The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World (25 page)

A
lthough his nameplate remained on the corner office in the Battery Department, Chamberlain had his family photographs and other personal belongings removed to the War Room. He would now work full-time on the Hub, so a replacement would have to be found for him in the department. The shift coincided with a perceptible change of sentiment among the battery guys. In prior decades—as long as anyone remembered, anyway—every head of the Battery Department had come from outside. Since Elton Cairns in the 1960s, no one had ever been elevated to the top post from within. In fact, said Jack Vaughey, there had been no promotion of any kind—apart from postdoctoral assistants hired as full-time staff—in some three decades. Now Tony Burrell, a recruit from Los Alamos National Laboratory, had been hired as interim successor to Chamberlain, and several of the battery guys were unhappy. “So what is wrong with
me
?” was how one of them put it.

Neither Thackeray nor Amine coveted the wholly administrative post, but they, too, bristled at Burrell’s elevation. Unlike Chamberlain, who confined himself to activities like licensing their inventions, Burrell pushed into the science. Both battery geniuses griped when Burrell—not himself a battery guy—took charge of the department’s lithium-air research effort. Amine expected to run lithium-air, especially since he had attracted considerable funding from Dow Chemical for part of the work. Thackeray said that you simply did not appoint a non–battery guy to a supervisory role over something as serious as lithium-air. Amine was still more piqued when Burrell took command of the voltage fade team as well. Sitting straight across the table from Burrell in a big departmental meeting, Amine said the job should go to Chris Johnson. He said Johnson’s knowledge of NMC surpassed almost anyone else’s. Burrell was like a potted plant—Amine did not so much as glance at him. The rebuke not only of Burrell but also of upper management’s prerogative to select group leaders fit Amine’s personal style. Its bluntness stood out.

 • • • 

Burrell’s multiple appointments irritated Amine, but the main rub was stature and respect. In a series of private meetings, Amine asked Chamberlain to consider his achievements: at the age of forty-nine, he was a 709, the second most senior rank in the national labs. He should be a 710, what was known as a “distinguished fellow,” he said. Each large unit at Argonne was apportioned one 710 slot or occasionally two—there were two in Building 205—but no more. There were a total of just ten 710s or so for the lab as a whole. This pinnacle was the crowning achievement of a long career, the recipients typically closing in on retirement, in their late fifties or early sixties, such as Thackeray, who himself was a 710. But Amine said he should not have to wait—he had won numerous awards, published “tons of papers,” been granted some 120 patents, and was recognized internationally. He was as good as Thackeray. “You know, listen. I’ve been very patient,” he said. “You can talk to the upper guys. I’d like it to come from you so they know that you are supporting me and playing your role.” The unspoken threat hung in the air—if Chamberlain would not argue his case, he would go over his head and “make things happen.” Amine had a record of doing so.

A few years earlier, Amine had approached Chamberlain’s predecessor, Gary Henriksen. “Gary, it’s been four years since I’ve been a 708,” he had said; it is time for promotion. But Henriksen had refused to recommend him; it was not out of disrespect for his work. It was that for two years Henriksen had been pushing the promotion of another senior lab researcher, a man older than Amine who Henriksen felt deserved the bump-up first. Stacked up against Amine’s application, which is how the lab management might handle two such simultaneous recommendations, the other man would stand “no chance” of promotion; Amine would overshadow him. The fair thing was to allow the other researcher to go first, then look at Amine’s case. Amine insisted.

“What an ingrate,” Henriksen had replied, and rejected Amine again.

Amine went to the director of the chemical division. “You promote me,” he said, “or I’ll resign. You make your decision. I need to know within a week.” The next day, the phone rang. “Get your papers in order. We will move them forward.” Both men were promoted.

Not long after the blowup over Burrell, Amine was dining on sushi when his cell phone began to vibrate. “Oh, hi, Jeff,” he said, excusing himself.

“You got your promotion,” Chamberlain said. Chamberlain was not going to let the situation boil over as before. He had presented Amine’s unusual request up the ranks and won approval.

Amine returned to the table, a broad smile on his face. He said, “Jeff is a great guy. He’s a guy who recognizes—I think we are very fortunate to have him.”

Later, Emilio Bunel, the division chief and Chamberlain’s direct boss, summoned a Battery Department meeting. He had an announcement: Jack Vaughey was herewith promoted to group leader. If the stars were publicly grumbling, Bunel and Chamberlain wondered who was next. The department employed some sixty researchers but had the same management structure—a director and Amine and Thackeray as group leaders—as when it numbered only a half dozen. Contentment did not seem possible when people remained in exactly the same jobs for their entire career. Vaughey would now be in charge of his own group of battery researchers.

