Liquid Metal Battery Snags Funding From Gates Firm

Liquid Metal Battery, a company pursuing a breakthrough battery design, has attracted Bill Gates and an oil driller as seed investors.

Many battery companies are working to improve existing technology, but the founders of Liquid Metal Battery are taking an unusual approach that they hope will slash energy storage costs and deliver batteries able to store several hours of wind and solar power. The target of the company, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is to have demonstration systems connected to the grid in three to five years, executives said. An official announcement of the series A funding is expected next month.

Liquid Metal Battery, as its name implies, is building a battery where all the active materials--the cathode, anode, and electrolyte--are in a liquid form at high temperatures. In most of today's common batteries, such as lead acid and lithium ion batteries, the cathode or anode are solid.

The all-liquid approach reduces the degradation of electrodes that can happen in batteries and allows for the high flow of current needed for bulk storage on the grid. Most importantly, though, it means the battery can built using relatively cheap components, said materials chemistry professor and co-founder Donald Sadoway. He conceived of the original idea by drawing on his experience around making metals, including giant aluminum ingots, using electrochemistry at an industrial scale.

Professor Donald Sadoway shows off a model of an all-liquid metal battery prototype under development.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

"I looked at how aluminum smelters take a giant hall with liquid aluminum and fill it and I said, 'That's where you can get economy of scale.' If you want a big battery, you build one big battery and you can't do that with today's technology," Sadoway said in an interview. "The scalability is going to be enabled by borrowing the lessons of 125 years of aluminum smelting."

Liquid Metal Battery has licensed technology developed at Sadoway's lab, where work will continue in parallel. Sadoway intends to take a yearlong sabbatical to be scientific adviser to the company. His lab received a three-year $6.9 million grant from the Department of Energy's ARPA-E research agency two years ago and a four-year, $4 million grant from oil company Total to research how to adapt this battery chemistry for home storage.

Sadoway decided to spin out a separate company because researchers were limited in their ability to test out larger prototypes which were initially about the size of a hockey puck. He also wanted to hire people with the engineering experience able to develop and test a commercial product.

"We're taking what we consider the top prospect chemistries from the lab study and we will look at how the laws of scale apply because no one has every built one of these before," he said. "If we do some very elegant science, that alone will not be considered a success."

The company is now working on a prototype system where each battery cell is about the size of a pizza box and able to store about 200 watt-hours and work at 1 volt. Its next task is to build a larger cell about the size of a Ping-Pong table, where many individual cells would be stacked in a battery pack. The target is to make a grid storage device able to deliver a few hours of power to fit into a shipping container, while a home battery would be about the size of a basement freezer, company executives said.

Layer cake
In the past few years, truck-size batteries have been connected to the grid for certain applications, such as maintaining a steady frequency or local back-up power. But batteries, in general, remain very expensive and are mainly used for delivering quick bursts of power. Batteries are starting to be used in conjunction with wind and solar farms, but Liquid Metal Battery is seeking to slash the cost of storage to the range of $100 per kilowatt-hour, several times lower than today's prices.

Providing many hours of storage at low cost, what many consider the holy grail in storage, would allow solar and wind farms to "firm up" variable wind and solar power, which sometimes rely on natural gas plants to provide a steady flow of power. Sadoway said different liquid metal chemistries could be used for different applications, such as storing energy at off-peak times and releasing it onto the grid at peak hours. That is now done by pumping water uphill to a reservoir and releasing it through a water turbine at night, which is cheap but limited in where it can be done.

This model of a prototype shows the makings of an all-liquid battery cell. The bottom red layer is the heavy liquid metal cathode, the yellow is the molten salt electrolyte, and the green above is the less dense anode. The container is surrounded by an insulator material.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

Sodium sulfur batteries and some types of flow batteries, which are already used for grid storage, use liquid electrodes today, said Luis Ortiz, the president and co-founder of Liquid Metal Battery. Where this company will be different is having liquid metal electrodes and a liquid electrolyte made of molten salt. The approach has performance and price advantages, he said.

"We have all-liquid components so it should last much longer because there won't be a build-up of stresses or cracks," Ortiz said. "We have reason to believe they could last tens of years."

One of the key technical challenges is to build a battery that is self-heating. For the metals and salt to remain liquid, researches have been working with metals at temperatures between 400 degrees and 700 degrees Celsius. Because the flow of large amounts of current generates heat, the battery itself can heat itself once it has reached the right temperature, but product designers need to sort out best battery shape, Sadoway said.

Early prototypes used liquid magnesium and liquid antimony as positive and negative electrodes. Because the metals and the molten salt electrolyte have different densities, they remain separated as three distinct layers, much the way oil and vinegar don't mix.

