CHAPTER ONE
The Electric Battery and
a Low-Carbon Future
Introduction
The first true electric battery was invented more than two hundred years
ago, but it seems as if the technology’s greatest contributions to society are
only just arriving. For two centuries, battery technology advanced in fits
and starts, with periods of intense research and innovation and long
decades of stagnation. Advancements in battery technology during the
periods of focused innovation helped spark the automotive revolution and,
over the past few decades, the widespread penetration of personal elec-
tronics into so many facets of life. Yet, battery and other electric storage
technologies have long held the potential to catalyze a transformation of
the energy system as a whole.1 That potential has yet to be realized.
While over the past 50 or so years the technical revolution has sped
innovation across a number of fields, from business applications to digital
communication to weather prediction to media and nearly everything in
between, technological advances in battery storage have not kept pace.2 The
microprocessor provides a revealing contrast: in 1971, Intel launched the
4004, widely accepted as the first commercially available microprocessor.3
Since then, as Moore’s law accurately predicted, the numbers of transis-
tors in an integrated circuit in a microprocessor have roughly doubled every
two years—a phenomenon that has essentially ushered in the digital rev-
olution.4 Batteries, however, for the most part, are a different story.
The capacity of the common lithium-ion battery (LIB), for instance, only
achieved roughly 8 percent gains per year from 1990 through 2010, falling
