All of this work -- Xing's and the other ARPA-E projects -- occurs in the context that an interesting battery isn't always a useful one. For electric cars to succeed, ARPA-E reckoned, they need batteries that can be mass-produced. Moreover, they have to drive like gasoline cars without costing more.
So when ARPA-E offered funding, it set a few conditions. "Breakthrough" batteries should cost about a quarter of what car batteries cost today, while more than doubling the energy they can hold in the same area. This disqualified batteries with pricey ingredients like gold or platinum, for example, and other batteries that are cheap but pack no punch.
ARPA-E would give special consideration to batteries made differently than Asian competitors do and to batteries that show potential for mass-manufacturing on U.S. soil. "At the end of the day, we want the scaling in the United States of these successful technologies," said Majumdar, the ARPA-E chief.
By some indications, this is actually an area where the United States is several steps ahead of other countries. Japanese, Korean and Chinese companies are more focused on today's technology, fine-tuning the manufacturing to cement their lead in lithium-ion batteries, according to venture investor Dhiraj Malkani, a principal with RockPort Capital Partners. "There's not much disruptive innovation going on, on the technology side," he said.
That plays to a U.S. strength: the ability to discover cutting-edge ideas in universities and research labs. It also highlights a U.S. weakness: the tendency to find these ideas, then lose them to overseas developers. The missing link is often the lack of patient, private investors.
Majumdar and others say cutting-edge energy technologies are so risky and unmarketable that companies and investors won't play. So this is where ARPA-E comes in, Majumdar says. After three years of funding, an awardee should have enough science for a venture capitalist to say "yea" or "nay." The riskiness of the prospect becomes far less daunting.
Malkani, the venture investor from RockPort, agreed that many of the ARPA-E awardees, especially the ones coming from universities and labs, are too immature for him to take on right now.
"We just haven't found the right pick for us, from the standpoint of a technology that's really disruptive," he says. "We are tracking a couple things that fit that bill and look very promising."
Lithium-air fits the term "disruptive," but there's a reason he doesn't mention it. It has to do with the term "exit."
The role of the venture capitalist
Venture capitalists think of their investments as short-term relationships. When someone like Malkani sees a disruptive technology, he checks if the inventor has resolved the basic science questions and can actually do, in the lab where he controls all the conditions, what he says he can do.
If it checks out, he funds the inventor's startup company. Then he becomes one of its executives. Venture capitalists often join a company's board of directors; that lets them gauge, and guide, the company's progress. The goal is to turn an inventor's prototype into a product.
If that works, Malkani would help the company issue stock to raise more money -- "going public" -- and head on to his next project. Or he'd hand it to a larger company that thinks it has promise. This is normally where the venture capitalists "exit."
Venture capitalists generally want the process to take five years, but Malkani says seven to 10 years is typical. Lithium-air isn't near these timelines.
For the moment, venture investors are focused on lithium-ion, the lightest, most cost-effective battery for electric cars today. Matt Nordan, a vice president at Venrock, says that worldwide, companies and governments have plunged $4 billion into new lithium-ion factories in the last five years. "They're not going to abandon those facilities in short order and jump to a different kind of technology," he said.
See what we're tweeting about
18 Comments
Add CommentWhat is happening with the liquid salt and the liquid metal batteries that was slanted to be mega charge batteries?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this+1 to the Edgar Casey reference! Now we need to dig under the spynx's paw.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs I understand and recall, in the 1970s ARPA-net was not a magnanimous gift bestowed upon private industry, as implied in this article, but a method for the military to foster better communications among its widespread scientific project development subcontractors working in academia. It did work well and academics expanded its use for other scientific projects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow will ARPA-E ensure that any successful technological development produced by its taxpayer funded grantees will lead to products manufactured in the U.S. and sold by U.S. companies? Many successful Asian manufactured technologies were developed in the U.S. – there seems to be no ability or even desire for any industry to use U.S. developments to benefit U.S. companies and workers. Of the grants that have been given, how many have been awarded to foreign nationals or those with close family or personal contacts with foreign citizens? If grants are going to universities, how many foreign national students will be working on them? I'm not being bigoted in any way, but ARPA-E seems to present itself as encouraging developments that directly benefit the U.S. economy. This does not seem to me to be a feasible objective.
