A step-by-step guide to battery breakthroughs

It’s often said that breakthroughs cannot be scheduled.  I’m here to tell you that this is 20^th century thinking.  The statement assumes that the word “breakthrough” is unambiguously defined.   This blog post questions that assumption and provides a step-by-step guide to achieving a breakthrough.  My focus is on batteries, but with a few tweaks, one could adapt this for other areas also. 

Let me begin by saying that in the last century there was a feeling that a breakthrough was thought to be when, for example, you discover a new material for a battery that has, say, higher energy or is safer or something.  Those sorts of breakthroughs then go through the traditional rigmarole of publications, licensing, technology transfer, peer appreciation, awards, products and the rest of the boring stuff that takes 20 years to get settled.  In the age of Twitter, Facebook, Uber, and, Snapchat, this kind of time frame is for the folks unwilling to look to new ways of achieving breakthroughs.  If you belong to this “old” club, I suggest you move on.  This guide will be of no use to you.  

But what is a breakthrough anyway?  As far as I know there is no body that proclaims something a breakthrough (a Pope for science?).  And is there really such a thing as an eureka moment?  Even if you have one, it will be a year before you can reproduce the experiment and get all the techniques in place to prove it.  And if the breakthrough is supposed to be a product, it will take you 10 more years to scale it and make it.

But what if there were a reputable publication that actually called something a breakthrough.  And then this was validated and verified by other publications saying the same thing?  That appears to be in line with the scientific method, does it not?

So, for the purposes of moving forward, let us define a breakthrough as just that: It is proclaimed as such by more than one publication.  Also to help us move forward, publications will be broadly classified as a peer reviewed journal article, or a newspaper, or a blog, or a tweet etc.  i.e., as long as the word breakthrough and your work appear on the World Wide Web somewhere, you are golden.  This guide will help you get there.

A disclaimer:  The results are only guaranteed if you follow each and every step.

Step 1:  Before you begin the research, try not to read the literature.  The peer-reviewed literature is full of things that have been tried before.  If you read them carefully, then what you are doing will not be new.  Remember this mantra (courtesy of NBC when they were promoting reruns in the 90s):  “If you haven’t seen it before, its new to you”. 

Step 2:  As you start the research, remember that facts just get in the way.  The literature is full of facts (hence Step 1).   In 1492 everyone thought the world was flat; until Columbus took to the seas.¹  Then we all thought it was round, until Tom Friedman proved it was flat.  Until The Matrix came out, we thought gravity was forever binding us to the earth.  Breakthroughs happen when these laws are broken and it takes a bold person to go where no person has gone before.  To paraphrase Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction, you may feel a slight sting every once in a while when it seems like you are violating faraday’s law.  Those are the facts f*ing with you.   f* facts.

Step 3:  Now that you have done your due diligence and ignored everything, it is time to focus.  Try to work on a newly-discovered material, or atleast one that has been forgotten for a while.  This is an important step.  As much as you can go after Steps 1 and 2, the more studied the material, the harder it is to prove to yourself that you are violating all the well-known laws because you are charting a new path rather than screwing up.  It’s so much easier to believe this if it’s a brand new material.  Graphene is good (not as a battery material, but remember Step 2). So are fullerenes  (granted they are old, but it seems like its time to revisit them).  Graphite, on the other hand, could be bad; unless you plan to use it in a new way; in which case it can be good.  Lithium metal is ALWAYS good; but if you go this route you really need to get religion on Steps 1 and 2.  

Step 4:  As you start getting data on the new invention, revisit Step 2.  Revisit it often, especially when you feel down. 

Step 5:  Time to start writing the paper.  Always state that your invention is better than Li-ion.  The only way to get anyone excited is to say that.  This may sound hard, but it is not.  There are many metrics that need to be satisfied for a battery, including, energy, power, charge time, cost, life, safety, low temperature and high temperature stability.  If you think that you have something that looks better in any one of these, you are doing better than Li-ion.  Cost is the easy one if all else fails.  You can always safely say something like “our preliminary cost estimates suggest that the battery will cost less than something-small/kWh”.  Other end of the spectrum is energy, which is the hardest.  If you go down this path you really need Step 6. 

Step 6:  Always confuse energy with power.  It’s completely appropriate to say “Our pixie dust battery can discharge a factor of 10 faster than Li-ion, therefore EVs based on pixie dust have a longer driving range comparable to Li-ion EVs”  or “our batteries can be charged in 5 minutes, providing more energy than any battery known to man or aliens. On a separate note, we only seem to get one cycle from our battery; we think this has something to do with aliens” 

Step 7:  The paper is ready and it is time to submit.  Never send the paper to a journal that specializes in publishing papers in batteries.  This will get your paper into the hands of traditional battery-types who remember past history, know what works and what does not, and have a strong scientific foundation in the field.  Such knowledge can be an impediment to your out-of-the-box thinking.  Remember Step 2.  Always choose a journal that is disconnected from the battery field. 

Step 8:  With the paper coming out, it is time to prepare for a press release.  Remember that the press wants to hear that this is a breakthrough.   So despite what the peer-reviewed paper proves, make sure you call it a breakthrough at the press release.  Remember that Steve Jobs did not really have a working iPhone when he announced it to the world, and declared that they would ship in 6 months.  If it is good enough for Steve, I’m sure it is good enough for you.  So don’t be shy in telling the press how great your battery will be.  Make sure that you give interviews to numerous publications.  Remember our definition of a breakthrough:  you need multiple publications to say it is one.  So target many outlets. 