When the battery is being charged, a chemical reaction causes compounds dissolved in the electrolyte to form magnesium and antimony metal. During discharging, the chemical reaction happens in reverse, releasing electrons to create an electrical current onto the grid. In a difference from most batteries, the electrolyte gets thicker and the two liquid metal electrodes get thinner while discharging.

The container that holds the liquids itself acts as a conductor. Actual batteries will need to be engineered with an insulator around the container because they operate at high temperatures.

Student Gates
The group is now working on a second-generation liquid metal battery that acts in principle the same way that today's lead acid, lithium ion, and nickel metal hydride batteries do, said Ortiz. In that design, metal ions pass between the anode and cathode and the electrolyte remains constant, he explained.

The company is cagey on exactly which metals researchers are working with. But in general, they are working with pairs of metals of different densities that are relatively cheap, Ortiz said. Similarly, the electrolyte used can be very cheap material, such as table salt or rock salt used to salt roads.

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The technology behind Liquid Metal Battery came to the attention of Bill Gates through the lecturing of professor Sadoway, whose solid-state chemistry classes can be viewed online. In an appreciation written for MIT's 150th anniversary, Gates singled out Sadoway's work on energy storage.

In forming a company, Liquid Metal Battery took funding from Gates' venture arm and a large corporation with the hopes of having long-term investors. "We were interested in taking patient money with deep pockets because these are large systems that take a significant amount of capital," said co-founder David Bradwell.

Gates, who has a deep interest in clean energy and climate change, said last year he has invested in five battery-related ventures because inexpensive storage is a "tough problem (that) may not be solvable in any economic way."

Research on the all-liquid battery approach has been going on for about five or six years and Sadoway said the group has met the technical and cost milestones set out by investors and ARPA-E. "We've got to get (total installed costs) down below $250 a kilowatt-hour. That's the issue--cost," he said. "Our work is cut out for us (but) I'm guardedly optimistic."

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20064404-54.html#ixzz1NHqZY5hX

Brammo Revs Up With Six-Speed EV Motorcycles

Brammo will offer its electric motorcycles with a six-speed transmission beginning in 2012, the company announced today.

The bikes will be unveiled this Friday in Las Vegas shortly before competing in the MiniMotoSX race.

Motorcycle manufacturer Brammo could make a big impact on the motorcycle world with this change.

While electric motorcycles have been around for some time, and even had their own race on the Isle of Man in June 2009, up until now they've mainly been seen as bikes for early adopters interested in green tech, or those who might otherwise consider a moped.

Electric motorcycles are relatively quiet, have a limited range, and arguably offer limited speed and performance when compared to comparable racing bikes with internal combustion engines. They're also fighting an image problem in a market famous for exuding a longstanding sexy, powerful, and adventurous appeal.

"Electric motorcycle design has always been a bit of a balancing act in direct drive systems where great acceleration performance comes at the expense of low top-end speed," Brian Wismann, director of product development at Brammo, said in a statement.

If Brammo's new line of six-speed electric motorcycles are finally able to join the ranks in terms of image and performance, an Italian engineering firm may be to thank.

SMRE's Integrated Electric Transmission (IET) which Brammo has exclusively licensed.

(Credit: Brammo)

SMRE Engineering has patented what it calls the Integrated Electric Transmission (IET), which allows a battery-powered motorcycle to have a six-speed transmission, and perform more closely to a traditional racing motorcycle.

"The IET is a mechatronic propulsion unit that emulates the feeling and performance of a traditional internal combustion engine, with a specially developed electric motor, clutch, and gear shift, that enables Brammo motorcycles to accelerate hard from the line up to a high top speed, something that is just not possible to achieve with a single ratio electric motorcycle," Brammo said in a statement.

That's quite a change from the single-speed electric motorcycles currently made by Brammo, Zero Motorcycles, and Native Cycles.

Brammo has acquired an exclusive international license to use SMRE's tech in its bikes, the company also announced today.

The line of Brammo motorcycles including the new technology (see video) will go on sale in 2012 and range in price from about $10,000 to $12,000, not including possible federal or state incentives offered for EVs.

Brammo already sells its Enertia all-electric motorcycles at Best Buy. No word on when or if the electronics retail giant will also offer the six-speed version in 2012.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20059695-54.html#ixzz1LUqQlQ3X

Nanosolar Lands Big Orders For Printed Solar Cell

Nanosolar thin-film solar cells are made using a roll-to-roll process and then the cells are assembled into panels in another factory in Germany.

(Credit: Nanosolar)

Thin-film solar company Nanosolar said today it has secured sizable customer orders and it expects to match solar industry cost leaders in a few years.

Nanosolar, one of dozens of companies founded last decade to use thin-film cells to lower the cost of solar, said it has customer orders that could be as much as 1 gigawatt worth of solar panels over six years if the company meets technical milestones and ramps up volume as it projects. The panels are designed for utility-scale solar projects over 1 megawatt in size.

