Gerry

So ESA’s annual event is over for another year. It’s no longer an event for battery scientists or even battery vendors but it looks like an excellent networking event for everyone else.  As a conference with formal presentations, forget it.

If you have something to say that adds to the argument, you need to write a paper and to deliver that to an audience, you need to create slides for your power point. And you’ll need to get clearance from your company’s lawyers and PRs.

Too much hassle. So panel discussions predominate. Mumble into your boots and agree with the other guys. Might be good if you knew who was on the panel? It all looks like, and sounds like, a bad TV chat show with C listers as guests.

No hard take home messages with facts. Remember those? Some energised speakers for sure, but sometimes it was hard to tell whether this was a stand up comedy show or a political rally.

Energy storage is not about job creation but it is all about making efficient use of electricity generation assets and reducing the impact of fossil fuels on the climate. It’s also about making money — hence the presence of the bankers. If only there could be another way for accessing capital. Access to prosperity needs money and electricity. Clearly showing my age and my politics here.

Still, for all that, Energy Storage has come of age, led by the progressive US states of California and New York, their utilities, some wise heads and a little tech Viagra this month from Mr Musk. You just have to show it works. I didn’t see too much of that. I wonder what the old guard of Dr Phil Symonds and Brad Roberts would have made of it all?

The rest of the world is way behind America on this and have much catching up to do — that much is clear.

But in a week when global media was more concerned about whether FIFA was corrupt from top to bottom,  did it matter?  If you can’t see the truth about FIFA, I’d suggest you’re half blind. And if you can’t see the benefits of storage, you’re totally blind! The world’s media wasn’t really here.

Being corrupt will probably make you rich…but banking on electricity storage to swell your fortunes is still, sadly, uncertain.

Short of a definitive announcement from the company, you can take all the stories about Apple coming up with electric car any time soon as total bollocks and a figment of a flaccid and useless mainstream press adding up one and one and making it 27.

'Poaching' a few execs from the once bright hope of A123 Systems is hardly an indicator:  A company whose existence is now so perilously dependent on batteries would be foolish not to beef up its electrochemical knowledge base and the breakthroughs needed are more likely to come in the area of thin film batteries, which are showing the kind of promise needed for electronic 'wearables'.

A company which is still clearly a 'one man band' in the form of the departed Steve Jobs has not come up with anything more remarkable than size variants on the device which he once envisaged— the iPhone.  And make no mistake, here at ESPL, we’re Apple fans, having got this business off the ground on Apple’s desktop computers which are easy to use, easy to customise and downright reliable.

Jobs was bold, but I don’t think even this far sighted soul would have been audacious enough to take on the extremely difficult task of improving battery energy density, life and cost— even with the US$160 billion cash pile Apple currently has.

And I’ve never seen an Apple delegate on the lists of recent battery events (though I did meet a guy from Google (not that they needed to come)).

The apocryphal tales of how Jobs and friends came up with the iPhone concept are well known, and not difficult to imagine. More than a decade ago, they pulled out their keyboard-driven devices from their pockets and collectively thought 'these are crap' —unwieldy interfaces and little extendable functionality (no apps).

One suspects the deceased Jobs and the effete Sir Jonathon Ive would have remarkable respect for today’s auto engineers and designers.  Any fool watching automobile ads in the USA and elsewhere could identify a key theme— more and more safety, which means more and more sensors, more electronics and a role for firms like Apple, Google and though its painful to say— Microsoft—to pull it all together.

But building a new electric drivetrain? The salutary lessons already being learned by the German auto industry should be enough— working on your own does not bring the performance and productivity gains you need to make affordable and saleable electric vehicles to the masses. And a lot of the problem still lays in the electrochemistry— the fundamentals— not the batteries, which are based on applied understanding. Read our write ups of the European AABC meeting in Mainz and the US Nattbat meeting in Phoenix in the Spring issue of BEST and judge for yourself— click here for a paid subscription, it's very affordable battery knowledge you need.

