The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (13 page)

Based on what he was hearing, Chamberlain calculated what Envia management stood to earn in a buyout. The VCs now owned 46 percent of the company. Kumar’s share had been whittled down to 10 percent; Sinkula’s was even less. Still, if the company was sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, they would be wealthy. Kapadia, too, had been awarded stock as CEO. But when Chamberlain plumbed the subject with Kumar and Kapadia, they expressed surprise. Why, we’ve never actually done the math, they said. “We only want the best success for the technology,” they would say.

That was what they
should
tell Chamberlain or anyone else on the outside, the Argonne man thought. But it was also rubbish. Kumar and his partners had in fact spent much time on their calculators. Kapadia had hired Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for independent advice. Both he and Kumar said they favored cashing out—whenever it was in their interest. But to turn one of the interested car giants into an actual buyer, they needed to advance their technology a bit more.

They could also take a greater risk and go to the equity market. They could offer shares in an initial public offering—an IPO, the traditional aim of Silicon Valley start-ups seeking to monetize their years of toil. They had a firm idea of what an IPO should raise. A billion dollars, Kumar said.

That was Kumar’s and Kapadia’s personal goal—a
$1 billion payout
.

Late one night, Chamberlain called Kumar’s founding partner, Sinkula. “Look, I am about to put my reputation on the line by pulling the string on this,” he said, meaning to stir up American interest in Envia. “You need to tell me whether you really have something that is worth that much money.”

Sinkula replied, “Why would Toyota, Honda, and GM be coming to us and saying how good Envia’s technology is if it wasn’t? I would not jerk you around on this. We have an actual technology.”

Chamberlain later said, “At some level, I have to trust that.”

He went back to his central motivation, which was “to do something for the United States of America.” He believed it would be decidedly disadvantageous for the United States if Envia migrated to Asia.

S
ome said the problem with batteries was that until recently no one had declared them an urgent need. Neither consumers nor carmakers had said they
wanted
a vastly improved battery. Given demand, the market would have supplied one.

If this was true, all that was required to win the battery race was the declaration of a commercial crisis. Time would take care of the rest. But Peter Littlewood, Argonne’s deputy director, said it wasn’t. The problem went much deeper than words and economic theology. It was big and required a big answer.

Littlewood primarily blamed industry. Companies that could encourage and develop transformational inventions resisted them because “people go out of business.” Sony worked to improve its batteries, but only by a few percentage points a year. The readiness of consumers to accept the current pace of improvement was part of the problem, too. But given industry’s tens of billions of dollars in investment and anticipated profit, there simply was no rationale for a big leap. “It is the Microsoft model,” he said. “Why write decent software when you can keep selling people upgrades?” Because of such professional self-sabotage, batteries were a disaster. “You open the damn things up, and they are a mess,” Littlewood said. “I mean they are an affront to the eye.”

Littlewood formerly ran the theoretical physics department at Bell Laboratories. He was part of a cabal within the scientific and managerial leadership of the national labs and the Department of Energy—former senior Bell scientists and managers who saw their private-sector prior employer as a model for how research should be run. Eric Isaacs, Argonne’s director and Littlewood’s boss, was also a Bell veteran. The directors of two other national labs were as well, as was the Department of Energy’s chief scientist, Bill Brinkman, along with Steven Chu, the secretary of energy, who won a Nobel Prize for work he’d done at Bell.

Littlewood went on from Bell to run Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, where in the 1950s Francis Crick and James Watson discerned the structure of DNA. But when he arrived at Argonne in 2011, it was Bell Labs he invoked. If AT&T had been in energy storage rather than the phone business, he said, you might have very different battery technology today. Bell would have spent years if necessary exploring the tiniest fundamentals of battery chemistries and how they interacted. It would have derived a road map—a precise electrochemical latticework of the battery. It would have then methodically ticked off the possible routes to an answer until the puzzle was solved. The proof was in what happened when Bell dabbled in batteries—in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a Bell researcher named Samar Basu developed the first graphite anode, which, improved by Moroccan researcher Rachid Yazami and combined with Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode, became the basis for today’s standard lithium-ion battery. “We haven’t done that,” Littlewood said, “which is why we’re in the mess we’re in now and why you see scrambled proposals to try to get something that works in a period of a few years.” He said, “We’re driven because the energy problem is so close to us that we need to solve it. But we don’t understand properly how batteries work.”

