Name: Big battery bet
Uploaded: 2014-04-09
Duration: 4 min 23 s
Description: Ener1's thinks their lithium batteries can re-power the U.S. auto industry.

I'm here in Times Square, surrounded by cars powered by good, old- fashioned gasoline. They're dirty, noisy machines that pollute the air, contribute to global warming, and let's face it, get us into a lot of trouble in the Middle East. That's why, in five to ten years, these streets will be swarming with electric cars. Now, the most important part of an electric car is the battery. That big, ugly, clunky thing, deep inside the car. The battery is what determines how fast you car will accelerate, how far you can go on a single charge, and how much you'll pay for the car. So, let's go up to Ener1. It's a small company based here in New York that has big plans to power the next generation of electric cars. Charles, I'm, this is my camcorder with a lithium ion battery. This is the small miracle that's really allowing the electric car to now take off, isn't it? But it's a big transition from powering a little camcorder to a three or four thousand pound car. That's right. What we need, in terms of electrification, is we need either high power, or high energy density. And, and the real revolution here is, if you take this, which is a Sony pack for a laptop computer, or this, for your camcorder, this is 0. 78 amp per hours. And you compare that in terms of size and weight, to our five amp per hour high power cell, which is prismatic. You can see it's flat stacked. It weighs less than even your 0. 12 amp per hour cell. And this is our building block for our energy density product, which is the electric car you were referring to. And this is a 20 amp per hour cell. You can see that it's flat and stacked in its design. And even here, you've got equivalent, lent we, weight to, to what powers your camcorder today. And how important is the battery to the, to the car? It, when you, when you look at electric drive, right, the battery in an electric car is up to 50 % of the vehicle going forward. And so it really is a 50- 50 partnership between the battery company and, and the automotive company. This battery I'm holding now, it says made in China. And isn't that sort of the story that the United States is up against right now? That because the electronics manufacturers are mostly based in Asia, the battery industry also started there, and as a result, now, these countries have a huge lead when it comes to actually making lithium ion batteries? There is no production that exists in the United States today in any meaningful volume. And, and EnerDel was the first company to stand up a plant here in the US for, specifically for automotive. And, and so when you look at that market opportunity, one of the things I think that is clear to us, is, is that we have a technical advantage. We are one of the first people to produce this cell, this, this breakthrough in terms of the prismatic or flat stacked design to the chemistry, and, and work with new revolutionary, new chemistries. And I think it's that technical advantage that we may have as much as a two- year advantage over our competition. And now the flat design here, helps with the, one of the biggest issues confronting these batteries, which is what you call thermal runaway. That's right. Which would, anyone else might call the exploding car. Which is the fear, I think, that keeps a lot of automakers awake at night. Because this is a laptop battery and we all have heard about exploding laptops. How have you gotten around that problem of the overheating of the lithium ion technology? You know, one of the things I think that is clear is there are two key components here: the flat stack design to the battery gives you higher surface area, which means that you can dissipate heat more quickly. The second point is that with the new chemistries we're using, like lithium titanate, getting away from the graphite that's in your laptop computers has also enabled us to create a battery that doesn't heat up and, and it stays cool even under, in continuous states of, of discharge as what you see in your, your, your laptop computer. We still have a long way to go before electric cars are zooming around Times Square. And until then, the big question is is the United States going to exchange a dependence on foreign oil for a dependence on foreign batteries? You know, come to think of it, I think I'll just take the subway.

Ener1's thinks their lithium batteries can re-power the U.S. auto industry.