Once the shock wore off, the move seemed to lift the pall. Amine’s promotion was not yet public knowledge, but the announcement about Vaughey was enough to create a titter in the department. Some toted up a private list of others deserving a bump, including themselves. None complained not to be first because Vaughey, a fifteen-year department veteran, was so diffident and affable.

Vaughey seemed grateful but said his life was unchanged. He did not receive a raise because Argonne salaries had been frozen along with those of all federal employees for a couple of years. He would carry out precisely the same work, which was the continued attempt to make a pure lithium metal anode that did not catch fire. If he succeeded, it would be a colossal achievement, one larger than a solution to voltage fade. It would bring more recognition than any conceivable promotion. Still, Vaughey said such a move—someone’s elevation—was overdue.

Jason was unmoved by Vaughey’s promotion. More than halfway through a three-year postdoctoral assistantship, he had a personally pressing matter. If the lab did not intend to promote him as well—with a staff position—he had to start looking outside. He was almost a decade older than many of the postdocs and had his two children to think about.

Thackeray said that Croy merited promotion but that there was currently no opening; even if there were, he would have to compete for it. The reality was that Argonne, like most employers, could act fast if faced with losing someone valuable. But the risk had to be explicit—there had to be an actual competing offer. Croy said that while that might be true, he would not enter into a job search lightly. If he received a job offer and liked it, he would accept and leave Argonne. “I wouldn’t pull a gun and not be willing to use it,” he said. “I wouldn’t waste my time or theirs.” Thackeray said he understood.

Croy e-mailed Kumar, which led to an appointment with Envia.

The interview took place just a few months after Croy, Thackeray, and Kumar had exchanged views on voltage fade. His work was already familiar to the Envia team. But as they watched Croy flip through his slides, they saw that this was new stuff. Croy and Gallagher had recently obtained fresh clues from the beam line as to the nature of voltage fade. It was precisely the sort of progress that Kumar hoped to tackle at Envia. When they subsequently spoke one on one, however, Kumar did not question Croy on science. He rather spoke generally about the profession—about finding someone who would fit well in Envia. Croy could see that Kumar cared “about the company and its image. They like what they are doing and believe in it.”

Closing out the day, Croy met with Kapadia. The CEO said that everyone Croy had met at Envia had liked him. “We are going to give you an offer,” Kapadia said. “If you want the job, you should ask for whatever will make you happy.”

Croy was delighted. Here was an enterprise clearly on the move, managed by talented and motivated scientists with faith in themselves. Kumar’s substance had especially made an impression. He still favored a position at Argonne but was eager to hear Envia’s offer.

Argonne reacted fast. Chamberlain—no longer leading the Battery Department but still in overall charge of energy storage at the lab—said that Croy was equivalent to Gallagher. Both were “stars.” “If we lost Jason, it would be hard on us, because his potential is great, not only in science, but to lead,” Chamberlain said. “There is always a small percentage who can lead and also have the intellect. He has both.”

Notwithstanding his usual modesty, Croy thought the same. In the subsequent days, Thackeray asked where Croy saw himself in future years. “In Dr. Isaacs’s seat,” Croy said.

Chamberlain said that one thing was clear for both Argonne and Envia: whoever had Croy would possess “the guy who is closest to the needed breakthrough” on voltage fade.

A little over a month later, a two-page letter arrived from Kumar by e-mail. As a personal touch, the Envia founder left a message on Croy’s office phone. He hoped that Croy would join Envia as a “senior scientist.” Kumar threw in thirty thousand share options. In an IPO, they could be worth $500,000 or even $1 million, Kumar said, enough for a serious down payment on a decent house even in the expensive East Bay. Croy declined to disclose the financial details to Argonne but said the package was “very attractive.”

Chamberlain fashioned a counteroffer. He knew he could not match Kumar on salary dollar for dollar, but he could come close when you considered the respective costs of living. Housing was far cheaper south of Chicago. Neither could he offer anything resembling stock options. But he knew that a big factor for Croy was the proximity to his and his wife’s families in Indiana. Lindsey Croy didn’t want to move to California. Chamberlain hoped that and the higher salary would tip Croy’s decision.

