Imagine that we brought back Alexander Graham

Bell, the inventor of the telephone,

and we showed him our cellphones.

This is George Crabtree, senior scientist at Argonne Labs

and amateur necromancer.

His reaction would be what's that?

That's not a phone?

He'd be baffled.

Now bring back Thomas Edison and show him the grid as we have it

now.

He would instantly recognize every feature of that grid.

He'd go, I understand that grid.

I know how it works.

I know where the electricity goes.

In fact, I can run the grid for you if you like.

That just shows that one industry

has changed dramatically.

And it's really changed in the last 20 years.

The other, the grid, hasn't.

But it will change.

It may be five to 10 to 15 years off.

But I think it will come.

So your goal is to confuse the ghost of Thomas Edison when

he comes back.

Exactly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK.

OK.

Why are we talking about the ghost of Thomas Edison?

Because the electricity grid is in need of a major overhaul.

It's inefficient.

It's wasteful.

And it could just be better, OK?

In a lot of ways, the technology of our grid

is stuck in the 19th century with good old Thomas Edison.

We need to bring it forward into the 21st century.

And to do that, we need to leave behind the old grid like we've

left behind this guy.

For this guy.

And today we've got smartphones.

Tomorrow, give or take a decade, we'll have a smart grid.

What you doing?

I'm playing Angry Birds.

A smart grid will really confuse the hell out

of Thomas Edison, right?

Right.

And Crabtree is spearheading that confusion effort

at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research.

Which can be pronounced JCESR.

JCESR is a research partnership between

various academic and industrial labs

with commercial manufacturers with the expressed goal

of getting out the next generation of battery

technology and increasing our ability to store energy.

This is a storage moment.

We've suddenly realized this new emphasis on climate change,

that it's going to be a tough road to eliminate carbon

from our economy.

We don't have the technology for it.

Most of the carbon emitted into our atmosphere

comes from transportation and electricity generation.

That's because most of our cars run on gasoline.

And most of our power comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

These two together are about 2/3 of the carbon emissions

that the United States and every other country emits.

So we want to cut down on our carbon emissions.

But there's a minor complication.

It doesn't matter how many solar panels or windmills we make.

We're never to be able to completely go green

until we come up with a revolution in energy storage

technology.

That might sound like a daunting task,

but we've done this before.

In 1991, Sony came out with the first lithium ion battery.

And almost every aspect of the way we live today

changed because of it.

Because of its small size and rechargeability,

the lithium ion battery allowed us

to carry around our computers and cellphones wherever we go,

allowing us to be connected to instantaneous communication

and information at all times.

The lithium ion battery not only revolutionized the kind

of technology we could have, it revolutionized the way

we interact with each other.

You say something?

There's two more revolutions waiting to happen.

One is with electric cars.

The other one is with the grid.

And large, high density batteries like the one JCESR's

trying to develop could be the answer.

For the stability and effectiveness

of our power grid, energy storage is critical.

If you break it down, there's basically two places

where energy can be stored.

First, we can set up a giant battery

at the beginning of the grid, the power plant.

But why, you may ask, would we want

to store the energy a power plant produces?

Well, we don't use energy consistently

throughout the day.

At night, when we go to bed, we use much less energy

than when we're up and watching TV or microwaving Hot Pockets.

If a power point can store energy when we're asleep

or when demand is low, we could balance

the amount of electricity the plant would have to generate.

And since electricity prices are often

dictated by consumer demand, if we store and release

energy as needed, we can lower the price of electricity

during times of high usage.

But this load balancing is really

important for renewable energies like wind and solar.

Because they get their energy from sources

we can't control-- the sun and the weather--

their electricity production is highly variable.

When a cloud comes over, by the way,

that reduces the output of the solar plant by 70%.

Likewise, if it isn't windy, our wind turbines

don't work so well, either.

But if you have a battery, and you're

by your wind turbine or your solar array,

you can store up that energy when demand is low

and save it for when it's not very sunny or it's not windy.

For solar power, this is especially

important during sunset.

Which is the peak demand time.

Everybody's home from work.

