Nocera: The riddle of powering electric cars

Steve LeVine became interested in batteries in the wake of the financial crisis. LeVine is the Washington correspondent for Quartz, a news site covering the global economy, and he sensed, he told me recently, “a loss of confidence in the U.S. in our ability to create a real economy” - one based not on financial instruments or a real estate boom, but real products that would help create entire new industries.

The battery could be such a product. Not just any battery, of course, but a battery designed for electric cars and capable of powering them for 200 miles or even 300 miles per charge. A battery that could compete with - and eventually replace - the internal combustion engine and transform the electric car from a niche product to a mass-market automobile.

Such a battery did not yet exist. But if such a thing could be invented, it might well develop into a $100 billion-plus market in its first five or six years of existence, according to LeVine. A battery like that could vastly improve energy security. And with so much less exhaust spewed into the air, the effect on climate change could be lowered. The United States was trying to develop such a battery, but so were many other countries.

That interest led LeVine to the Argonne National Laboratory, one of the Department of Energy’s 17 national labs. For the better part of two years he was given access to its Battery Department, emerging with a captivating book entitled “The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World.”

With the closure or winnowing of many of corporate America’s industrial labs - not least the famed Bell Labs, which is a shadow of its once-mighty self - industry now relies heavily on the U.S. government’s national labs for basic scientific research. Thus it was that scientists at Argonne, which is in the Chicago suburbs, discovered the battery chemistry that made electric cars possible, called NMC (for nickel-manganese-cobalt). The Chevrolet Volt uses a version of NMC, as will, reportedly, the next generation of Nissan Leafs. Which also suggests its drawback: The Volt only gets about 40 miles on pure battery power alone before it switches to its gasoline-powered engine.

The core of LeVine’s book is about the effort to take the next big step: create a battery that can achieve five times that mileage, while still remaining stable - stability is always a big issue with batteries - and affordable. The scientists at Argonne - some of them larger-than-life figures in the battery world - labeled this effort NMC 2.0. Though the writing can get technical at times, LeVine still tells a rollicking good tale. The scientists make a number of painstaking advances, inching the chemistry forward, only to discover problems. One such problem is called “voltage fade” - an instability that is serious enough to make the battery unusable in an electric vehicle.

There is also a private company in LeVine’s narrative, a startup called Envia Systems. Licensing the advances made by Argonne, it claims to have solved the rest of the puzzle. Its executives are persuasive enough that General Motors contracts with them to create the battery for an electric car it is calling, internally, the Bolt, which is supposed to get 200 miles per charge.

LeVine told me that, for a long time, he fully expected that his book would end with Envia solving the riddle of NMC 2.0, and having a wildly successful public offering. But that’s not what happens. As GM, Argonne, and LeVine eventually discover, the Envia claims were wildly exaggerated. After GM finds out the company won’t be able to deliver after all, it ends its contract with the company and looks to LG Chem Ltd., the big South Korean company, to supply the battery.

Indeed, by the end of the book, scientists still haven’t solved the voltage fade problem, and NMC 2.0 seems as far away as ever.

Argonne wins a competition set up by the Department of Energy to create a “Battery Hub,” in which more than a dozen national labs, universities and corporate partners will work together to completely rethink their approach to the conceptual leap the government - and everyone else - is hoping for. In effect, they’re starting over.

There is grist in “The Powerhouse” for critics of President Barack Obama. He pushed for battery innovation just as he pushed for solar innovation. The latter gave us Solyndra; the former gave us Envia. Financing efforts to invent a new battery is, without question, a form of industrial policy.

But LeVine thinks this view is misguided, and so do I.

“France and Germany and China have renewed their push for electric cars,” he says. “The stakes are so high and the dividends so rich that they keep going” - even if the quest seems, at times, quixotic.

Besides, batteries are, as LeVine puts it, “a hard problem.” If the government won’t try to solve that problem, who will?

Joe Nocera is a columnist for the New York Times.