The Argonne bureaucracy was slow to approve the proposal. A week after Kumar’s offer was in hand, Croy said, “Still waiting to hear from Argonne if you can believe that. No job, no Hub, no money. Only thing we have is voltage fade, as constant as the stars!”

He had two days left to reply to Kumar.

Chamberlain and Croy spoke by phone. Chamberlain said the younger man should make the best decision for his own circumstances. Envia’s offer was extremely attractive, perhaps superior financially to the one to come any day from Argonne. But, in the spirit of friendly advice, he wanted to make sure that Croy understood, in case he didn’t already, the reality of the Bay Area. “There are enormous risks going to Envia,” he said. “Look at Solyndra. It could be shuttered in two years. Silicon Valley eats people up.” He went on:

At this point—pre-IPO—it is intoxicating. You can believe the hype because you want to. They dangle options in front of you. But there is no way to predict if Envia is a mirage. Even if you knew all the data. I am not talking Envia down—I think they have a great shot at it. But if you are outside of it entirely, you just don’t know what the truth is.

Chamberlain was sincere. But, notwithstanding his doubts about Envia, Thackeray wondered if Chamberlain had gone too far. “Can you imagine if we convince Jason to stay and five years from now he could have been worth $5 million?” he said.

At last, Argonne’s human resources unit e-mailed a counteroffer.

Croy had another day to weigh the two.

The next morning, an e-mail from Croy arrived in Chamberlain’s in-box. “I just wanted to write and officially accept,” he said. Envia’s offer was rich, but Chamberlain’s instincts were strong. The Croys had lived away long enough; Lindsey Croy refused to do so again.

Kumar understood. Deciding between the two offers had “torn Jason apart,” Kumar said. Yet he regretted not having managed to persuade the Argonne man. Croy did as well. “I thought it would be a good thing” to go to Envia, he said.

I
n July 2012, the Argonne team traveled to Washington for the Hub orals. This was the toughest part of the competition. The reviewers, consisting of battery specialists and scientists from unrelated fields, would be demanding and could be brutal.

The Argonne guys were worried by a celebrity team from Oak Ridge Lab and the University of Texas at Austin. It was led by Ray Orbach, director of the university’s Energy Institute. Orbach had an inside track. He was a former undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy, an accomplished theoretical and experimental physicist with deep connections in the scientific community. Orbach had recruited a powerful roster, crowned by perhaps the most dangerous personality of all—John Goodenough, the eighty-nine-year-old lithium-ion battery pioneer. Chamberlain could say that Argonne’s proposal featured the most illustrious battery team on Earth, but it was a frivolous claim when competing with Goodenough, the father of modern batteries.

Goodenough was competitive and gravely serious about the Hub. The breakthroughs to be targeted were “critical for the social fabric,” Goodenough said. “If you are going to go beyond seven billion people on the Earth, you need to feed them all.”

On the favorable side from Argonne’s point of view was that Orbach, having signed the field’s living legend, had gone on to antagonize him. Goodenough was threatening to withdraw from the team. His gripe was that Orbach’s proposal managers were treating him like an artifact rather than the active battery man that he continued to be. “They would like me to be associated [but] in a way that they run everything,” he said. “You know, young Turks want to impose old-man honor and not power.” He laughed but was genuinely unhappy. Goodenough said, “The fact of the matter is I don’t want my name used improperly.”

Oak Ridge’s internal dissent aside, the Argonne team couldn’t count on their rivals’ blunders. They had to focus on their performance in the orals.

Eight-member teams were permitted in the orals room. The Argonne team would consist of five presenters from across the country—MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang; Argonne’s Nenad Markovic, an experimental chemist from Serbia; Berkeley’s Kristin Persson, a materials specialist; and of course Crabtree and Chamberlain. That left three spaces open. Argonne’s managers put much thought into who else would lend the proposal the most gravitas; what chords had they not yet struck that might appeal to the reviewers? It was decided that Dow Chemical, an Argonne partner, would receive one of the open slots to demonstrate industry’s endorsement of the proposal. Khal Amine would take the second as a recognized battery superstar. That left one slot. Chamberlain nominated Gallagher, who would be evidence of the new generation coming up. But at the last minute, Isaacs stepped in to take the slot for himself. He wanted to show that the entire lab was behind the effort. Gallagher could travel with the team to Washington as a utility player on call outside the room. At least two decades younger than the other team members, Gallagher was thrilled merely to be present.

