The Powerhouse — Steve Levine
Q. What is it like to have the weight of the world on your technical shoulders? And what is keeping us from getting a super-battery? To find out, Steve LeVine spent two years in a lab with a half-dozen battery geniuses. — Erik Torenberg
Probably not since Alessandro Volta himself has so much public attention been lavished on the battery. Like then (the first decade of the 19th century), that’s included big hopes, some inflated claims, and much hoopla. Inventing one that is much cheaper and far more powerful is truly a big deal. But it’s not the usual science or technology story — no one knows when or even whether we are going to get a great battery. Last night, however, I replenished my own sense of reality by catching up on the story of the light bulb. Humphrey Davy first invented a facsimile of an incandescent bulb in 1802. But it took almost eight decades for Edison to create the one that went commercial. We need to relax a bit.
Q. What was one awesome thing (or several) that you learned while writing the book that isn’t included in the book? — Ben Tossell
Toward the end of the research, I found out — and Elon Musk hints at this — that the answer to getting to the goals of the super battery can be otherwise reached. That is, you might not have to make the big leap in the discovery lab — you might achieve at least the cost goals by getting a lot better at manufacturing batteries.
I am looking at that now — at entrepreneurs who are trying to reinvent how batteries are made.
Q. Is there anything that surprised you about John Goodenough? I think it’s remarkable that he’s still grinding it out at 92 years old. Did you come away from this with the feeling that he’s close to solving the problem of making an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal? — Eric Willis
Ah, John Goodenough.
Renaissance man and decent person besides.
I did have the sense that at least he thinks he is onto an answer to the anode side of the battery.
At 92, he is focused entirely on lithium metal, and — though he is careful now about his secrets so he did not tell me precisely his approach — he thinks he has a decent shot at figuring out how to fashion lithium metal into an anode without it turning into an explosion while a car is rumbling down a freeway.
Q. What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing this book Steve? — Erik Torenberg
The most surprising aspect of batteries, in my opinion, is how careful we have to be about what we hear. It turns out that many or most of the “breakthroughs” that we read about are not quite what they are implying; there is an invisible “yes, but … “ embedded — or should be embedded — into these announcements. Some of them are simply narrow — one aspect of the battery is improved, but a host of complications are left unattended to. But others are outright whoppers — they are exaggerations or deceit. That was a surprise and a lesson I carry with me.
Q. I’m sure you had an exciting journey writing this, but if you had to pick a favorite quote or passage, what would it be and is there a hidden or more I depth story behind it? — Virginia Barnett
The story is character-driven, and so I am driven to reply from that space. The most interesting character from the vantage of a writer — the hardest to write about because of the strong emotions he elicits in others — was Khalil Amine, one of the two battery geniuses at Argonne. I heard no end of gripes about him, most or all of them deeply and sincerely felt. Ultimately, I concluded that Amine’s critics had him wrong. The gripes that is were problems not with him, but with the gripers themselves. Those passages weave through the book.
Amine is an immigrant from Morocco. His wife is Chinese. But his style is learned from years working in Japan. As I say, a fascinating window into invention that I did not expect.
