The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (29 page)

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fter Argonne won the Hub, Chamberlain barely had time to think about celebrating. The Department of Energy insisted on an entirely revised Hub budget—immediately. He thought back over the three years since he first floated the idea for a research effort on the scale of Bell Labs, recalling the history as though telling it for himself as much as anyone else—En-Caesar, the Battery Sematech, and briefing the Obama campaign. He reached back to Cabot Industries, his early experiences in the private sector, and the day he left the start-up world thinking he would coast into Argonne’s intellectual property unit for a few relaxing years.

In the ensuing months, Chamberlain would learn that, just as American plans had suffered a setback, Wan Gang had tempered his own aspirations and shifted direction. China’s motorists continued to adopt electrics even more slowly than did Americans—some 80 percent of the forty thousand electric vehicles on China’s roads in the coming year would be buses and taxis. Wan said he would eliminate a $10,000-a-car subsidy entirely by 2020. The government would instead offer grants to company research labs.

Wu Feng, a senior Chinese official who visited Argonne in late 2013, said that when Wan took up the battery race, he was an electric car expert. China’s battery guys had warned him that energy storage was “difficult.” But he and the other car specialists weren’t absorbing the message. “They imagined that it is easy.” Now Wan realized that “it will be a long time to reach the goals.” China was still in the race. But Wan had learned that the country would not win quickly.

Some members of the American team felt the same. Peter Faguy, the Department of Energy official who had ordered the crash effort to solve voltage fade, was shutting down the team. Would fade ever be figured out and NMC 2.0 fully enabled? Perhaps, Faguy said. He was not opposed to anyone trying again. But voltage fade had eradicated his own hopes that you could throw money and desire at a problem. “The romantic notion of the line researcher solving it with the light bulb going off is a nonstarter,” Faguy said. “These kind of problems are intractable.”

 • • • 

Some even said the race was misconceived from the start. Economic and technological hope and coincidence led a lot of nations to chase an illusory prize that then evaporated in their hands. When it was time for the better battery and electric cars, they would arrive and spread quickly, with dividends crossing borders and no single national winner. But that time was not yet with us.

Don Hillebrand disagreed. Extremely capable scientists backed by patriotic governments with concrete and reasonable objectives had made a sincere dash for a better technological path, one that held almost magical powers to resolve some of the era’s most intractable economic, political, and environmental problems. When hopes and the stakes for winning are so great, however, you can bring out not only those with potential answers—visionaries—but also “charismatic thieves, swindlers, who are tricking people,” Hillebrand said. And, in the case of the battery, when you combined those tendencies with the perseverance of the internal combustion engine, you got a race that “ended in the middle.” But Hillebrand predicted that the Hub would invent a blockbuster new battery chemistry. It was a matter of survival. The Hub scientists “know if they don’t, they’ll be in trouble.” Specifically, Chamberlain’s “career is very much on the line and
he
knows it.”

The War Room was closed. Chamberlain moved into a modern, freshly carpeted suite of offices in Building 200. His new title was Deputy Director of Development and Demonstration for the Hub. That meant that he was responsible for delivering the prototypes promised under the five-five-five criteria. He said he was “highly confident” that he would do so and thus create a new paradigm for American manufacturing. It would be Bell Labs 2.0. He said, “I’m hoping in five or ten years to be touring the country saying, ‘This is how it can be done.’”

He watched electrics quietly moving ahead. The Volt for sure was a pioneering vehicle, but Elon Musk had pushed further—he had made electrics indisputably cool. With Tesla, Musk himself was now the most celebrated technologist in Silicon Valley.

Toward the end of 2014, a mini-rivalry erupted: Musk hurtled into a contest with GM to produce the two-hundred-mile electric. He did not
say
he was in competition with GM—in his eyes, that would be demeaning. But after vowing for years to produce a mass-market electric by the end of the decade, he now said he would do so in 2017. He said the car, to be called the Model III, would cost about $35,000. And that fact—the price—put Musk squarely on GM’s turf.

Jon Lauckner, still smarting over the Envia debacle, did not say when GM would release its own two-hundred-mile electric, but it would not easily relinquish its market. GM did not desire a direct clash with Musk, given his rare mastery of product style and marketing—his pizzazz—but it had one. If he intended to be out with his Model III in 2017, GM would have to have its rival model on sale that year or earlier.