The contracts are a boost to San Jose, Calif.-based Nansolar, which has raised close to $500 million but replaced its CEO last year, a sign of some troubles at the company. The contracts are with existing partners, solar developers Belectric from Germany, EDF Energies Nouvelles of France, and Plain Energy from Germany.

By the end of this year, Nansolar expects to manufacture solar cells at a rate of near 115 megawatts per year in San Jose. Those cells are transported to Germany where another factory makes panels specifically designed for utility customers.

Once it's at full capacity in its San Jose plant, Nansolar expects its production costs will be at a $1 per watt, making its costs lower than panels made with traditional crystalline silicon cells, according to Brian Stone, Nanosolar's vice president of sales and marketing.

The company expects that improved efficiency of its solar cells, from 10 percent now to 14 percent in 2014, will get production costs below 60 cents a watt by the end of 2013, making it competitive with other thin-film solar manufacturers. The key to its lower production costs is Nansolar's roll-to-roll cell manufacturing, said CEO Geoff Tate, who joined the company about one year ago.

Most thin-film solar companies use a vaccum deposition process where solar cell material is layered on to a substrate. Nanosolar's photovoltaic material, made from a combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS), starts in a liquid form and is coated onto an aluminum foil. The layer evaporates and then is heated to create a crystalline structure needed for a solar cell, explained Tate.

The manufacturing process, where cells are essentially printed, allows for faster production and greater cost reductions over time, compared to both other CIGS makers and companies that make cadmium telluride thin-film cells, including industry price leader First Solar.

"We believe CIGS has higher efficiency potential but printing is actually more important than whether we are doing cad tel or CIGS because it gives us a cost structure that none of the others have," said Tate.

The solar panels themselves are designed specifically for utility-scale projects, with relatively large panels able to produce 200 watts each and a mounting system which saves on material and cabling.

To get to the company's projected volume target, Nansolar doesn't need to raise any more money. In 2008, the company raised $300 million, bringing the total raised to near $500 million. After ramping up to full scale at its current locations in California and Germany, the company intends to double its manufacturing capacity with new plants, said Tate.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20057991-54.html#ixzz1KrDI2meF

Volkswagen Unveils Third-Generation Beetle

The new and improved Volkswagen Beetle.(Credit: Volkswagen)

The Volkswagen Beetle enjoys a long and storied history. And now, it's moving into its third generation.

The Volkswagen Beetle is arguably one of the most recognizable cars on the road. First launched in the U.S. in 1949, the car was a staple in the country for 30 years. Over that span, Volkswagen sold nearly 5 million Beetles in the U.S. alone. After being discontinued, the Beetle was brought back in 1998. Through 2010, the New Beetle's sales topped 477,000 units in the U.S. All told, more than 22.5 million Beetles (first- and second-generation) have been built.

The latest Beetle, which Volkswagen is calling its third-generation model, features a new design that might surprise those who have grown accustomed to its iconic look. According to Volkswagen, the third-generation Beetle is "substantially wider, the front hood is longer, the front windshield is shifted further back and has a much steeper incline." In fact, the 2012 Beetle is 3.3 inches wider than its predecessor and half an inch shorter in height. The body is also 6 inches longer.

In addition, the Beetle comes with a panoramic top that's 80 percent larger than the previous option, and offers both a "turbo-charged TDI Clean Diesel and turbo-charged gasoline engines." The Clean Diesel engine, the company says, is the most fuel-efficient option ever available in a Beetle, offering 40 miles per gallon on the highway and 29 miles per gallon in the city.

On the tech side, consumers should find quite a bit to like. The 2012 Beetle comes standard with eight speakers. If customers opt for the premium VIII audio system, they will get an integrated CD changer, along with an SD card slot and touch screen. In addition, customers can opt for the first time to get navigation in the Beetle.

For better sound, customers can choose the Fender Premium Audio System, which delivers "an additional subwoofer and 400 watts of output power," Volkswagen said. For the first time, Volkswagen is also bringing keyless access to the Beetle, letting owners open the doors and start the engine without requiring an ignition key.

The 2012 Volkswagen Beetle is scheduled to launch in the U.S. in September or October. Volkswagen has yet to reveal pricing.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20054899-17.html#ixzz1JzaWPPor

Microsoft And Toyota Partner On Smart-Grid Tech

Toyota Motor has agreed to develop and deploy telematic services, including its smart-grid technology for running electric systems more efficiently, on Microsoft's cloud-based Azure technology.

Toyota wants to use the technology to give customers navigation and diagnostic services, much like General Motors' OnStar service. Toyota also envisions scenarios in which drivers would be able to turn on heaters or air conditioning at their home with voice commands from their car. "We'll boost the value of today's vehicles by making them information terminals," Toyota President Akio Toyoda said at a press conference today, which was Webcast.