Then there was the proposal itself. As the weeks had gone on, Gallagher’s techno-economic model kept moving closer to the front of the document and now was a growing factor in Argonne’s orals presentation. Just the day before, the group was rehearsing at the lab in front of Isaacs and his deputy Peter Littlewood when Chamberlain reached the middle of the slide deck. The two Bell veterans leapt at Chamberlain’s description of the Nelson-Gallagher model.

“This has to be right at the beginning,” one said. “This is what we have to talk about.”

With each such elevation, Gallagher obtained an effective promotion. As it now stood, if Argonne won, he would be catapulted to a management slot just under the senior men.

Gallagher himself considered the model an “incredibly useful tool.” But he had suppressed his opinion in early Hub discussions, conditioned by the gibes he usually heard around the lab, scorn that the model was “second-rate stuff that anybody who has a bachelor’s degree could do.” The other battery guys shunned the model, which was why Gallagher was “amazed” now as Isaacs and Littlewood talked it up as an ingenious way to build prototypes on the cheap: you would accelerate innovation by quickly informing inventors what would and would not work at factory scale.

Littlewood’s own excitement went back again to Bell, where he recalled an effort to build a prototype that had inadvertently led to the discovery of the “fractional quantum Hall effect,” a principle of physics that won another Nobel Prize. Littlewood endorsed the Hub’s intention to emphasize prototyping as a first principle.

To Gallagher, senior management’s attitude clarified the Hub’s core mission, which was “to throw out the old paradigm and say, ‘If you could start from scratch, how would you organize things?’” The writing team was unified in this arguably radical conclusion—that to rapidly launch the age of electric cars, you needed an entirely
new system
of research. You had to ignore virtually all the battery work currently under way and conceive both a new way to invent and new concepts of storage, a frame of mind that Goodenough himself would recognize. “Most of us believe that you would eventually get there with today’s model,” Gallagher said. “But it would be very inefficient. We want to try to do it in the near future instead of the distant future.” If something out there was going to inadvertently create the big leap, it would have already done so. The only way to win the race was to start over.

The assertion that nothing currently on the market or in battery labs anywhere in the world was up to the task was a bold one. Gallagher wasn’t even certain that the Hub was the prescription. Unlike Khal Amine, who said that the right team and the right sum of money would produce the battery breakthrough in a decade, Gallagher was “a little more pragmatic. I don’t know. The thing is I am really excited about trying.”

The Hub might
get there, or might not. Gallagher said that battery development as currently practiced at Argonne and everywhere else was a dead end.

The group had rented and catered an extra room at the Germantown, Maryland, Marriott, where they were staying, thirty miles northwest of Washington, D.C. The orals would be held nearby on Wednesday in the Department of Energy’s basic sciences division. The team would rehearse in the room today—a Monday—then rest tomorrow.

The team assembled in the morning for this last round of practice. Crabtree went first. The Argonne-led group, he said, had carefully considered the FOA—the announcement of the Hub opportunity—and looked forward to the reviewers’ scrutiny. He flashed a chart on the screen. It was a “unifying graphic” conceived by Gallagher that depicted innovation leading from the laboratory to the market. At the nucleus was the techno-economic model. In the Hub, it was relabeled “system analysis,” and Crabtree, with the fresh orders from the top, promoted it like a breakthrough innovation in itself. It was “a new paradigm for battery development,” he said, an example of “science-based rational design” through which “we can predict what we will get.”

Crabtree said the current methodology, where scientists published articles and engineers focused on performance, resulted in isolation between groups working on the anode, cathode, and electrolyte. “They operate on a hunt-and-try approach. So if something works well, ‘Let’s do it.’ If it doesn’t work, we will drop it without trying to understand why,” he said. The result was battery performance improvement of about 5 percent per year, “which is actually quite impressive, but
not
fast enough to achieve the goals.”

To meet the Argonne team’s transformational goals, there had to be a new way of doing things, Crabtree said. He unveiled five-five-five—five times greater energy density at one fifth the cost, carried out in five years. “So let’s look at how that system would work,” he said.

As a given battery design was studied, researchers would reach a point at which the Hub managers would step in and caucus: did the results merit a go-ahead? If the answer was yes, the next stage would involve a “translational development team.” Crabtree called attention to a slide. “These colors represent the representatives of every part of the Energy Storage Hub,” he said. This team would now move the promising battery concept along to “more decision points.” If the concept continued to meet the benchmarks, it could then graduate to industrial scale-up.