Well the article actually suggests exactly how this funding will impact production. By the way, ARPAnet was only one of MANY DARPA and later ARPA projects that impacted civilian tech. Things like cell phones and composite materials can also be linked right back to the bad old days of the cold war.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a targeted program aimed at a well understood failing of the U.S. research and development community. Which is, as cited in the article, the lack of willingness to expend funding on development of good research leads. ARPA E directly addresses this failing by providing a stepping stone.
It is clear to me that this attracts venture capital because several ARPA E projects are already attracting attention from commercial investors to the tune of millions of dollars. Hopefully a lot of the ideas so funded will attract attention here at home and not get shipped overseas for a quick buck.
The main potential problems I see are with technologies that industry might see as requiring them to abandon technologies that are still very profitable to them. We have a somewhat short sighted set of models for industry in this country and one can only hope that is changing.
It's worth noting that not all of the projects being overseen by ARPA E are small companies or universities. I know of at least one large car company that has submitted ideas as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry, but I find no mention of any method ensuring that taxpayer funded developments will only be implemented by U.S. manufacturing companies. For that matter, many U.S. manufacturing companies are manufacturing overseas, displacing U.S. workers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho will might be granted the patents for new technologies developed under these grants? I guess it's not the U.S. taxpayers or ARPA-E. Who has control over international manufacturing rights? As I understand, its the patent holder, if anyone.
Please let me know (specifically) if I'm missing something.
Mag-lev monorail system could travel above the traffic, ignore the bad weather such as ice and snow, carry thousands of people and cargo at hundreds of miles per hour without human intervention. Once in motion inertia and magnetic tunnels would let the train (pods)clear steeper grades. Gravity would accelerate it to lower elevations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are no guarantees in this world. If the U.S. wants to be a manufacturing center then it needs to clean up its act. We need to upgrade infrastructure, enact a SANE and cost effective health care system that doesn't cost 4x more than it should, etc. Instead, in their infinite wisdom, the voters of this country have elected a bunch of ignoramuses to Congress, insuring that idiocy and foolishness will continue to be the word of the day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore to the point, what exactly would ARPA-e do to 'insure' that any technology developed under its auspices would be used in U.S. manufacturing? You could slap a bunch of contract language onto your grants, but if it is 4x cheaper to make stuff in China, then that's where it will end up being made, one way or another. Alternately nobody actually interested in making money will touch anything tainted with such grants with a 10' pole. It is like sticking a 'you must walk on water' clause into a contract. You can do it, but there's a 100% chance it still won't actually happen.
It is incredible that the author focuses on the energy density of Lithium-air batteries, comparing it to gasoline, but provides no numeric data for energy density.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI guess they assume the reader has not made it through a high school physics course - or perhaps the reporter has not.
I agree - my comments were directed to the inference repeated in the article that taxpayer investments in ARPA-E technological developments would revitalize the U.S. economy:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The White House argues that if lithium-air achieves a breakthrough, or any of the other battery technologies do, the payoff will be huge. Money normally spent on foreign oil could stay in the U.S. economy. One-hundred-thirty-million cars in the United States, gradually turning electric, would revitalize the auto industry as well as its suppliers in the Midwest. More manufacturing jobs would sprout up to supply the tons of minerals and materials that go into the batteries. Used-up batteries could find a second life on the grid."
By the way, wiki says that Chile and Argentina are currently the largest producers of lithium, but "China may emerge as a significant producer of brine-source lithium carbonate around 2010. There is potential production of up to 55,000 tonnes per year if projects in Qinghai province and Tibet proceed."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis could lead to the breakthrough in batteries that we've been waiting for (for 200 yrs.?), or it could be another mirage distracting from more realistic scenarios for reducing GHG's. It might be good to recall that over the last 50 yrs. there have been many similar announcements of a revolutionary battery technology which was going to solve everything....with just a bit more research and money.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs people have suggested above, the killer job argument is so dishonest: what technology is harnessed in the end is less relevant than other factors affecting the US as a manufacturing base.