Littlewood turned up at Bell in 1980, just out of graduate school. His specialty was exotic phenomena such as the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle crucial to quantum physics. Bell had no distractions—no teaching, no pesky students—and researchers enjoyed seemingly limitless resources. New researchers would show up and be told, “Do something interesting.” Not prolific invention, but do
one important thing
every year. “Now what’s important?” Littlewood wondered. The answer he got was, “You can tell when you see it.”

You were being appraised against Bell’s legacy, which meant the question, “Have you won a Nobel Prize? Have you invented some new method of doing something?” That was the standard through Bell’s three quarters of a century of history. “There were ten thousand scientists at the heyday,” Littlewood said. “They were not all Nobel laureates, but were all at a very high level. A bunch of arrogant bastards, all of them.” But as self-assured as they were, Bell scientists also realized that, because they were aiming at the truly big breakthroughs, they needed the help of colleagues. They cooperated.

If you looked at Bell that way, you realized that the lab had been assembled rather carefully, with different kinds of talent—all individuals, all excellent at their specialties—put in an environment where they could not afford not to interact. Because AT&T was a regulated monopoly, it exerted little pressure on its Bell unit for a commercial payoff. Company managers hoped that any particular piece of Bell’s research would prove useful perhaps decades down the line. So while the pressure was intense to produce first-rate science, there was almost no insistence that expenses be justified from a business aspect.

The atmosphere discomfited some researchers. “Every year they’d hire a bunch of kids who would work eighteen hours a day,” Littlewood told a group of visiting battery guys, and the veterans would have to compete with them, too.

“Did ideas get stolen?” asked Venkat Srinivasan of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“Of course.”

As for Steven Chu, he felt like a member of the “chosen ones” when he joined Bell in 1978. The atmosphere was “electric,” and “the joy and excitement of doing science permeated the halls,” he said. Chu grew up on Long Island, the son of Chinese immigrants who expected their children to earn Ph.D.s. His maternal grandfather was an American-trained engineer. His father was an MIT-educated chemical engineer and his mother an economist. He earned his doctorate at Berkeley and was hired to stay on as an assistant professor, but before starting the job he was offered a leave of absence to broaden his experience and he used the time to go to work at Bell.

Chu’s first Bell boss admonished him to be satisfied with nothing less than starting a new scientific field. Five years later, he was leading the lab’s quantum electronics research team. Among his first accomplishments was measuring the energy levels of positronium, an atomlike object with its electric charges flipped. Measurements were hard because positronium has an average lifetime of 125 picoseconds (125 trillionths of a second, a scale that is to a second as a second is to 31,700 years). Then Chu puzzled out how to use laser light to cool and trap atoms. “Life at Bell Labs, like Mary Poppins, was practically perfect in every way,” he said.

As secretary of energy under Obama, Chu wanted to capture the magic of Bell and its peers, the great industrial labs that had been run by scientific and commercial visionaries like Thomas Edison and T. J. Watson. He wanted to assemble the best minds in one place and focus on a single mission. The objective would be to disrupt the largest industry on the planet—fossil fuels.

A half century back, such an approach to business was part of the American DNA. But today, Intel, for instance, while still on top after decades in semiconductors, had narrower aims. “They’re not going to do the stuff like Bell did,” Chu said. Neither were universities.

Chu wanted to establish long-term research programs that, while undirected as to their specific product, would almost certainly emerge with important and most likely foundational results. At Bell, Chu said, you learned to take on “a problem, think about it hard, solve it, write up the paper, submit it, and move on to the next one.” He wanted a similarly fast environment.

