How young companies are challenging fossil fuels with solar, wind energy to build better batteries

Professor Donald Sadoway remembers chuckling at an email in 2009 from a woman claiming to represent Bill Gates. The world’s richest man had taken Sadoway’s Introduction to Solid State Chemistry online, the message explained. Gates wondered if he could meet the guy teaching the popular MIT course the next time he was in the Boston area. “I thought it was a student prank,” says Sadoway, who’s spent more than a decade melting metals in search of a cheap, longlife battery that might wean the world off dirty energy. He’d almost forgotten the note when Gates’s assistant wrote again to plead for a response.
A month later, Gates and Sadoway were swapping ideas on curbing climate change in the chemist’s secondstory office on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus.
They discussed progress on batteries to help solar and wind compete with fossil fuels. Gates said to call when Sadoway was ready to start a company. “He agreed to be an angel investor,” Sadoway says. “It would have been tough without that support.”

Sadoway is ready. He and a handful of scientists with young companies and big backers say they have a shot at solving a vexing problem: how to store and deliver power around the clock so sustainable energies can become viable alternatives to fossil fuels. Today’s nickel-cadmium and lithium-ion offerings aren’t up to the task. They can’t run a home for more than a few hours or most cars for more than 160km. At about $400 per kilowatt-hour, they’re double the price analysts say will unleash widespread green power.

Storing this energy when the sun isn’t shining or a breeze isn’t blowing has remained an expensive hurdle. Battery believers say that’s changing. They’ve invested more than $5 billion in the past decade, racing to get technologies to market. They’re betting new batteries can hold enough clean energy to run a car, home, or campus; store power from wind or solar farms; and make dirty electricity grids greener by replacing generators and reducing the need for more fossil fuel plants.

This market for storage capacity will increase almost 10-fold in three years to 2,400 mw, equal to six natural gas turbines, Navigant Consulting says.

Gates made good on his pledge to Sadoway with an undisclosed investment in 2011. The money helped form Ambri, a nod to the company’s roots in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Billionaire Nick Pritzker and his son Joby are backing Aquion Energy through their Prelude Ventures and Tao Invest funds. At Aquion, a Carnegie Mellon University professor is repurposing a factory that made Volkswagens and Sony TVs to fashion batteries for residences and hotels. Technology from California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has support from VC Vinod Khosla. The top three US automakers are testing the lab’s lithium polymer product, which powers cars and homes.


More money will flow to the global, $50 billion-a-year battery industry as the US, China and Germany scramble to cut greenhouse gases. The market includes everything from flashlights and home solar to power sources for islands and storage that can fortify grids. A dozen startups are chasing the pot in a field dominated by Panasonic and LG Electronics, which are advancing their own offerings. “It’s a fantastic time, with some really strong technologies,” says Venkat Srinivasan of Berkeley Lab.

Sadoway is one of the first out of the gate. This year, he plans to ship six 10-tonne prototypes packed with hundreds of liquid metal cells to wind and solar farms in Hawaii, a microgrid in Alaska and a Consolidated Edison substation in Manhattan. Ambri’s battery will store power Con Ed offloads when demand is low. Then, rather than cranking up another coal- or gas-fired plant, the utility will drain the battery when New Yorkers want more juice.

He says Ambri can top lithium-ion on price and longevity with tricky chemistry that he and a former student have finally perfected. Unlike the lithium-ion in laptops, which can take about 400 charges and last four years, Sadoway says his batteries can take 10,000 charges and work for at least a decade.

No one so far has come up with a clear route to bringing down prices while ramping up production. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk says he can do it. He’s betting $5 billion that a new plant near a lithium mine in Nevada will make his Teslas go more than 200 miles at about $35,000 per car by 2017. That’s about one-third the cost of today’s priciest $100,000 Model S. Analysts estimate Tesla’s batteries cost less than $400 a kilowatt-hour. Musk has said he wants to cut costs by 30% with full output.

Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers jump-started today’s race to beat lithium-ion in 2007. VCs asked one simple question: What should the ideal battery do? The firm, known for spotting future tech icons such as Netscape and Google, came up with a list of “impossible demands.” Then they set out to find the technology hopefully lurking in a chemist’s lab ready to be refined and eventually brought to market, says Ray Lane, partner emeritus at Kleiner.

Kleiner took a chance with Jay Whitacre, a lanky cyclist with a Ph.D. in materials science and gave him $1.6 million in 2008 to accelerate his research. Six months later, Whitacre, now 43, was ready to take his sodiumbased battery out of his lab. He called the company Aquion for its aqueousion chemistry.

Whitacre said he’s developed what will become the cheapest non-toxic and long-lasting battery for a home or a hospital. It provides steady power for eight hours or more, discharging solar energy it gathers during the day. Whitacre shows off the fruit of his labour: a 28.6-kilowatt-hour battery module the size of a clothes dryer. It’s running the staff refrigerator, coffee maker and water heater.

Hany Eitouni is also chasing $100 cells with technology he helped develop at Berkeley Lab. Khosla Ventures and Samsung Venture Investment bet $17 million on Eitouni’s Seeo, bringing venture funding to more than $42 million since 2007. Eitouni, 37, says his latest rolled packets of lithium polymer cells are the size of a briefcase and hold two to three times the energy per weight of today’s liquid lithium battery. That’s key for electric vehicles to travel more than 200 miles per charge.

Ambri CEO Phil Guidice says new batteries emerging with the help of big backers will finally enable renewables to compete with fossil fuels. “Khosla, Gates, Musk and the Pritzkers are all excited about changing the world in a better way, and they’re swinging for the fences,” Guidice says. “We’re getting closer every day.”