Charging ahead: Steven Chu, Nobel Prize-winner and former energy secretary, on today’s battery research—and more

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).FundingThis research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.FundingThis research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.Notes1. See “Taking stock: Steven Chu, former secretary of Energy, on fracking, renewables, nuclear weapons, and his work, post-Nobel Prize,” Dan Drollette Jr, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1, 2016, https://thebulletin.org/2016/11/taking-stock-steven-chu-former-secretary-of-the-energy-department-on-fracking-renewables-nuclear-weapons-and-his-work-post-nobel-prize/.2. See “Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars,” by Rob Davies, The Guardian, July 4, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/04/toyota-claims-battery-breakthrough-electric-cars.3. A battery is a device that is able to store electrical energy in the form of chemical energy, and then convert that energy back into electricity when called upon. The chemical reactions in a battery involve the flow of electrons from one material (known as an anode) to another (known as a cathode), through an external circuit. This flow of electrons provides an electric current that can be used to do work—whether it be moving a car, operating a cell phone, or powering a laptop. To enable the electrons to move within the battery, they are carried by a liquid known as an electrolyte solution that is in contact with both the anode and cathode. Anodes and cathodes made from different substances produce different chemical reactions that affect how the battery works. In other words, what the anodes and cathodes are made of affects how much energy the battery can store and its voltage. For more, see “How a battery works” at https://www.science.org.au/curious/technology-future/batteries.4. See “The obsession with EV range is all wrong,” by Shannon Osaka, The Washington Post, July 7, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/07/07/ev-range-anxiety-battery-myth/.5. See “Global EV Outlook 2023: Trends in Batteries,” International Energy Agency, https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in-batteries.6. For more on EV batteries and weight, see https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-weight.7. As the name implies, a solid-state battery would be just that—a battery that does not use a liquid electrolyte solution to ferry the ions that make for a charge, such as what a lithium-ion battery does. A solid-state battery can also store more energy, pound for pound, than a battery that is liquid-based, and it does not run the same risks of overheating. It would also have more range and charge twice as fast. But this new technology is still very much in the R&D phase.8. According to energy.gov, the battery cell of a lithium-ion battery—the most common one used in cars and many other devices—is made up of an anode, a cathode, a separator, electrolytes, and two current collectors (positive and negative). The anode and cathode store the lithium. The electrolyte carries positively charged lithium ions from the anode to the cathode—and vice versa—through the separator. The movement of the lithium ions creates free electrons in the anode which creates a charge at the positive current collector. The electrical current then flows from the current collector through the device being powered (car, cell phone, computer, etc.) to the negative current collector. The separator blocks the flow of electrons inside the battery. https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/articles/how-lithium-ion-batteries-work.Multiple individual lithium-ion battery cells are connected to make a battery module. A group of connected battery modules is then contained within an enclosed battery casing with underbody protection. This is known as the battery pack—which is the big heavy traction battery that you can see if you crawl under an electric vehicle or a hybrid. On early Toyota Prius hybrids, the traction battery pack is in the form of a rectangular shape roughly about 16 inches wide by 34 inches long and 8 inches deep. Its capacity is rated in kilowatt-hours.9. For more on these elements, see “Electric Vehicles, Batteries, Cobalt, and Rare Earth Metals” by Josh Goldman, Union of Concerned Scientists, October 25, 2017, https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-goldman/electric-vehicles-batteries-cobalt-and-rare-earth-metals/.10. The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers is the largest scientific organization in Germany. A union of 18 scientific-technical and biological-medical research centers, the association’s official mission is “solving the grand challenges of science, society and industry”Additional informationFundingThis research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.Notes on contributorsDan DrolletteDan Drollette Jr. is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent who has filed stories from every continent except Antarctica. His stories have appeared in Scientific American, International Wildlife, MIT’s Technology Review, Natural History, Cosmos, Science, New Scientist, and the BBC Online, among others. He was a TEDx speaker to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and held a Fulbright Postgraduate Traveling Fellowship to Australia—where he lived for a total of four years. For three years, he edited CERN’s on-line weekly magazine about high-energy subparticle physics, in Geneva, Switzerland, where his office was 100 yards from the injection point of the Large Hadron Collider.