Plug-in hybrids, an American’s dream, coming to a road near you (or may be there now)
Posted on November 12th, 2008By John J. Fialka
This story is the second part of a two-part series on batteries for plug-in hybrid cars. Click here to read the first part.
Climatewire: The car stuck in traffic in front of you may look dented and road-weary, but it might also be the car of the future. General Motors Corp. is road-testing the Chevrolet Volt, its version of the plug-in hybrid, by installing it in “mules,” or older cars intended not to attract attention.
“They’re out there driving around,” explained Rob Peterson, a spokesman for GM, who said that despite his company’s economic troubles it will place an order with one or more companies to mass-produce lithium-ion automobile batteries by the end of this year.
The battery — the product of secretive research going back to the Cold War — will have higher power density and less weight than any non-military vehicle power system in history. “Our intention with the Volt is mass production,” added Peterson. “We’re talking about tens of thousands of vehicles.”
As GM plans to make the 2010 Volt debut part of Chevy’s highly touted “American Revolution” of vehicle technology, battery experts are focused on Toyota. The pioneer of the modern hybrid-electric car created a new, environmentally sensitive market around the Toyota Prius, and most observers don’t expect the company to give up part of this lucrative business anytime soon.
Toyota has been playing coy, yet revving its engines on the subject of an as-yet unnamed plug-in, for some time. “We have a very large base of satisfied owners,” explained John Hanson, a company spokesman. “There are a number of issues that need to be resolved with lithium-ion batteries. They include the durability factor — how long it will last — and how much it costs and who pays for replacement batteries.”
Still, Toyota will lease its first version of the plug-in hybrid by the end of next year to a group of fleet owners, companies it will select. It has tackled the tricky nature of making lithium-ion batteries by going into the battery business itself. “I’m not aware of any other battery manufacturer that has announced they’re going to have an assembly line running next year, except for Toyota,” said Hanson.
A car with the potential to substantially lower GHG emissions
Once on the road in volume, the plug-in hybrids that these and other manufacturers are rushing to get into showrooms promise to substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions, because lithium-ion batteries will let them run mainly on electricity. They can be recharged by plugging into the nation’s electric grid.
All of this anticipatory market-scuffling seems a bit ironic to John Goodenough, an American physicist, who developed the basic format for the lithium-ion battery in the late 1970s while at Oxford University in England. There were earlier versions of the battery, but they experienced what engineers call “thermal runaway.” Translated, that means they had a tendency to overheat and explode. Goodenough, whose work was funded with a $20,000 grant from the U.S. Air Force, found a compound of lithium and cobalt oxide that was safer.
“It was the beginning of the wireless revolution,” explained Goodenough, who noted that in the 1990s, Japanese companies, led by Sony, began using the safer version of the lithium-ion battery for cell phones and laptops.
But nothing very revolutionary happened in the United States. Goodenough moved on to the University of Texas, Austin, where he developed an improved battery material that could safely serve the power demands of power tools and even cars.
Finding a way to store the power of electricity has, of course, a long history, one that began in America with Ben Franklin, who first wondered how to do it. Then came Alessandro Volta, a minor Italian aristocrat. He studied Franklin’s experiments and styled himself a “Franklinist.” He wrote poetic papers on how electricity might be treated as an invisible liquid. One of his scientist-mentors was so unimpressed he ordered Volta to “keep silent forever.”
But in 1799, Volta was back in his laboratory, building a stack of silver coins, interspersing them with poker chip-sized pieces of zinc and circular pieces of cardboard soaked with water. He finally grasped both ends of his apparatus and was rewarded with a substantial electric shock: He had developed the first storage battery.
Who killed the electric car? Kettering did
By the early 20th century, the technology had launched a generation of electric vehicles, some with lead-acid batteries weighing more than a ton. But in 1911, an inventor named Charles Franklin Kettering provided Cadillac with an electric starter, powered by a relatively small battery that took over the strenuous and sometimes dangerous job of cranking the gasoline engine, which had made gasoline-powered cars unattractive to women.
The market boost the starter gave to gasoline autos made them dominant and doomed the electric car, whose giant batteries had to be recharged almost daily. The shift tended to freeze battery research, because automakers decided that only a relatively small and simple battery was needed to start gasoline-powered cars. It is the battery that serves most cars today.
Goodenough filed a patent on his latest lithium-ion battery in 1996, and then got his shock by discovering that NTT Corp., the Japanese telecommunications company, had filed an earlier patent on the same technology. Goodenough sued NTT, claiming that a Japanese scientist who had earlier worked in his Texas laboratory had stolen the idea and taken it back to NTT.
The suit was quietly settled last month in a state district court in Travis County, Texas, where NTT agreed to pay $30 million to Goodenough and to Hydro-Quebec, the huge Canadian utility that had licensed the patent from Goodenough.
Goodenough recalled that when he questioned the Japanese scientist, he admitted stealing the battery technology. Gerald Conley, a Dallas lawyer who represented NTT in the suit, insisted that in the settlement — the terms of which remain secret — neither NTT nor its scientist admitted any theft.
‘The inventor never really gets much’
Thirty million dollars might seem like a suitable reward for inventing a car battery that holds the potential to reduce the planet’s CO2 emissions, promises tens of thousands of ‘green’ jobs and may bolster Ben Franklin’s dream of American technological self-reliance, but Goodenough, who is 86, says lawyers took most of it. “The inventor never really gets much. I’m very happy to have worked on a society-transformative problem.”
Just how long it will take the plug-in hybrid to transform the United States, the car-crazy society that is the world’s second-largest CO2 emitter, is still a matter of speculation and competitive secrecy.
Among the most interested observers of the race to put plug-ins on the road are the nation’s utilities, which see them as a way to take market share away from oil companies because they can use the excess capacity the utilities have at night to charge thousands, perhaps millions, of these vehicles. Some utilities can use the cars to store surplus wind-generated electricity that would otherwise go unused.
Haresh Kamath, who manages battery research at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit that is funded by utilities, said he doesn’t think the current economic crisis and slumping gasoline prices will slow down the entry of plug-in hybrid.
Toyota, he notes, has shown other car companies how hybrids can “put a green aura” around their products that heightens sales. “We believe these technologies have reached the tipping point in many ways. It’s not just the price of oil anymore, it’s whether we as a society want to have continued oil dependency and want to emit carbon into the atmosphere.”