'Batteries Are the Key'

What are the most significant developments out there?
Lithium ion phosphate. Lithium ion phosphate is the technology that just came out a couple of years ago from MIT. It's a rapidly growing chemistry that everybody sees as a much better option. It's just a different material for its cathode. It gets rid of the cobalt, gets rid of the nickel. It's stable, it has really high state of charges, it's safer, but it has lower energy.

Are these developments directly related to high oil and gas prices, to consumers having a bigger interest in alternative energy cars?
That's part of it. I think what's really driving it is cell phones. As they get smaller and smaller, cell phones are driving really good research on the chemistries. That has rippled through the rest of the community. Oil prices help right now, and we're all seeing this opportunity to scale-up because the battery company that gets the first real order in lithium ion from an auto maker, they've won the lottery.

Is the infrastructure there? Are there companies that are going to be able to provide these batteries in that quantity?
Manufacturing of lithium ion is a big unknown. All of the sites for that, for the manufacturing of those batteries, are overseas right now. They are not in North America and they're not in Europe either. The capacity does not exist yet but it will. A123Systems is betting on building its batteries in China and that's where we've been told their battery factories are going up right now. Korea and Japan are both planning to manufacture those batteries because they have a great manufacturing infrastructure in place already. To make a lithium ion battery you've got to hold it to really tight tolerances. You have a lot of thin metal plates that have to be kept very close without touching. You have to use an ultra pure environment. You have to be very careful with your welding and your fixing, because if any of these plates touch each other or if there are any shorts within the battery pack, you can cause a thermal concentration that will quickly blow into a flame.

How big are the batteries?
Forty miles worth of battery is about the size of  an air-conditioning unit that hangs in a window. It weighs about 300 pounds. And then the batteries in a 10-mile plug-in hybrid would be about twice the size of a computer case. Keep in mind that these batteries, when you are looking at nickel metal hydride, get five to 10 percent smaller with every generation. Which is about two years. The batteries are going to continue to get smaller and better and safer. At the same time, you're going to read in the press in the next year all of the phenomenal, terrible battery fires someplace-

Fires, really?
Yes, because it's going to happen. It always happens. Did you know that one out of 1,000 cars ends up burning?

You mean gasoline fuel cars?
Yes, just any car. And there are going to be cars with this new energy technology in them that are going to burn, and as you start to see photographs on the web of laptops that burst into flames in different places, that's going to happen with cars, on occasion. And it won't be anything out of the routine, but it's something that people are going to have get used to and get ready for. But with these batteries, they will make them safe, they will give them warranties and they will make them last for the life of the car because [car manufacturers] can't face the risks of anything but that.

So, what does the future look like?
General Motors has announced that they are going to have a[n electric] vehicle in 2010 [the Volt]. Even if it's a small-scale vehicle, the amount of batteries they are going to need will dwarf any batteries produced up to this point in the world. They have said they are going to have a plug-in hybrid and every company that they have announced they're doing exploratory research with is a lithium ion company.

© 2008