How Batteries Went From Primitive Power to Global Domination
For an energy source that’s been around for three decades, the lithium-ion battery is only just hitting its stride.
It’s worked its way up from primitive cellular phones to cameras and laptops before entering everyone’s pockets inside smartphones. But only now that the electric car has arrived is this energy storage system truly taking off. The latest proof: The electric-vehicle boom, which still in its early days, has already replaced gadgets as the world’s biggest source of lithium-ion battery demand.
“We are at an inflection point. Each year will beat the previous year,” said Ravi Manghani, a Boston-based storage analyst at GTM Research. “It’s definitely an ‘oh wow’ moment.”
The future of the battery is going to be driven by the car. Surging demand for lithium-ion batteries, boosted by uptake from automakers, has created efficiencies of scale that have sent prices plummeting. Last year alone, the price of battery packs fell 24 percent, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. These cost declines, in turn, are encouraging the continued expansion of battery power. Lithium-ion technology has begun popping up on electrical grids, scooters, ferries and airplanes—a proliferation that will only accelerate.
It’s all happened rather fast. Electric vehicles accounted for virtually zero lithium-ion demand a decade ago, said Christophe Pillot, a partner and director at Paris-based Avicenne Energy.
The batteries first began appearing in electric vehicles in 2006. But it took until 2014, when automobiles accounted for nearly 15,000 megawatt-hours, for vehicles to exceed a 25 percent share of the world’s total lithium-ion supply, according to Avicenne data. Between 2014 and 2017, electric vehicles’ use of lithium-ion more than quadrupled to more than 71,000 megawatt-hours, with a similar jolt forecast by 2023.
Electric vehicles reached 50 percent of lithium-ion demand in 2016, although it inched past consumer electronics for the first time the year prior, according to Avicenne data. With electric-vehicle sales rising and demand for smartphones slowing, the gap will only grow wider.
“One million cars consume the same amount of lithium-ion batteries as everything else,” Pillot said.
A chemist named Stanley Whittingham helped pioneer the rechargeable lithium-ion technology in the early 1970s while working for an unlikely battery booster: Exxon.
A reason: “The oil giant believed that in a few decades, most likely after the turn of the millennium, petroleum production would peak, and that the time to diversify was now,” wrote Seth Fletcher in a 2011 book, “Bottled Lightning,” about the birth of electric cars. At the time, lead-acid based rechargeable batteries were common.
Whittingham, who now teaches at the State University of New York at Binghamton, approached Exxon leaders for approval to proceed with battery research. “I gave an elevator speech to a subcommittee of the Exxon board of directors in New York City,” he said in recent interview. “At that point, it was still conceptual. We had only built prototypes in the lab.”
In the 1980s, material scientist John Goodenough managed to increase the voltage, and therefore the energy density. “I asked myself, and I asked my student: How much lithium do you have to take out before the oxide changes its structure?” said Goodenough, who now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. It turned out that more than half of the lithium could be removed without changing the structure. “That was enough to be interesting, so we published. But people said you won’t get mobility.”