The team was not starting with a blank slate of new battery theories. The proposal had three potentially transformational concepts, each of which, in the opinion of the Argonne team, stood a reasonable chance of working. To plumb these concepts, the team had marshaled “game-changing tools,” Crabtree said. They included “the Electrochemical Discovery Lab,” to be equipped with every major measurement tool required to evaluate a battery. These tools were sensitive—you had to be trained in how to use them. But once you were, the tools had the power—along with techno-economic modeling—to carve months and years off the time required to separate winning from losing chemistries.

Some concepts would not make it. The team would determine that they were unsuitable for development. “In fact, we expect to have many
of these,” Crabtree said. Some of the rejects would be nonetheless mined for useful knowledge—lessons learned that would be driven back into the interrogatory process through a specially created “Science Library of Knowledge.”

“We’ve assembled a team consisting of five national laboratories, five universities, and five industry partners,” Crabtree said. “One team operating under one management with one mission.”

Chamberlain presented next. He spoke of the “temperature plot,” which Argonne believed would be crucial to the Hub’s success. It was part of techno-economic modeling. The idea was to track every material under study on a chart. Color and line length would indicate the material’s readiness for translation into a prototype. The longer and greener the line, the readier it was in terms of performance, cost, energy, power, safety, and life. Importantly, the data were comprehensive. By cost, Chamberlain did not mean just electrode preparation, coating, and so on, but shipping and receiving the product—the total cost of developing a battery pack. A high-voltage system, for instance, could almost certainly operate in relatively small factories, have a cost advantage, and thus be evident in a long, green line.

The reviewers needed to contemplate another important question as they compared Argonne with its Hub competitors, Chamberlain said. That was “how quickly can you get going on day one?” Not only did the Argonne team have “the skills and the people set to do it. We already have the equipment,” he said. All the members had signed a legally binding agreement governing intellectual property. “We don’t have this fear” of losing out if an idea is swept up by another team member. Chamberlain said, “We can openly collaborate because we already have a plan.” A single entity—Argonne—would control all licensing. The Hub would be “a one-stop shop for industry,” he said, and “hit the ground running.”

 • • • 

On Wednesday morning, July 18, the Argonne team filed into a battered room in the DOE’s basic sciences division headquarters. Inside sat the reviewers, empty seats for the Argonne guys, and an old projector to display slides.

The projector didn’t work. Chamberlain summoned Gallagher, who, standing outside the room, had a spare. Then the room went dark—somehow the electricity had gone down. The battery guys stood still. Long minutes passed.

Finally, the lights returned.

Chamberlain said, “I think that was eight minutes. We’ll get that back, right?”

You can have five, a reviewer said.

The Argonne team silently cropped out lines.

After the orals were over, the group gathered for coffee. The reviewers, particularly Jeff Dahn, the competing inventor of NMC, had seized on the five-five-five claim. “There is no way you can do this,” Dahn said. Other reviewers picked up the theme. Chamberlain had faced precisely the same doubts at Argonne; before an uprising could break out among the reviewers, he stood and said, “I learned in industry and academia that if you set goals with people or for people, what people do is they naturally try to achieve that goal. So we set it.” He nodded to the reviewers. “It is
going to be extraordinarily difficult to achieve this goal. And we understand it is aspirational. But if we make it halfway or two thirds the way there, we will shift the market. And I don’t mean it will move things a little bit and create businesses and jobs. It will shift the market.”

Chamberlain hoped his point was understood—that if they were ultrarealistic and set a goal for a 50 percent improvement over lithium-ion, the researchers would aim precisely for 50 percent. But if they targeted a fivefold improvement and got twofold, “that is a monumental achievement.” A couple of the battery guys were unhappy with Dahn, but Crabtree thought his questions were fair—tough, but fair.

The flight back to Chicago was in a couple of hours. At the airport, Isaacs said that no one could have commanded the floor as Crabtree had. When he entered the room, every member of the review committee knew who he was. “We couldn’t have done it without you,” Isaacs said. Chamberlain said that everyone “really did a good job.”

Someone asked, “Was it a slam dunk?”

“No, not at all,” Isaacs said. His voice was tight.

“We are going to wait and see,” Crabtree said.

It was pointed out that prior to the orals, Thackeray had forecast an Argonne victory. Chamberlain laughed.

“It is not slam-dunk,” Isaacs said. “There will be other strong competitors and you can’t tell. These committees can do anything that they want to do. And DOE has its own mind. It is going to be a real tough decision.” No one in particular could know what mastery Oak Ridge would put on display.

Not a slam dunk. But they felt damn confident.