Poor obama ... he never gets his facts correct and misleads the ignorant. The Internet was not because of government 'investment' but rather a natural evolution of the electronic communications between researchers. Most of the growth of the internet was private VC's betting on companies like cisco. GPS was developed for the military to drop bombs on target and make sure troops don't get lost. Most of the real advances from government investments that we use as civilian were first developed for the military. Even the interstate highway system was developed to defend the US by facilitating military troop movement and defense transportation. Same for railroads.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGovernment investments specifically for civilian use are pretty sorry as far as returns. The government is good at getting industries together and setting STANDARDS. When they try to set standards or ‘invent’ stuff, they fail. When you bet your own money, you succeed. Bet someone else’s money and you just don’t care. That’s why VC’s sit on boards and control management. They get smarter guys to watch the smart guys.
On the surface, lithium air batteries seem like a good bet. However, they suffer from a lot of issues that are pretty basic:
1) If a battery will provide charge for 500 miles – 10 hours of discharge – it will take more than 10 hours to charge – battery exchanges rather than gas stations?
2) Lithium is not the nicest element. The EPA probably will not let us make batteries here. Where do you get this much lithium and what do you do with old batteries? Recycle?
In the end, we have to develop BIOLOGCAL engines that are not heat engines but use ATP for efficient power conversion. Or develop analogs to what has evolved in Nature.
Battery power density is a major stumbling block preventing the widespread use of electric vehicles, but it is not the only one. As co2dog points out, recharging is also a problem. I doubt that battery swap will provide a viable solution. Imagine you've just bought a shiny new electric car. A substantial part of its value lies in the batteries. Are you happy to take it into a 'filling station' after a few hundred miles and have the battery replaced by a unit of whose history you are completely unaware? I don't think so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLook at the amount of energy currently used in transportation. According to DoE figures, it's close to 2/3 of that used in electricity generation. Even being generous about the differing efficiencies, the US would need something like 50% more generating capacity to power an all-electric transportation system. And every filling station will need a multi-megawatt supply, so you will also need a radical upgrade of the grid.
I think it will be highly entertaining when we solve the energy/transportation issue just in time for telecommunications to radically alter the need for personal transport to a much less demanding level. With geothermal heatpumps the electricity demand for summer and winter peak times will drop quite a bit. Machinery will still need power but thermal exchange will work much better and working from home will become wide spread. A productivity based pay system should gradually edge out inaccurate pay for time systems that are currently dominant. As agriculture continues to adopt a less intrusive model that uses precision fertilizing, pesticide spraying and watering, the amount of energy used to grow food will drop as well. By 2050 I personally feel that energy usage per person will have dropped significantly world wide. I doubt that population levels will be such that we can sustain our current level of technology penetration but I guess we will see.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree. I'd also like to see the details of the comparison of pollution from gasoline powered cars vs. electric powered by a 50% coal-fired grid.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"there seems to be no ability or even desire for any industry to use U.S. developments to benefit U.S. companies and workers"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the main true, primarily due to the demands and greed of America's unionistic workers (ie. high school graduates working as auto workers getting $75./hr incl. benefits 5 yrs ago) The desire to make more money on the part of management has also been a factor. However new U.S. discoveries do benefit U.S. interests in smaller ways, such as at management levels and, sometimes, in U.S. assembly plants (using foreign made parts)
Agreed, as things stand now there is no way this much benefit will acrue to America. However lesser benefits would probably happen, such as the benefit to the environment of cleaner cars, some of which would probably at least be assembled in the U.S. Also one never knows which way the technology would branch out. There could be other related products and, if the manufacturing was highly technical then, at least for a time, it may be done in the U.S.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this