The stakes were clear. The top electrics—the Volt, the Leaf, and Musk’s Model S—were selling at a pace of 2,000 to 3,000 vehicles a month each, but motorists were buying about
40,000
of the BMW 3-Series, the entry-level gasoline-driven luxury car that Musk identified as his genuine competition. They would be somewhat over the price of the average vehicle, but at that rate of sales, the competing GMs and Teslas would tip electrics into the broad consumer market. They would no longer be niche vehicles. At once, Obama’s aim for 1 million electrics on the road would be realized. And that is what Musk said he would do—he alone would sell 500,000 electrics a year by 2020.

LG Chemical, GM’s lithium-ion battery supplier, contributed to the drama. Prompted by no one obvious, a senior executive blurted out at an earnings presentation that the company would manufacture a two-hundred-mile battery in 2016.
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He did not say for whom LG was making the battery, but the disclosure seemed to further telegraph GM’s forthcoming battle with Musk.

The pieces were in place. Tesla and GM would achieve their range by re-engineering current-generation battery technology and lightening up their respective vehicles. The Hub, by starting over from scratch, stood a fighting chance of taking batteries the rest of the way.

Chamberlain said the Hub meant peering deep into the physics, with no assumptions as to where the answer lay. Armed with an atomic road map of the chemistry, the United States could really win.

When I began to consider a book on batteries, the reception from friends and advisers was all but unanimous: don’t do it. It would be a tedious bore. The exceptions were a few hands at Argonne National Laboratory, who seemed to understand the fascination instantly. They are Jeff Chamberlain, Angela Hardin, and Don Hillebrand. I want to single out Chamberlain, without whose support this book would not have happened. The decision to welcome a stranger with a tape recorder into a secure setting with colossally high stakes was not trivial. I would ultimately spend two years in the Battery Department, sometimes hanging around for a few days and once for two months. Chamberlain let go, gave me the run of the department, and persuaded the rest of the lab to relax. They allowed me to be the fly on the wall that I had hoped. I am grateful to Eric Isaacs, Argonne’s director, whose permission was required, and David Sandalow, who made a timely call to Isaacs on my behalf that finally set everything in motion. I am also grateful to Sujeet Kumar and Atul Kapadia, who welcomed me to observe Envia’s quest to be a successful start-up battery company.

Thanks to New America, which supported this book in an astonishing three-year-long fellowship. New America is a unique institution whose literary and intellectual sensibilities constantly result in outstanding work. Specifically, thanks to Steve Coll, Andres Martinez, Rachel White, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. Superlative thanks to Kevin Delaney, my editor at Quartz, a gentle chief who runs the best publication on the Internet and understood my fixation. In the first fourteen months of Quartz’s existence, Kevin accorded me roughly ten months of either part- or full-time book leave. Certainly no other boss would have been so generous. Thanks also to David Bradley, who demonstrates that it is simultaneously possible to be a media colossus and a nice man. I cannot say enough about Jim Levine, the most trustworthy agent and friend in publishing. Jim read and commented on the manuscript three times. Thanks to Rick Kot for embracing the book and to Melanie Tortoroli for her artful and supple advice and editing and ultimately her enthusiasm—she is a terrific friend. Additional thanks to Viking’s Ben Petrone and Sarah Janet for their superb work. Susan Glasser commissioned the article for
Foreign Policy
that led to this book and Charlie Homans edited it. Alyson Wright, my research assistant and transcriber, diligently listened to, typed out, and checked hundreds of hours of interviews and offered wise counsel on the content. Noel Greenwood gets an exceptional expression of thanks. Noel edited my first two books and committed to do so this time as well. Throughout, he was in treatment for cancer. Finally, Noel decided enough was enough. I saw him a week before he died and we settled on a road map for
The Powerhouse,
one that I stuck to pretty closely. Thanks, Noel.

I am solely responsible for any errors but I am grateful to Billy Woodford of MIT, who read the full manuscript three times and returned with pages of important scientific and technical corrections, tweaks, and suggestions. Christian Caryl, Konstantin Kakaes, Chris Leonard, Sharon Moshavi, and Chris White read the manuscript and saved me from numerous errors in addition to offering important stylistic suggestions.

