Battery powered

Prospect Magazine

A new generation of viral batteries could mean a breakthrough for electric cars

June 2009

Whether it’s a mobile petering out mid-call, or a laptop with “lazy battery syndrome” holding ever-smaller amounts of charge, most gadget owners know the problems dying batteries bring. For most of us this powerlessness is an occasional inconvenience, but for hi-tech manufacturers and scientists it is one of the biggest limitations on plans to build a new generation of electronic devices. And nowhere is this more of a problem than among those seeking to tackle climate change.

Scientists and entrepreneurs are dreaming up plans for new electronic car batteries that can charge faster and longer—some even using “viral” technology—to help reduce the 20 per cent global greenhouse gas emissions generated by transport. Indeed for many green technology enthusiasts there is no task more vital than rebooting the humble car battery. Build a battery that can power a car for 300 miles and you are halfway to a world without oil. Build one that charges in the time it takes to fill a tank of petrol, and you have the makings of a commercial hit too.

A battery is just a container of chemicals designed to produce electrons. They have two ends: one positive, one negative. The electrons move from the negative terminal (the cathode), via an electrically conducting material (an electrolyte) to the positive terminal (the anode), making the electrical current. It’s this flow that runs out quickly in cheap batteries, and is also unstable at high temperatures—lithium ion batteries often explode when they get too hot, one of the problems of moving them from laptops to cars. The other obstacle is charging time. Today’s typical electric car battery copes (just about) with the overnight charge needed for a short 30-mile journey. But cross-country drivers might well balk at the need to plug in at a service station for three to eight hours at a time. Even the Tesla Roadster, the world’s first electric sportscar—which goes from 0 to 60mph in 3.9 seconds and costs £92,000—takes up to three and a half hours to top up. Detaching ions off the cathode and towards the anode is, at present, a painfully slow process.

Roll in the nanoballs. In March 2009, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Gerbrand Ceder unveiled a battery capable of charging a hundred times faster than ordinary batteries. Their cathode comes with tiny balls of lithium iron phosphate, called nanoballs because each measures just 50 nanometress (one billionth of a metre) across. The nanoballs release the lithium ions much more rapidly, making the charge much faster. This means, potentially, that a plug-in hybrid car could charge in 5 minutes, and a mobile phone in 10 seconds.
In addition to providing a partial solution to climate change, this new technology is going to make someone a tidy profit—even a fraction of the world’s current 806m cars and light trucks- switch to batteries instead of burning 260bn gallons of fuel.

Take the new Chevy Volt—the car American giant GM hopes can catapult it from economic misery into the hearts of green-minded, and cash conscious, drivers. The Volt is targeted primarily at commuters driving under 40 miles a day, which it can do without petrol or carbon emissions, but for longer trips it can also run petrol, ethanol, bio-diesel, or even hydrogen until the battery is powered up again. It won’t launch until 2010 in the US, but fans have already launched a “want list” online—with 48,000 people from 88 countries signing up.

Other entrepreneurs are getting in on the act. A company called A123 Systems have recently created a new lithium ion battery, only slightly larger than an AA battery but 800 times more powerful. In April the company announced a link-up with Chrysler for their future battery powered cars, due to launch in 2010, while also producing batteries for Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), China’s first hybrid manufacturer.

Lithium ions are just the beginning. EEStor, a secretive Texan company, builds ultracapacitors: larger devices capable of storing electricity by physically separating the chemical charges in a normal battery. They use aluminium coated barium titanate powder, and EEStor claims they supply around 10 times the energy density of a normal car lead battery, at a fraction of the weight and size. Until recently these claims had been dismissed as a weird green scam, but news of a tie up with a Canadian-based company (called Zenn Motor Company Systems) which operates 500 low-speed electric vehicles in 40 US states have convinced some doubters. The next step will be to make a prototype for a motorway speed, long-range electric car with an ultracapacitor—which Zenn’s CEO says will happen in 2010.

Potentially the most interesting battery, however, is being developed back at MIT, down the corridor from Gerband Ceder‘s nanoballs, in the office of Angela Belcher. Belcher is a materials chemist and something of a rockstar in the field of batteries. I spoke to her during the Aspen Institute’s Environmental Forum in March, where she had just revealed an even more potentially radical invention: a viral battery. Her MIT team has made a lithium-ion battery with genetically-engineered viruses playing the role of anode and cathode. The virus coats itself with cobalt oxide and gold to provide the charge. The viral battery has the same capacity and performance as the rechargeable ones which run the Chevy Volt, but it is much smaller-. Indeed Belcher believes it can be scaled to almost any size, and can even be moulded to take the shape of its container, be it a car or mobile phone. And no need to worry about infection either; the virus, she told me, is a common “bacteriophage”: infectious for bacteria but harmless to humans.

It might be five or ten years before the viral batteries and nanoballs being dreamed up at MIT become commercially viable. Much depends on the market for electric cars, and in turn the price of oil. But Washington’s new commitment to tackling climate change will make the most difference: in March President Obama toured an electric car factory and pledged $2.4bn of his stimulus fund towards their promotion and development. He has also mooted a $7000 tax credit for the purchase of alternative vehicles, and in May he announced tough new rules for automobile emissions, imposing the first-ever US limits on climate-altering gases from cars and trucks. The new rules come into effect in 2012, with the goal of making the US 40 percent cleaner and more fuel-efficient by 2016, and ultimately cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. All of this will nudge exploratory technologies in university labs towards the market. Indeed, if the administration continues to pressure GM on electric cars (as it is in a strong position to do, given the billions of dollars of help it is giving them) consumers might see the tiger in their tank replaced by a virus sooner than they think.

This was written for Prospect Magazine , which you can Download