What’s your definition of good engineering? Mine would include making use of the stuff that’s already there, cannibalising (if necessary) existing kit to make what I need or want to try. That’s what I learned as a kid messing around with electronics half a century ago and I’m glad to say it's a philosophy that rings true with some of the best minds out there today.

When I met the battery team behind the Tesla, some years back, I was wowed by the fact that they had taken the same view, using what’s out there to make a product – the 18650 cell design. Because it was already there in large numbers, it had a good safety case and the computer industry has done much to cover the costs of performance enhancements.

But Tesla has stood alone in its thinking – not that that has done it any harm.

Now someone with considerably more battery kudos than myself – one Menahem Anderman, battery guru to the auto industry, has crunched the numbers – and what do you know?

Tesla has the patents, the know-how and the experience to build battery packs with very large numbers of cells and against all the so-called ‘sensible manufacturing thinking’, they do OK. And……

Mr Elon Musk and friends were on the right lines all along – if you are prepared to take the risk and build a stonking great lithium-ion plant and ramp up production over the next ten years, which they plan to do.

But what if a few other automakers got smart and decided to share Tesla’s battery vision?

Well the risk would be shared and costs reduced but the up-shot is affordable, pure electric cars with half decent range could be available almost tomorrow because they’d be using a common platform – not too different, conceptually, from the common IC platforms you see being used by GM and VW to name two, across their auto ranges.

Everything else is just styling and marketing.

Directing the auto industry to do something different is a tough game and only something as large as the European Union can do that from the outside. Musk could just be, from almost out of nowhere, as influential on automotive manufacture as Jobs was to the mobile phone market, because before the iPhone (and its imitators), mobile phones were rubbish.

If Musk is right, there will be plenty of winners, right across the battery industry. Buying Dr A’s report confirms the obvious, but your financial people ought to see the charts.

It’s been a long time coming: this ‘energy storage’ malarkey. But visitors to this year’s Intersolar in Munich were in for a treat— a whole hall dedicated to the stuff. The Germans have been big on solar (in all its forms) for years, but lets be honest: None of the PV power coming out of the inverters on any German roof has been despatchable and the same is true for the Brits who’ve been coerced into taking a subsidy from the state to put solar on their roofs as well. It's electricity nobody can use.

Some smarter folk with money and technical know-how have managed to lash up their own residential storage with lead acid batteries and primitive control systems, raising two fingers to greedy, complacent utilities who hold them to ransom with ever steeper energy charges.

Germans, with their “Green” principles and mothballed nuclear plants, pay some of the highest costs for electricity in the world. But thanks to the Government driven 'Energiewende' programme and €30m of grants, quite a few German firms have come up with a complete solution.

One Belgian company (Leclanche) has completely re-invented itself on the back of the idea — a scalable battery system, battery management box and a purpose made tie-in that enable the user to intergrate their wind, solar and (God forbid) grid-connected supplies. Cost of ownership? Maybe just €8,000 if you’ve got solar on your roof already. Over 20 years and increasing electricity costs, it’s a decent payback.

Of course buying such a system may not be as easy as say, buying a hybrid car because the players are still building installer networks, but some players looked ahead of the game.

This writer was completely awed by Samsung, whose exhibition stand was so customer focused, a five year old would have understood the message — lead is dead (sorry guys), lithium-ion is so much better and we can offer you a beautiful slimline storage system you can hang on your wall. And you can control with an App no doubt, from your Galaxy phone?

Now when it’s got this much styling, you can safely say domestic energy storage has come of age. And if we see Apple here next year, you’ll know I’m right!

The curse of ABC has failed to arrive: On the anniversary of 9/11

This year: no breaking news disasters; No terrorism (9/11 - Bali 2001)

No dead Royals (Diana - Bangkok 1997)

No Asian financial crash 

And no missiles anywhere. Instead, record numbers of delegates and the encouraging news that we knew already — the lead industry is pretty much in rude health and that 2/3's of the market is here in Asia. And Brian Wilson got the International Lead Medal — but not for eating cabbage fritters. Confused?  Read the BEST Battery Briefing next week to find out more as our new Editor Tim Probert brings a fresh take on the industry.