A special thanks to those who had the patience to explain (often repeatedly) the science and history of batteries, technology, big geopolitics, and Argonne (with apologies in advance for the names I will no doubt omit for no reason apart from personal shortcomings): Khalil Amine, Jason Croy, Kevin Gallagher, Don Hillebrand, Mike Thackeray, Lynn Trahey, and Brad Ullrick. Also Daniel Abraham, Ralph Brodd, Emilio Bunel, Tony Burrell, Yet-Ming Chiang, George Crabtree, Jeff Dahn, Sun-Ho Kang, Chris Johnson, Peter Littlewood, Paul Nelson, Mark Peters, Venkat Srinivasan, and Jack Vaughey. In addition, Ali Abouimrane, Elizabeth Austin, Mali Balasubramanian, Ilias Belharouak, Martin Bettge, Benjamin Blaiszik, Terry Bray, Rita Brzowski, Zonghai Chen, Holly Coghill, Larry Curtiss, Bill David, Dennis Dees, Carolyn Edmonson, Dan Flores, Sharon Giblin, Gary Henriksen, Matt Howard, Donghan Kim, Greg Krumdick, Jun Lu, Nenad Markovic, Vilas Pol, Yang Ren, Dave Schroeder, Mike Slater, and Cynthia Sullivan.

For kindnesses large and small, thanks to Tom De Waal, Sabine Gallagher, Gideon Lichfield, Sam Patten, Becky Shafer, Faith Smith, Lisa Thackeray, Eric Weiner, and Georgina Wilson.

My most profound gratitude to my family for unconditional support and understanding of absences, silences, and surliness: thanks to Alisha, Ilana and Dolores LeVine, and finally to my best friend and wife, Nurilda Nurlybayeva.

Atul Kapadia e-mailed the following letter to the Envia team on August 30, 2013:

Dear Envia Team:

Thank you very much for all the hard work and the sacrifices each of you made for Envia during the past three years. I greatly enjoyed our interaction but most importantly learnt a lot from each of you.

It was most satisfying for me to watch each of our employees really care about the quality of their work. Everyone worked hard and made enormous sacrifices. When Tom Stephens, GM Vice-Chairman, visited Envia in 2011, he told me in a private conversation that he wished that GM could reproduce Envia’s culture—Envia is respected because each employee takes pride in their job and knows that if they did not show up, Envia would suffer. That’s high praise indeed. Of course, I did not take any credit for that because the true credit belonged to Sujeet and Herman (for setting up such a work-ethic early-on) and to the team members themselves.

My journey with Envia has been a long one! When I was at Bay Partners, I (along with John Walecka) was the first one to write a check for Envia in 2007 and then re-wrote another check in 2009. When we were approaching insolvency and were using Silicon Valley bank debt money in 2010, I joined the team and Envia closed a highly successful [cash-raising] round of $17 million. Closing those deals with Honda and GM was equally exciting. However, you will all admit that most fun was to compete and win against LG at GM by benchmarking [the] NMC:LMO mixture against our own layered-layered lithium rich cathode.

Some companies have this unique magic potion of employees that as time goes by you see several of the young (and not so young like me) employees become successful via entrepreneurship, via MBAs from prestigious universities or big-shot executives in large companies. I know for a fact that I will hear about many many of you in the years to come.

You all have very exciting individual futures ahead of you. And as long as you keep things simple—ethically and intellectually—nothing will stop you from achieving things that you want to achieve. Surround yourself with people who are tough on you, but also have a strong moral compass.

Some of you have also asked me—what really happened? Easiest way to explain it is when you have strong personalities, there are always disagreements. And disagreements can sometimes be reconciled and sometimes not be reconciled. Add to that 4 months ago, I co-founded a company with a friend that recently got funded. And my co-founder is jealous that I spend all my time thinking about Envia. So as a confluence of several factors, I submitted my resignation to the Board of Directors on August 4 and again yesterday. Today they graciously accepted it.

Just like I was the right CEO when the company had a financing crisis in 2010, our new CEO, Purnesh Seegopaul, is absolutely the right CEO for this moment. He has a Ph.D and has deep experience in the specialty materials world. Despite my several disagreements with Purnesh, in this specialty materials business, I have enormous respect for his judgment. Two years ago, Purnesh gave me some conservative advice on making sure that the business team was not running too fast compared to where Envia was in its technology development cycle. At that point, I disagreed with him. But as time passed, I realized that Purnesh was right. Purnesh is calm, meticulous and methodical—all traits that are vital to running a research company. Make sure you don’t let go of him.

Lastly, I received several messages today that I did not address the team in the company meeting. Purnesh graciously offered. But my philosophy is you look forward—not backward. And for each of you the time now is to carve that individual and combined forward path—so all the best!

Regards,

Atul