Bell sought to elevate the best scientists to management. Given authority, they were held responsible for the productivity of those under them. There was no peer review. Some scientists called the system “su-PEER-ior review,” Chu said. The culture kept the checks and balances. If you made a bad decision, a community of great scientists was on hand to step in to help fix it, “but not because they wanted to be the boss.” It was, “You’ve got an idea? Come. Let’s go to the board. Let’s talk about it now. ‘Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing,’” Chu said. He himself could be an exacting boss. When he later was named director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he became known for his “Chu-namis,” stormy fits of pique when something had not been carried out to his standard. Chu wanted to replicate this atmosphere at the national labs that the Department of Energy funded.

 • • • 

Littlewood cautioned Chu that there were bits of Bell that you would not wish to copy. AT&T was very good at its reliable phone business. It had some of the world’s best fundamental scientists, who thought ambitiously about the future. Bell employees were proud of their technological leaps. But the company often did not drive its breakthroughs through to an actual product. AT&T earned only nominal licensing fees for the transistor, for example, though it was invented at Bell. Its scientists conceived the first cellular phones in 1947 and, a quarter century later, the system of transmission towers through which they work, but others pioneered the mobile phone business. AT&T had a landline monopoly and gave away its other inventions as a price of peace with regulators. It worked as a business strategy, until Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department aggressively pursued AT&T’s breakup. That left it in pieces, absent the patents and side businesses that could have fueled its survival.

Littlewood said Bell was commercially flat-footed. Unless efforts were fully deliberated, he continued, long-term achievements would be limited. He saw Bell as an example of unfulfilled potential, like the Apollo Moon mission. Had Apollo been better planned, he said, “we’d still be there.” “It turned out to be an interesting technology program that, if you were thinking ahead and not just to 1970, you would have studied the fundamentals and taken it to Mars.” You would not aim for a victory that meant simply stepping your toe on the Moon a few times. In numerous cases, the declared goals of starry-eyed American politicians went unmet. The Apollo narrative promised big leaps if only the goal and budget were pledged. But it was a singular event. Apollo could not be replicated by force of will.

 • • • 

The national labs had originated as entrepreneurial places in World War II. Eventually numbering seventeen, the labs had lost their spunk in the intervening five and six decades. At Argonne, a scientist often would mention a certain chemistry that seemed promising, but when you plumbed further you would discover that he was not actually working on it. “That’s not funded,” he would say. It had not been sanctioned and paid for by the Department of Energy. When a battery guy would invoke that excuse, you would presume he or she was joking because it sounded so pathetic. But you would see it was not a joke. The truth was that the labs lacked the system, and the scientists the mind-set, for the rapid pursuit of hot new ideas.

The federal research effort had devolved into an assemblage of disparate projects, each worth $300,000 or so. This gave the labs the feel of aimless institutions. No one vetted battery projects from the top, ensuring that the outcome was at least one very good battery
system
rather than a dozen wonderful electrodes and an unrelated electrolyte. The philosophy seemed to be that somehow the better battery would all come together of its own accord. But it hadn’t—not yet anyway.

Chu’s idea was to overturn this system. He would cut out the “principal investigator,” the main scientist answerable to almost no one before all the money was spent. In his or her place would be team-funded work grouped in blocks to attack big problems identified either from below or from above. If scientists veered off on their own, they could be halted in their tracks because funding would not follow them. In theory you could corral people into line and achieve more coherent results.

You could recreate the major industrial lab.

Chu considered China’s method. What China did, he said, was to identify a known technology and, in a twist on Japan’s approach, squeeze efficiencies out of it by methodically, incrementally improving it over a long period of time. By doing that continually, say, for a decade, China would end up with a dramatically different technology. Not something of the scale of the integrated circuit but, stretched out over a few decades, a very, very good result—“unbelievable,” Chu said. “Revolutionary.”

If you looked at the leading ideas in batteries, America’s were of a different order from those in China, Chu said—they were embedded in products, while China’s innovations were by and large accumulations of tweaks on others’ work. The lesson of history was that you could not be satisfied with that lead. Quite apart from the battery debacle, the United States invented the airplane but soon lost the lead to French and other European inventors. Germany invented automobile manufacturing but was overtaken by Henry Ford.

Chu intended to follow the latter example. “We’re gonna lead in batteries,” he said.