We have been down this road before. Some people like Elon Musk proclaim that better EV batteries are coming soon. Others say they are years if not decades away. Now, Forbes reports that the business and finance communities are quietly admitting that EV battery progress will fall short of expectations.
Forbes points out that BMW board member Ian Robertson promised a while back that there would be more breakthroughs in EV battery technology in the next 5 years than in the past 100 years combined. Almost 2 years have gone by since Robertson made that prediction but no dramatic improvements have occurred.
Renault once predicted that global electric car sales would reach 10 per cent by 2020. It has stopped saying that. Meanwhile, Nissan is ending its marriage with NEC and moving its battery business to LG Chem, apparently because improvements to the batteries its uses for its Nissan LEAF electric vehicle have not happened as expected.
The U.S. was supposed to have one million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015 but will fall far short of that goal. Germany wanted one million plug-in cars on the road by 2020 but has just 14,000 so far. Last week, investment bank UBS urged investors to sell Tesla Motors shares, saying the company’s goal of delivering 1.5 million cars in 10 years is unrealistic. Other investment banks are cooling on Tesla also.
In fact, many industry observers now expect that plug-in hybrids with range extender engines like the Chevy Volt will gain significantly in popularity over the next decade while interest in electric vehicles cools.
Donald Sadoway is an MIT researcher with an international reputation. He claims that lithium-ion battery technology is a dead end and that researchers need to be exploring other avenues. “Development (of lithium-ion batteries) is not going to be significant enough to change the price performance ratio for it to have an impact on auto sales predictions. These numbers are so low because it will still make more sense to have an internal combustion engine in 2025 using fossil fuel,” Sadoway said in an interview.
He goes on to say, “I truly believe that the breakthrough will come outside the lithium-ion area. A vast amount of money has been spent with little to show for it, but we’ve been looking for incremental improvements, of one to five per cent, that’s not going to make any difference to the number of electric vehicles on the road.”
Nissan LEAF battery pack
Sadoway believes that there are gains to be made from the so-called “economies of scale” Elon Musk frequently talks about. Bringing all the suppliers needed to make batteries under one roof, as Tesla is doing with its Gigafactory outside Reno, Nevada, may very well bring down the price of batteries to around $200 per kWh, but that’s not enough to make electric vehicles attractive to mainstream buyer. To get the masses to switch to electric cars, prices will have to be half of that or less the experts say.
In some ways, Sadoway sounds like a frustrated suitor. “I’ve tried to market my ideas of beyond lithium, but they are seen as too radical, too high a chance of failure. I don’t see much chance of success because resources are not being sensibly allocated. We need something better than incremental change. This will come from universities letting loose unfettered minds doing radical research. But the total amount of money is really very small and the likelihood of a major breakthrough? Your guess is as good as mine.”
Is Sadoway correct? Is the dream of a world populated by battery electric cars just pie in the sky? One month ago, we told our readers of a new company, 24M, founded by noted MIT researcher Yet-Ming Chiang. He says he and his research team have figured out a way to make better lithium-ion batteries with greater power density at much less cost.
Chiang says the secret is not giving up on lithium-ion technology but rather figuring out how to improve the manufacturing process, which dates back to the days of making audio cassette tapes. His process could drive battery prices down below the magic $100 per kWh barrier and slash the cost of building battery factories by over 80%. Those are some extraordinary claims.
It’s interesting that Chiang and Sadoway are both at MIT, both noted researchers and both chasing the same dream. One wants to reinvent the wheel; the other wants to ditch the wheel and come up with something completely new. Could professional jealousy be part of the reason one is so upbeat and the other so down on lithium ion technology? But before we all go praising Chiang as a saviour, keep in mind that his last battery venture, A123, wound up going bankrupt after a short time.
The only thing we can say for sure is that the world cannot wait long to break its fossil fuel habit. The need for low or zero emissions transportation for the masses, not just the wealhy, is critically important. What that transportation turns out to be is a story that has yet to be written.
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