Reading yesterday’s New York Times, it seems China could well be poised to leapfrog the West in advanced battery technology (China Vies to Be World’s Leader in Electric Cars). According to the article, Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that.

If they deliver the goods, the economic ramifications will be significant.  But then so will the resulting breakthroughs in battery technology.

Despite our ever-increasing addiction to battery-powered gizmos, current technologies are seriously limited.  My laptop and cell-phone (and this morning, my e-book) constantly seem to die at most inopportune moments.  And remembering to recharge the 1001 things in my life that depend on batteries (while working out which recharger goes with which device) is a time-suck I could easily live without.

No question, personal electronics are desperately in need of a major battery upgrade.

But that’s small fry compared to the challenges of developing usable batteries for power-hungry cars.

The problem is, it’s hard to get electricity into batteries fast; hard to get it out again; and once you’ve got a lot of it in there, hard to prevent the battery having a melt-down—remember the stories of igniting/exploding PC batteries?  These are tractable problems for the small stuff—cell phones and the like—but they present enormous obstacles to scaling up batteries large enough to power cars.

Yet developing battery-powered cars makes a lot of sense… It reduces reliance on highly-refined fossil fuels.  It has the potential to even out electricity demands—essentially using batteries as an energy-buffer.  It enables Prius-like energy-recovery while driving. And it relocates a harmful source of pollution (tailpipe emissions) to where it can be better managed—at the power station.

The good news is that emerging technologies like nanotechnology are providing solutions to at least some of the challenges being faced in developing advanced batteries.  Lithium ion batteries in particular are benefiting from electrodes engineered with nanometer-scale structures, which decrease charging time and increase power output, while improving battery safety.  Companies like A123 and Altairnano are already exploiting nanotechnology-based developments in advanced batteries.  And anecdotally, experts suspect that the performance of most high-end laptop batteries already depend on the use of carbon nanotubes in the electrodes.

There’s still some way to go before this technology matures to the point where electric cars make sense on a grand scale.  But that day is coming.  And by all accounts China will be in the lead when it does.  China is already a major player in the field of nanotechnology (see last week’s piece by Tom Mackenzie in The Guardian for instance), and has the capacity to focus research and development resources where they are most likely to deliver the goods.

The end result probably doesn’t bode well for an ailing US car industry which is still struggling to readjust to a world where smaller, lighter, greener are the order of the day (even the much-touted Chevy Volt still looks like old ideas dressed in new technology).  But a push by China to develop technologically and economically viable electric cars could stimulate world-wide development of battery technologies that leads to a reduced dependence on fossil fuels, and a smaller overall environmental footprint.

That would certainly be good news.

And as a spin-off, there’s a chance that we might finally get batteries for our laptops, cell phones and e-books that don’t die when we need the most.  Now that would be progress indeed!

Footnotes

While writing this, there was some discussion on the NYT article and batteries in general on Twitter.  I particularly wanted to acknowledge helpful comments and links from @joergheber (esp. on wireless power transfer), @quantum_tunnel (re-engineering batteries) and @crc2008 (for the link to the Lightning Car Company) – thanks guys.