The service, a centerpiece of Toyota's green initiative, will provide energy management technology for Toyota's electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in 2012. Drivers will be able to choose to charge those cars when energy consumption is lowest and prices are cheapest. "We must find a planet-friendly way of using energy," Toyoda said. Toyota hopes to roll out a more advanced platform to handle a wider variety of applications globally by 2015.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer

(Credit: Microsoft)

The new technology will be tested as part of the Toyota Smart Center pilot program, currently running in Japan. The trial gives consumers detailed information about energy consumption in their cars and homes so they can manage their use more efficiently. Toyota has said it believes such smart-grid systems can help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 75 percent.

The deal calls for the two companies to invest a total of $12 million in Toyota Media Service, a Toyota subsidiary that will provide digital information services to Toyota's car customers.

The deal gives Microsoft a marquee customer for its Azure technology, which provides companies the ability to offer applications as a Web-delivered service. And it's not just Toyota that will take advantage of the technology. The car maker intends to open up the service to other developers who could create services of value to drivers. "Getting the platform right opens a lot of opportunities," Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said.

For Microsoft, the deal moves the company further into the automotive business. The software giant has already partnered with Ford for its Sync in-car connectivity system that lets drivers access their phone and music device with voice commands. It also helps Microsoft expand its drive into smart-grid technology. Just Monday at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference, Microsoft's Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard told CNET that since consumers and utilities have not taken up its Hohm energy-monitoring application as hoped, the company is increasing focus on electric-vehicle charging.

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Neither Ballmer nor Toyoda offered up much detail for the kinds of scenarios that might be available. There was some broad discussion about energy-monitoring applications, and some speculation about GPS services that could reroute drivers based on traffic. But whatever is ultimately offered, Toyoda acknowledged that consumers will foot the bill. "To a certain extent, we will have to ask customers to shoulder the expense," Toyoda said.

Toyoda expects the new technology to work in concert with the Entune service, which Toyota unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. That service allows drivers to use voice commands to buy movie tickets, make restaurant reservations, and listen to music. With the technology created by the Microsoft partnership, Toyoda said, "we will be able to offer much broader applications for Entune."

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20051357-75.html#ixzz1JFI403DV

Tax Per Gallon, Or Per Mile?

As the Nissan Leaf does not use any gasoline, its drivers do not pay for highway maintenance.(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

A report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), requested by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), looks at the feasibility of taxing drivers based on miles driven. To implement the tax, the CBO found that technology exists to seamlessly record and transmit mileage.

Conrad requested the report to explore means of raising money to fund a $556 billion budget request by the Obama administration to maintain highways. Currently, funds are raised from an 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal tax on gasoline and a 24.4-cent-per-gallon federal tax on diesel. Conrad suggested an alternate per-mile tax due to lower revenues from the gas tax as vehicles become more efficient.

While saying per-mile metering devices were feasible, the report fell short of estimating the cost of implementing metering devices. It said that, while it would be less expensive to require manufacturers to install metering devices as original equipment, the phase-in would take many years.

Implementing a per mile tax would face many similar hurdles. If everycar in the nation could not be equipped with a factory-installed or aftermarket metering device all at the same time, the tax would need to allow some drivers to pay the per mile tax, and others to continue to pay the per-gallon tax.

Both Oregon and Washington are already considering some means of taxing cars that use little or no gas. Previously, Oregon considered a per-mile tax. Both states are currently looking into a road tax aimed specifically at plug-in vehicles.

Source: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-20047354-48.html#ixzz1Hvn0eWT1

Ford Focus Electric Will Connect With AT&T

The new MyFord Mobile smartphone app will allow owners to plan trips, locate charging stations, remotely lock/unlock doors, and more.(Credit: Ford)

The Ford Focus Electric will use the embedded AT&T wireless connection to send and receive data about thecar, Ford announced today.

Through the new MyFord Mobile smartphone app, owners will be able to plan trips, monitor their vehicle's state of charge, locate charging stations, remotely lock/unlock doors, use a built-in GPS system to locate the car and receive alerts.

"With a wireless connection, we're putting battery charge and vehicle range information, along with an interactive, data-driven trip planning app, directly at the fingertips of our customers," said Ed Pleet, product and business manager for Ford Connected Services. "This technology will keep drivers connected to vital information, enhancing their electric car ownership experience. The AT&T network is an important part of this equation, and we're pleased to have AT&T on board."

The MyFord Mobile app will be available for most major smartphones as well as via a secure Ford Web site.

The Ford Focus Electric was unveiled at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. A 240-volt charging station will also be available for charging the Ford Focus at home, the company said.

Source: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-20046093-48.html#ixzz1HdKsLM1u