It’s been clear for years that the biggest single breakthrough one could reasonably hope for, the killer app, in computer terms, for addressing our energy and climate challenges, is batteries. That “reasonably” qualification is intended to rule out the SF stuff, like Doc Brown’s Mr. Fusion or some urban myth come true of a magic fuel injector that will let your V8 powered eclipse-inducing SUV get 200 miles per gallon. Once you weed out those fantasies, batteries are sexier than [something you find disturbingly sexy that I can't mention on this site].
That’s why I just love seeing things like this press release, DuPont News: DuPont Launches Energain™ Separators for High-Performance Lithium Ion Batteries:
DuPont™ Energain™ battery separators can increase power 15–30%, increase battery life by up to 20% and improve battery safety by providing stability at high temperatures. With more battery power, drivers can travel farther on a single charge and accelerate more quickly and safely. For automobile and battery manufacturers, more battery power can reduce the number of batteries typically required in today’s hybrid and electric vehicles.
While the initial uses for the separator are in hybrid and electric vehicle batteries, the technology also will be targeted for batteries in renewable energy, grid applications and specialty consumer applications, including laptops, cell phones and power tools. Other products made using DuPont’s proprietary nanofiber technology will target a broad range of liquid filtration applications for the biopharmaceutical, microelectronics, and food and beverage industries, offering superior retention, filter life and flow resistance.
DuPont has begun construction on a facility in Chesterfield County, Va. (U.S.), to manufacture product for development and commercial sale. The new facility is expected to start up in the first quarter of 2011 and will initially be able to provide enough material to supply up to 20% of today’s hybrid and electric vehicle needs.
Assuming all that glossy corporate-speak didn’t cause you to bazooka barf all over your screen, this really is a big deal. Let’s run some numbers…
A Leaf-like EV gets about 5 miles per kWh of energy. For a 100-mile range that’s a 20 kWh battery pack. And at a price of roughly $400/kWh[1], that’s an $8,000 battery. For the sake of example, assume that adding DuPont’s Energain to a Leaf battery would decrease the cost/kWh by the quoted 15-30%. Yes, I’m hand waving the cost of Energain, which I strongly suspect DuPont won’t give away, but I’m also not including any other battery advances, so this is likely a very conservative view of the situation. So, Nissan or whoever builds the same size battery for the same cost that delivers greater range, or builds a smaller battery at reduced cost that delivers the same range.
In the first case, we still have an $8,000 battery, but it delivers enough energy to drive the car from 115 to 130 miles instead of the original 100. In the second case, the battery still gives you 100 miles/charge, but it costs from about $6,100 to $6,900, which reduces the cost to Nissan by $1,100 to $1,900. It won’t be long before nearly all of that cost savings is passed on to consumers, given the way the EV market is heating up. And unless there’s a dramatic turnaround in the economy, a roughly one to two thousand dollar drop in the price of an EV could make a big difference.
You could do a similar calculation for the battery in plain old hybrids, like the Prius, or plug-in hybrids, like the Volt. Because those cars have much smaller batteries than a full-blown EV they would see proportionately smaller savings, but who would argue against a lower price on the $41,000 Volt?
The key point here is that transportation emissions and oil consumption are huge chunks of our problem, so we can’t electrify transportation quickly enough.
Another potential use for improved batteries, as mentioned in the press release, is in “grid applications”. That means things like buffering the delivery of electrons from nondispatchable sources, like wind and solar, to meet the consumption cycles of society. Again, lower cost, even by 15 to 30%, is a huge win and it has potentially broad implications.
I’m not at all surprised to see such announcements about battery breakthroughs. I’m far from alone in figuring out how important batteries are, and therefore how large a mountain of money some inventor or company could make by developing the killer app. So I suspect there are dozens, maybe hundreds of companies working on ways to get more miles/dollar out of electrified transportation alternatives. Most of them won’t amount to anything, of course — that’s the way new technology is — but we don’t need all of them to work, just a few that will combine to drive the cost per kWh of storage down to something like $50 to $100. That would change the entire car industry more and quicker than 99% of the people buying and driving cars today realizes is even possible.
Just to be clear, such a turn of events would not be a silver bullet. We’d still be faced with the gargantuan task of cleaning up the worldwide electricity supply, and that’s such an immense challenge that I honestly don’t know how we’ll manage it when the US can’t so much as pass a law that says, “we [heart] Earth”, and China and India are both on paths to consume more energy and emit more CO2 for the next several years to a decade.
[1] The cost of auto-scale batteries is very hard to pin down. I’ve seen reports all over the map, including some much higher than $400, and one claiming that Nissan is making Leaf packs for $375/kWh. I pulled $400/kWh out of my hat as an example.
