The powerhouse
"A worldwide race is on to perfect the next engine of economic growth, the advanced lithium-ion battery. It will power the electric car, relieve global warming, and catapult the winner into a new era of economic and political mastery. Can the United States win? Steve LeVine was granted unprecedented access to a secret federal laboratory outside Chicago, where a group of geniuses is trying to solve this next monumental task of physics. But these scientists--almost all foreign born--are not alone. With so much at stake, researchers in Japan, South Korea, and China are in the same pursuit. The drama intensifies when a Silicon Valley start-up licenses the federal laboratory's signature invention with the aim of a blockbuster sale to the world's biggest carmakers. The Powerhouse is a real-time, two-year thrilling account of big invention, big commercialization, and big deception. It exposes the layers of competition and ambition, aspiration and disappointment behind this great turning point in the history of technology"-- Provided by publisher.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
6mentions
5people
2015–2024years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If interested in battery technology and Argonne I'd recommend this book: "The Powerhouse: America, China, and the Great Battery War" [0]
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Powerhouse-America-China-Great-Batter...
- Interesting footnote: "The UT Austin Office of Technology Commercialization is actively negotiating license agreements with multiple companies engaged in a variety of battery-related industry segments."
I recommend the book "The Powerhouse: America, China, and the Great Battery War"[1], it goes into some detail about the legal issues around (one) li-ion design and Thackary's work with/without Goodenough and attribution.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Powerhouse-America-China-Great-Batter...
- Efforts are underway. Unfortunately, it's a tedious slog.
There's a book by Steve LeVine, The Powerhouse, that describes the current environment of battery research and some of the main players (Argonne national lab, DoE, Startups, Korea, Japan, etc.). (It features Goodenough.)
- Why don't more folks respect this car?
That's an excellent question, and I find the answers so far unconvincing. My guess is more psychological / sociological: GM has none of the sex appeal / marketing that Tesla or even BMW has. For that reason the Volt is easily overlooked or disrespected.
I'll also add that GM and other car companies already have some second-life battery efforts underway (http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/09/3775606/used-sec...), which is a very cool way of killing two birds with a single electric stone (I'm surprised this story and other like it haven't gotten more traction online). The second lives of batteries are incredibly underrated right now.
By the way, let me also recommend Steve Levine's book The Powerhouse: America, China, and the Great Battery War, http://www.amazon.com/Powerhouse-America-China-Great-Battery..., which concerns the initial development of the Volt, among many other things. People who disdain the Volt should in particular read it!
- A good battery specific coverage of this was http://www.amazon.com/The-Powerhouse-Inside-Invention-Batter...
- Yeah! I think breakthroughs are also sometimes ... more boring than people expect?
Like, there isn't really an "invention of the transformer" singular breakthrough moment for lithium ion batteries. But there absolutely is a breakthrough-level difference in battery technology between, say, the 90s and today.
Maybe battery nerds would say there were breakthrough moments like that, but when I read The Powerhouse (Steve Levine), which is about some of these developments, I came away surprised and impressed by how incremental but consistent the progress was.
Same thing with solar panels. We figured out how to do PV in the middle of the 20th century, but it didn't really work until recently, after tons of "boring" incremental progress on it.
