in aircrafts, busses, cars, handheld electronic devices, computers, and even electric motor-assisted bicycles illustrate the very low thermal stability and riskiness of this existing metal-based battery technology. Th ere are also safety risks in the battery production and disposal process, as illustrated by the case of the fire at the Nihon Gaishi Kabushikigaisha (NGK Insulators) Sodium-Sulfur battery factory in Tsukuba, Japan, in September 2011. Adding further uncertainty is the cost and ready and sustained supply of Lithium and some of the transition metals currently used in LiBs—Cobalt, Vanadium, Nickel, and Titanium (Nitta, Wu, Lee, and Yushin, 11/24/14: 252–3). Battery and energy storage markets need to cut the cost of technology, the levelized cost of technology (LCOT), as soon as the technology is developed and scaled up for manufacture and sale. Battery companies whose cost per unit storage does not drop by a factor of two in the next five years will go out of business (Fallows, 4/16/14).
Today’s battery researchers are operating without a map (Levine, 10/12/12). The constraints of the laws of chemistry and physics on energy storage and supply means researchers have to rethink battery technology from “materials science scratch” (Day, 5/03/14). A cursory count of the number of elements in the periodic table used in battery, fuel cell, and other energy storage and supply materials research, according to Nitta, Wu, Lee, and Yushin (11/24/14: 253) among others, is about 40 of the 103 elements or 39 percent of the periodic table. The development of battery materials is a “punctuated evolution,” first by large jumps that occur with the discovery of a new class of material, then followed by an optimization phase to improve its basic structure and composition (Fultz, 7/08/14). The big jumps come from experimentation, often by serendipity or “Edison testing,” the stuff of basic research (Fultz, 7/08/14). Research and development (R&D) in this field therefore goes beyond innovation into the realm of discovery. Developing batteries from renewable and sustainable resources is the biggest challenge (Hardin, 8/11/11). Such a breakthrough could come from any number of avenues or not at all (Levine, 10/12/12).