Can battery technology advance rapidly to “transform the prosperity of the world”?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8073
Whatever is to be said for the scientific and technical literature as the place for study of battery-technology prospects, consider a pair of opposed outlooks presented to the public via national media: At the Atlantic, James Fallows reported former secretary of energy Steven Chu’s belief that among the many novel approaches being explored for battery technology, there’s “a reasonable chance that a couple may work—and really work, to double or triple energy density and lower cost.” At the Wall Street Journal, technology columnist Christopher Mims predicts , “Breakthroughs in energy storage technology aren’t coming. Not in the foreseeable future, at least.” “There is no Moore’s law for batteries,” Mims declares. He continues:
That is, while the computing power of microchips doubles every 18 months, the capacity of the batteries on which ever more of our gadgets depend exhibits no such exponential growth. In a good year, the capacity of the best batteries in our mobile phones, tablets and notebook computers—and increasingly, in our cars and household gadgets—increases just a few percent.
Just a few percent for the routine rate of advance? Fallows reported that Chu called it 5–10%. Fallows also reported that Chu engaged a dimension of the battery-development question that Mims’s column completely ignores: utility-scale energy storage for intermittently productive wind and solar sources. Fallows conveyed Chu’s optimistic vision:
All of this would be a huge market. But the effects are more profound. There are mountainous places even in the US, like western Alaska, that will never be connected to the electric grid. There aren’t enough people, and the distances are too great. There are many parts of South Asia like this, too. But they will have solar and wind power—which, in 10 or 15 years, are going to be as cheap as any other form of energy, or cheaper. Once you have storage systems, you can put a little solar installation on your roof or a plot of land, and now you have your electric supply! It will be like cellphones’ leapfrogging the land-line era. It will transform the prosperity of the world.
Mims says his confidence stems from the reality that “it takes years to convert ‘breakthroughs’ in the lab into something that works at scale, under all the conditions of real life use.” He adds, “And the overwhelming majority of innovations don’t survive the process.” He does, however, cite successes stemming nonetheless from slower, incremental progress. “But let’s not despair,” he counsels, then observes:
A funny thing happened while engineers were forced to wait for a breakthrough that never arrived. They compromised. They made their designs more efficient. And the result is a new dawn of devices lighter, more efficient, and more capable than anything that has come before.
He offers two examples of technologies made possible by exploiting modest battery improvements together with general innovativeness: an electric scooter and a portable vacuum cleaner. But he scoffs at the possibility of quiet, battery-powered drones for delivery services. “One alternative,” he quips, “is to power those drones with gasoline, but it’s hard to imagine people will put up with skies darkened by the auditory equivalent of flying weed whackers.”
--- Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.