Since Edison a century ago, the world of batteries has been riven with exaggeration and fibs. U.S. university and private labs routinely announce purportedly important new leaps, only to go quiet when the cameras are gone.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk himself has been roundhoused for what a lot of people, including U.S. regulators and Wall Street, suggest is an addiction to making claims he cannot fulfill, and sometimes outright violate the law. But now the carmaker has filed patents for a battery system that could last one million miles, enough for 76 years of driving for the average American motorist. Has anyone ever asked for such a car? It’s not obvious they have. But if you are in the mind of Musk, you will see past that, to a future fleet of cars that can transform into driverless, automated taxis when not being used by their owners. A fleet that he hopes will turn into a big new profit center for Tesla.
Leading battery researchers in the United States and Europe, while uncertain about the cost of the Tesla system, say a new academic paper describing the million-mile battery is rigorous and convincing. “The results are spectacular,” said Gerbrand Ceder, a professor of materials science at University of California, Berkeley.
The paper, co-authored by Jeff Dahn, a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, who is on contract with Tesla, suggests a substantial advance for driverless taxis, buses, and semi-trucks that can recharge in roughly 20 minutes, along with electric grid batteries boasting two-decade lifespans. These are among the greatest ambitions of the new electric age, and a new lithium-ion battery that does what Dahn describes would go far in reviving Musk’s reputation for mastery of applied cutting-edge technology.
Few inventions of the last four or five decades have had the impact that lithium-ion has had on the humble battery. It is this technology that enabled the breakthrough electronic masterpiece of the 20th century — the transistor — to untether from power cords in the home and office, and become the engine of the mobile electronic revolution. The heart of lithium-ion — the cathode — was invented in 1981 by John Goodenough, then a professor at Oxford and now at the University of Texas, and a decade later commercialized by Sony. The phone on which you may be reading this story almost certainly contains Goodenough’s invention. Researchers, including Dahn, have invented three or four competing lithium-ion formulations since then, but they all retain Goodenough’s original architecture. Four decades later, Goodenough’s basic brainchild remains the battery gold standard.
The other thing to know about lithium-ion is how it differs from the transistor. Batteries have no rule akin to Moore’s Law, the canon by which silicon chips double their power roughly every 18 months. If lithium-ion had improved at the pace of silicon, it might have all but pushed fossil fuels out of transportation by now and solved the woes of climate change. Lithium-ion has improved since 1981, but not nearly at that rate.
A decade ago, a lithium-ion battery cost more than $1,100 kWh, the measure for energy density. At the time, the U.S. Department of Energy set a goal of $100 kWh, a milestone that, if reached, would elevate electrics into a head-to-head battle for primacy with combustion cars. To those like me hearing the goal at industry conferences year after year, it seemed all but absurd. Never did I hear a researcher suggest it was possible.
Yet, according to a recent study by BloombergNEF, a renewable energy research firm, we are almost there. Last year, the cost declined to an average of $176 kWh. Within five years, it will drop to under $100, BNEF says.
From there — to the degree that carmakers pass this savings on to consumers in the form of lower price tags — electric car sales could surge. BNEF assumes that electric carmakers will do just that. By 2040, electrics will win the war with gasoline: 57% of all new U.S. passenger vehicle sales will be electric and, globally, electrics will comprise almost a third of all cars on the road.
Beyond John Goodenough himself, no single person on the planet has been more instrumental in ushering in the electric car age than Musk and his company, Tesla. Electric cars are a subject of serious conversation today only because Musk decided to take over the helm of Tesla in 2008. Four years ago, Dahn — himself one of the half-dozen or dozen most important minds in batteries — decided that he wanted to be part of what Musk was doing. He abandoned a longtime exclusive commercial relationship with 3M, and signed a five-year agreement to invent for Tesla.