The Connected Car

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POWER ON

Let's start with the battery and work our way up to the grid. Battery development has often, and incorrectly, been lamented as an area ceded to Asian firms, a misconception that was strengthened when GM announced that it is initially leaving manufacture of the Volt's lithium-ion battery cells to LG Chem. It is true that LG Chem will be producing cells at its huge home facility in South Korea. But labor is such a trivial cost in making them that LG Chem's American subsidiary, Compact Power, is investing $300 million (including $151 million from the Department of Energy's stimulus funds) to set up a supplementary plant in Michigan. The Department of Energy has meanwhile granted $249 million to an MIT spinoff, Massachusetts-based A123, that will build a lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility to compete directly with Compact Power's facility.

At any rate, cells are to the battery pack what protoplasm is to an organ or transistors to a computer. To focus on cells is to miss the point. I am standing over the Volt's pack at GM's new $30 million testing facility in Warren, Michigan. It looks like a fat, vinyl-clad cross, meant to fill a slot cut out of the car's undercarriage. The pack contains roughly 300 cells. "The voltage of each cell has to be evenly calibrated to every other," the lab's recently departed director, Bob Kruse, tells me. "Like a chain, performance depends on the weakest link."

Kruse notes that his pack is in only its first generation. On the horizon -- "Gen-3," he thinks -- will be a solid-state battery pack that should achieve a 50 percent saving in size and cost, mainly by reducing the volume of liquid electrolytes. His team is working with the University of Michigan's Ann Marie Sastry and her start-up, Sakti3. Sastry has already raised $5 million from a private venture fund and the state of Michigan; all are counting on the Volt to bring scale to a burgeoning industry.

"Gen-1 technologies have sufficiently high rates of discharge, very suitable for getting us over the tipping point, you know, where a reasonable part of the vehicle portfolio goes electric," Sastry tells me. "But liquid electrolytes present integration limits -- also limits on energy density. We think that disruptive manufacturing techniques can improve performance dramatically, as in the chip industry." Does this not ultimately mean very costly fabrication facilities, as with chips? "We aim to create a cheap, scalable process. But government support and appropriate regulation may be needed for other elements of electrification -- and that's justified. Think of what we spend to secure oil. Think of the livability of cities and the dangers of climate change. But the changes have to be reinforced by companies making a profit."

By the way, one of the more compelling businesses to expect from the proliferation of battery packs will come into relief only after Gen-1 cells end their useful lives in cars. Lab tests show that, even after 10 years, Volt packs will still be capable of carrying 75 percent of their original charge -- not enough for the vehicle, but more than enough for utilities to use as storage for bulk renewable energy. Posawatz is excited: "It is easy to imagine warehouses full of used batteries sucking up wind energy and saving it for times the wind does not blow, or homeowners using the pack as backup," he says. "For recycling entrepreneurs, this means a whole new way of doing business."

YOU HAVE TO HAVE STANDARDS

Around the battery are novel hardware components. The pack has five connectors running from it -- one for cooling, one for heating, a third for charging, a fourth for monitoring the car's performance, and the last one for an onboard information and entertainment system. Each connector, cable, and component represents a race to create a cross-industry standard; each participant in each race has the potential to turn an innovation into a marketmaker.

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