Mateo Jaramillo was giving me his spiel about his battery company when he mentioned, in passing, that the battery was “not super efficient.”
Oh. So that’s bad, right?
Not in this case, said Jaramillo, the chief executive of Form Energy. Efficiency is how much energy you get out of a battery compared with how much you put in when charging it. More efficiency is always nice, of course, but for the market that Form Energy is going after, what’s far more important is keeping down the cost of making the batteries.
There’s no costly lithium in Form Energy’s batteries. Instead, there’s plain old iron, which people have been using since the Iron Age (which ended about 2,600 years ago). Form Energy’s batteries produce electricity when the iron in them rusts. They’re recharged by using electricity to return the rust to iron.
Form Energy’s target markets include electric utilities, which need to store power when it’s plentiful and dribble it out when there’s demand for it. So much wind and solar generating capacity has been installed in some parts of the world that electricity prices in certain markets often go negative: The utilities literally pay customers to take their power because that’s cheaper than shutting down generation.
For utilities, a battery farm that’s cheap to build and soaks up lots of inexpensive, or even negatively priced, electricity for later sale sounds like a great deal, even if it’s bulky and inefficient. Form Energy broke ground in August on its first commercial project, for Great River Energy, a nonprofit electricity cooperative in Minnesota.
There probably will never be an iron-air battery in a cellphone or electric vehicle, but Form Energy isn’t trying to conquer every niche. As the English say, horses for courses.
I began this newsletter with Form Energy partly because I love the idea of capturing energy from rust, and partly because it’s part of a wave of American companies that are helping the United States try to get back to the leading edge of battery development.
The United States has let the lithium-ion battery market slip away. John Goodenough, a University of Texas physicist, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for a variety of breakthroughs, including developing in 1980 a better cathode material for lithium-ion batteries. A start-up that attempted to commercialize it got hundreds of millions of dollars from the Obama administration but went bust. A Chinese company bought the start-up, A123, out of bankruptcy in 2013. Other Chinese companies plunged into lithium-ion battery production just as Americans were pulling back.
Today, China utterly dominates the global production of lithium-ion batteries, which go into electric vehicles, cellphones, laptops, cordless tools and much more. One Chinese company, CATL, accounted for 38 percent of global production of electric vehicle batteries in the first seven months of this year, while another, BYD, was second at 16 percent, according to SNE Research of South Korea. No American companies were in the top 10.
Mind you, it’s wonderful for the fight against global warming that China has brought down the price of lithium-ion batteries and the price of solar panels, which help charge those batteries, as my colleague David Wallace-Wells wrote this month. But it would be good for the U.S. economy if Americans were making, not just buying, more of that planet-saving equipment.
Things are moving in a better direction now. Under President Biden, incentives in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are spurring major investments in batteries, including domestic production capacity for lithium-ion batteries. Also, the Department of Energy has pumped billions of dollars into development of new kinds of batteries, including promising solid-state batteries, which use solid electrolytes instead of liquids or gels. The initiative includes a “Long Duration Storage Shot,” whose goal is to reduce energy storage costs by 90 percent from their 2020 level, in batteries that provide at least 10 hours’ duration, by 2030.
Last year President Biden issued an executive order that “when new technologies and products are developed with support from the United States government, they will be manufactured in the United States whenever feasible and consistent with applicable law.”
The federal government’s initiative “mimics what China did over a decade ago by using demand- and supply-side subsidies and government support to build a supply chain,” Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy said in a report last year.
China has such a big lead in lithium-ion batteries that I have trouble imagining the United States catching up, although simply supplying domestic needs would be a welcome development. I think the most likely path for the United States to leapfrog China is with new technologies, such as Form Energy’s iron-air battery.
I love the creativity of battery designers, who rummage through the periodic table for elements with the ideal electronegativity and other characteristics. ARPA-E, the research-and-development branch of the Department of Energy, is funding start-ups that are working on battery chemistries including lithium-air, aluminum-air, zinc-air, sodium metal, sodium beta-alumina, vanadium redox flow and Prussian blue dye (yes, really). There are also energy storage technologies that aren’t batteries at all, such as pumping water to the top of a hill or storing heat in the form of molten salt.
“One-size-fits-all doesn’t pass the sniff test,” Eric Dresselhuys, the chief executive of ESS of Wilsonville, Ore., which makes an iron flow battery (different from an iron-air battery), told me. “How many different kinds of salad dressing are there? It’s impossible to believe that one energy storage tech is going to win.”
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-funded think tank, has been banging the drum since 2012 for the United States to focus on battery development. A report it released in July said the U.S. response to China on electric vehicles “should include investing in R&D to accelerate technological innovation, stimulating consumer adoption of E.V.s (e.g., by deploying charging infrastructure) and defensive trade measures.”
I spoke to the report’s author, Stephen Ezell, the foundation’s vice president for global innovation policy, about where the battery race between the United States and China is headed. “Tech policy scholars are going to look back on this in 20 years as a test case of whether more muscular policies can succeed,” he said. “I think so long as we do make it a national priority, we can succeed.”
Elsewhere: Find Out Here if You’re Middle Class
America’s middle class has shrunk as the nation has become more polarized between rich and poor. The share of Americans living in middle-income households shrank to 51 percent last year from 61 percent in 1971, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. (For Pew, middle income begins at two-thirds of median household income and extends up to double the median.)
To find out if you’re in the diminished middle class, enter where you live, what your income is and how many people live in your home into this Pew Research Center calculator. A family of four in San Francisco earning $220,000 a year? Middle income.
Quote of the Day
“Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have ‘assumptions’ that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense). The reason is simple. A hypothesis is important if it ‘explains’ much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone. To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions.”
— Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” collected in “Essays in Positive Economics” (1966)
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