They're turning on lights, turning on televisions,

starting to do things at home.

So there's lots of reasons to put storage centrally.

There are also lots of reasons to put it, as they say,

at the edge of the grid.

In other words, in your home.

Now this is where the grid can start acting like your phone.

And when we start to confuse the [BLEEP]

out of Thomas Edison.

So like old timey landlines where you can only

make or receive calls, our current grid only

lets you turn things on or off.

And dim, if you're in the mood and if you have a dimmer

switch.

Sure.

But that's basically it.

A battery lets you have more control.

So if I have a solar panel on the roof,

and I have a battery in the garage,

and if I'm gone all day at work and my solar panel's generating

electricity I can't use, I'd store it.

So now you have a lot of options,

thanks to your home battery.

Say you come home at sunset.

You could start turning on all your TVs and microwaves

and using that energy you saved up throughout the day

without being a burden on the electrical grid.

Or you could choose not to use it.

And all that clean energy you got from your solar panels

could be given back to the grid or even sold

to your local utility company.

Make a little scratch on the side.

Or you can do both.

You can customize your energy use

by controlling a battery with a computer, or more likely,

an app on your phone.

Which controls how much energy I get from the sun,

how much I put in my battery, and how I use that energy,

so all three of those things would

be controlled much the same way that I personalize my cell

phone to do the function that I myself need.

This gives the consumer a lot more power over his own energy

profile.

Pun intended.

Indeed.

As of right now, there are some home batteries

on the market and a few ways of storing energy

on a large scale.

The most popular method in the United States,

by a wide margin, is pumped hydro storage.

During low demand times, surplus energy from a power plant

is used to pump water into large elevated reservoirs.

When demand for electricity is high,

the reservoirs are drained.

And the pressure from the water spins a turbine

which produces electricity.

In fact, you can think of these giant reservoirs

as a type of battery where the energy

is stored in the form of the gravitational potential energy

of the water.

Other methods of energy storage include pumping compressed air

into underground caves, storing energy as heat

in molten salts, spinning flywheels, and of course,

large battery grids, like this one recently built

in Hokkaido, Japan.

Pumped hydro and compressed air storage work great.

But they suffer from the limitation

that you need either a large water source and high elevation

or a giant underground cave.

Batteries, on the other hand, can be kept anywhere

and provide near instantaneous power when needed.

But there's a problem.

They're great for phones and small electronics.

But for large scale applications like cars and the power grid,

lithium ion batteries are very expensive.

If clean energy is ever going to be

able to compete with coal and gasoline on a global scale,

we're going to need a new kind of battery.

George, you're our only hope.

Well, you're one of several.

So you need to make the battery about a factor of five

less expensive than lithium ion.

That's a huge job.

And you need to have an energy density

about a factor of five greater.

So if you want to compete, it's these factors of five

that you have to get.

So the way the battery community works right now, they

are indeed community, those four functions, discovery, design,

prototyping, and manufacturing are

done by completely different organizations

in different places quite often on different continents.

We combine all of those into one really communicative

organization.

So JCESR has not only a nice, big lab

like Argonne working on developing these new batteries,

there are several other labs working on multiple designs

simultaneously.

And these labs work in tandem with manufacturers

who could mass produce them and hopefully

get them to market sooner.

I have no idea what you're doing,

but keep up the good work.

The key is getting that factor of five increase

in battery life and storage.

And thankfully, there are several ways of doing this.

We've already counted 18 different ways

to design a beyond lithium ion battery.

And that means there's probably more than one

beyond lithium ion battery that will meet our stringent factors

of five improvement goals.

One of the main reasons lithium batteries are so expensive

is the materials that they're made of.

So Argonne National Laboratories and the other JCESR labs

are experimenting with different materials like magnesium,

aluminum, and even sulfur, all much more readily available,

and thus cheaper, than lithium.

You probably see improvements once every few months ideally.

We have a lot of people working on the project.

Are you optimistic about what you're doing?

You think you're going to make a amazing battery someday?

I mean, I think we can.

It's a big challenge to actually make these types of batteries

to work.

But there's a lot of promise to it.