Step 9:  The day has arrived; the publications are out; and you have spend the better part of the day googling yourself to see how far the word has spread.  This is the day when you may hear skepticism (some contained within the articles and others in emails addressed to you).  Remember Step 2.  Remind yourself that the iPhone had many critics (e.g, the proximity sensor will not work.  Who would want to surf the web on a phone anyway? Atleast they got the first problem right!).  If it worked out for Steve Jobs, then it could work out for you too.   

Step 10: Remember “Practice makes perfect”.  So go back to Step 1 and repeat. 

All the best. 

Venkat

1.  Now, you may search Wikipedia, or read some articles that claim that the earth was known to be round since before the Common Era.  But that is because you are reading the literature.  Did we not drill into you in Step 1 that this was bad!   Now stop looking up stuff and get with the program.    

Developing a roadmap for energy storage deployment

In my post titled “A boom. Then a bust. And now, a new equilibrium?” I had argued that this was a very unique time in batteries.  My opinion is that there are two fundamental trends that we need to pay attention to:

1.   Batteries are getting increasingly deployed, both in vehicles and on the grid, despite high costs.  

2.  Costs of batteries are coming down.  Typically, costs fall at 5-6% per year.  With the present push by the big companies, costs are expected to come down by a factor of two within the next 5 years. 

Let us talk about the first trend:  We have always had batteries in phones and laptops, but in the last few years, they have come on their own in bigger applications.  And this is despite the higher costs. 

Nissan has decided to commercialize a cheaper car with less battery (and, consequently,  less range), while Tesla makes a big car with a big battery to kill range anxiety (but adding wallet anxiety?). 

Utilities all across this country are deciding to install storage on the grid to learn more about how they work and how to monetize them, while home-owners with a green thumb (and a wallet to match) are thinking about how to stick it to the big guy. 

All this means that we are learning, everyday, about how the batteries are working in the real world.  Do they cycle well?  How does the fade change with temperature?  Are we going to get our money back if we buy a battery versus building a transmission line?  And what is the actual cost of the Tesla Powerwall per kWh once you add the invertor and pay for the labor? 

This is great for everyone.  Deployment will be the key to figuring out what works and what does not.

And this trend will only increase with the second trend of decreasing costs.  Many more will decide to go for an EV and install batteries with solar panels.  We will plug the EVs on the grid to try to learn if they can help pay for the costs.  We will plug them in all at the same time and we will know how the grid will react. 

But reality is that batteries will still be expensive, maybe a factor of two more than where they need to be. They will still have less life than solar panels.  And less energy than gasoline.  And will be less safe than Niagara falls (well… I suppose that depends on how hard you want to kill yourself!).   We will need new systems to satisfy these gaps. 

But new systems will require time and money to reach the market.  Both of which become scarce commodities when big players are cutting the costs of Li-ion batteries dramatically. 

This was the context for the day when more than 200 of us met at the 2015 Bay Area Battery Summit on Nov 3 at Berkeley Lab.  It was a great day with insightful talks and panels, wonderful hallway conversations with thoughts leader from academia and National Labs, industry, and policy makers. 

The main theme was to explore the interplay between technological innovations in batteries; the changing market, and the role policy can play in accelerating deployment.

I thought I would use this blog as a way to list a few key discussion points that I heard.   These are fodder for future blog posts, so I will keep them short.

- Storage resembles the solar market in the late 2000’s.  But there are differences (and significant ones at that).  What can we learn from solar?

- What does the equivalent of the California Solar Initiative look like for storage?

-  If reality is that the battery has to do more than one thing for it to be cost effective on the grid, what are those low-hanging use cases? And how can we get policy to align with this reality?

- What is the balance between deploying what we already have versus finding new things that can solve the cost, life, energy and/or safety challenges?

- If we do find something new, the reality is that we need 10 years and $300M to get it to market.  And on Day 1, the price of that battery will be huge!  How do these technologies compete with an existing technology where depreciation is already in play?

- How do we solve the conundrum that end users want to see data on a real system, while most startups can only make a few small cells? 

- Should someone in the midst of starting a battery company attempt to stay within the Li-ion manufacturing framework (to ensure that the big players buy them out)?  How can they try to disrupt the existing players and avoid the risk not being to get to scale?

- What are the role of the Federal and State governments, and the role of Universities and National Labs in ensuring that we have a portfolio of technologies in the market?

- And, the impossible problem: How do you get battery companies (and researchers) to stop overhyping what they do?  Funny enough, I was writing a blog post about this last week, but got distracted by the event.  Will get back to that next week.

As you can see, a VERY busy day with very deep conversations.   Over the next 2 months we will be consolidating the answers to these questions and providing a roadmap for ensuring success in the battery space.

One of the speakers (who, in the interest of fairness, will not be named) felt that batteries were somewhere around the “peak of inflated expectations” in the hype cycle.  Resetting expectations and doubling down on innovation and deployment will be crucial in moving towards productivity. 

But first, we need to talk about (and address) the problem of hype in batteries.  This will be the subject of my next couple of blog posts.

Stay tuned.

Venkat

Batteries at the cusp of a revolution?

I'm almost done with my next blog. Will post it tomorrow.  In the meantime, I wrote an op-ed on Greenbiz titled "Is battery technology finally at the cusp of a revolution?".  See https://www.greenbiz.com/article/battery-technology-finally-cusp-revolution
Check it out.

I was plugging the Bay Area Battery Summit in the op-ed.   Now that was a fantastic event.  Stay tuned for my blog post on the meeting (tomorrow).

Got to see a LOT of my colleagues from the battery industry.  That was fun!

Here is a shot from the event with the BMW i8 that the good folks from BMW brought in for us to see.  You can also see a fuel cell Hyundai behind it.

Venkat