Chicago hopes for jobs
As for the program's future, Wright said she is cautious but optimistic. "We're kind of in the honeymoon phase," she said. "This is really going to help us in terms of the pipeline development and getting people into our institutions and help with jobs."
However, JCESR's main measure for success may not be technology produced, but whether DOE's hub model outperforms conventional research paradigms. Venkat Srinivasan, head of the energy storage and distributed resources department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explained that basic research in labs and commercial research in factories were usually in separate silos.
With JCESR, industry partners and entrepreneurs will be involved at the earliest research stages and remain committed as a battery design comes to fruition, according to Chu. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley, as partners in JCESR, will have to coordinate closely with their counterparts at Argonne, despite more than 1,800 miles between them.
"This is not the Bell Labs of old where you need the water cooler effect," Srinivasan said. He added that the researchers Skype with their collaborators almost daily and share results through online databases.
For some public officials, A123's demise has not dampened their enthusiasm for battery research and clean-tech investment. "In Chicago, we are going to be the center of this promising field," said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel last week. "If you invest in the quality of your workforce and infrastructure, you will actually lead the country in job creation." Emanuel said he wants to create a Silicon Valley-style environment for battery development and commercialization around Chicago.
Gov. Pat Quinn (D-Ill.) said he wants to make sure the state has a piece of the $42 billion international battery industry. "Our state early on recognized how important this is to our future," Quinn said at the announcement news conference. "We want to really be intimately part of it, the center of it."
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
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9 Comments
Add CommentThere is no need or valid reason for the US government to promote individual companies. The government can and should help fund basic research but that is all. If an idea is good, private industry will produce it more efficiently if the government stays out of the process. It was bad economic policy for the US to have tried to promote this industry in the US. The proof is in the results. Companies going broke and US taxpayers holding the bag.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem was the economy stayed too low for too long cutting demand for batteries and keeping gas prices low. Sadly mosdtly because repubs kept the economy down by such things as not passing the debt limit in 2011 and still not doing s decent budget even as we speak has knocked 3% of GDP from our economy, the difference between a barely muddling through and a good economy.
But like PV makers they need to make their own markets as too many makers and not enough customers. Battery ones need to make EV's, grid storage, time of day home/business storage where one buys cheap power at night and sells at higher rates in the day, etc and sell, lease them.
And PV makers need to build their own powerplants and sell the power and/or sell, lease turnkey plug and play systems including mountings, panels, inverters that just plug into an 120 or 240vac outlet.
Sitting on your hands waiting for customers is not a winning way.
Sisko,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you think that then do you think the US should not have bailed out the auto industry? I think you make a valid point but we're talking about the direction of an entire nation, not just a single company. If there was a company out there better equipped to help us to obtain clean energy transportation I'm sure that company would be the company getting the money. Bases solely on the article it appears that there is a great deal of coordination between many academic institutions and businesses to make this succeed. Would you prefer that something like this be under something like NASA?
As far as your comment about the private industry, well that's the problem. They don't have a good way to do it, and even if they did Americans would not be quick to support. As a country we are very resilient to change. I myself driving a manual truck and would be very not pleased to go a battery driven car. It would be no fun because there would be no shifting. I'm sure many other American's such as myself would hate the idea of switching from our gas vehicles. If the price from EVs doesn't come down the same price as their gas counterparts there will never be a private sector. I remember how much people hated the transition from a normal transmission to the CVT. There was no "shift" of gears so it was to smooth for people, if I remember correctly Jeep installed something to create this feeling.
-Josh B, Ohio
Great! The DOE is busy distorting yet another market, and frittering away another multiple million taxpayer dollars while doing so. Your tax dollars at work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe comments above seem very simplistic. Energy is a complicated field and if you talk to executives at major oil companies, they point out that building a new energy infrastructure is a difficult and expensive process, longer than many innovators or their investors understand. A basic problem with batteries is that their rate of improvement is approximately 7-8% per year, which means it takes a decade to double performance or halve costs, in other words much more slowly that Moore's law with silicon. Seeking to improve performance dramatically is an excellent goal, but as Toyota has demonstrated with improving quality and with hybrids, practical experience with both production and usage is also important: in other words, innovation does not just take place in the lab, it also takes place as a result of usage and from process/business model improvements. Politically, the challenge in the US is that US politicians in both parties are reluctant to use price to encourage growth in demand for clean tech or to permit higher prices in the marketplace to encourage investment. They have as a result, taken a back door to encouraging efficiency, using transparency (e.g. LEED which illustrates the total cost of ownership for building leases) or regulation (increased CAFE requirments). Once the average fleet efficiency increases, gas prices will inevitably increase without major consequences to low income Americans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe alternative approach would have been more complicated, i.e. raise prices but provide a payment to users based upon historically lower prices. This would have kept the cost of transportation effectively the same, but incented people buy more efficient and less polluting forms and take advantage of continuing surviving payments.
While using price would have been more effective, transition programs are complicated to explain and possibly impossible to explain in the simplistic marketing campaigns that seem to be the rule.
But what is clear is that saying that markets will solve all problems overlooks the problem that other countries are subsidizing research and a first mover advantage will allow descending a learning curve much fast. Markets don't exist in a vacuum. Government investment in roads, railroads and airports facilitate transportation. Government taxation and subsidies already bias transportation choice.
The cost of capital for a new company is affected by risk. The uncertain policy environment in the US raises the cost of capital and lowers the benefit expected by users.
JoshB- The situation with the US auto industry was a completely different set of facts. With the auto industry we had an industry that had been successful but needed government loan guarantees in order to restructure their businesses to cut costs to return to profitability. In the case of the auto industry if the government had not provided the guarantees then it would have led to much higher unemployment and would have hurt US tax revenues as a result.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe current US government policy in making loans to “green companies” is quite different. The government is now trying to determine which new companies should be given an advantage in the marketplace and this practice is hurting the other new companies that are not receiving such a benefit. The practice is also very expensive to the taxpayer since the US government seems to do so poorly in doing due diligence on these companies to ensure that they have a valid business plan for long term success.
People may believe that new forms of energy production are necessary and that may well be a sensible goal. The process the US government has followed to achieve that goal over the last several years is wasteful of our limited resources.
I prefer that the US government do what has been shown to work and not unduly waste funds. That is to invest in basic research to help develop technologies that will be valuable to the economy over a long term basis. When the technology has commercial applications the government allows US companies to use this technology to satisfy consumer’s demands.
Try to find green energy companies that the US government made loans or grants to that will be successful on a long term basis. It will be a difficult search. I predict companies like Fisker will be broke in less than 5 years as other competitors are better able to supply superior products that consumers actually want at lower costs.
Instead of batteries, they should use compressed air for energy storage. It is simpler, cheaper and more efficient. Isentropic compression is theoretically reversible with near 100% efficiency. Use molten salt for heat insulation and storage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBack in 2007 an Austin Texas small company announced a new design for a much better battery called the Supercapacitor battery. Haven't heard anything else. Did the Petroleum companies buy up that patent and sit on it like they've done many times before?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWOOD-TV 8 in Grand Rapids has a great piece on how A123 SCAMMED us. In their Holland plant they got millions from the Feds, tens of millions from the state and another $12 million in tax breaks. When the grant money ran out, A123 sent the machines, IP, and inventory back to LG Chem in Korea. Bye.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot one production battery was ever produced in Michigan. We offered them a game, they played it. Made millions on equipment and raw materials -- all for Korea.
Congrats America. We're the most gullible country on the Planet.