8 The Electric Battery
The electric battery has already made petroleum-free driving possible.
In fact, in the early 1900s, lead acid batteries were used to power all-electric
cars, and much of the automotive industry was building toward an electric
car future before Ford’s Model T changed the world.22 Today, there are
currently 23 models of electric vehicles on the U.S. market, and 36 hybrid
electric versions.23 Still, to overcome “range anxiety” and to further increase
the electric car potential in the country, engineers and entrepreneurs are
working on cheaper batteries with more storage capacity. Already, battery
costs are coming down dramatically—about 14 percent annually over a
recent eight-year span, according to a recent study published in the jour-
nal Nature. In 2007, a carmaker would have to dish out $1,000 for a
kilowatt-hour’s worth of battery storage in a vehicle. By 2014, that cost had
been cut to an average of $410, and as low as $300 per kilowatt-hour for
industry leaders.24 In Chapter 4, you’ll read more about the history of elec-
tric vehicles and how recent advances in battery technology is making
this a truly pivotal moment for personal transportation.
As we wrote earlier, however, an electric car is only as clean and green
as the grid it is plugged into. And the climate implications of a lower car-
bon grid are far greater than “just” the transportation sector alone.
How the Battery Helps Integrate Intermittent Renewables
Just as gasoline and diesel are useful fuels for carrying energy for trans-
portation, coal and natural gas are convenient for powering electricity
generation facilities. The trade-off for such convenience, however, is that
coal and natural gas are both fossil fuels that emit considerable amounts
of greenhouse gas pollution when burned. In 2015, emissions from coal-
fired generation represented 71 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in
the electric sector, totaling over 1.3 trillion metric tons.25 Natural gas was
responsible for another 530 billion metric tons, or 28 percent of all elec-
tric sector emissions. And that’s only the carbon dioxide emissions; these
figures don’t include other greenhouse gases, such as methane. The extrac-
tion, transport, and combustion of natural gas, until recently considered
by many to be a lower emitting “bridge fuel,”26 is known to release vast
volumes of methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is at least 25 times
more efficient at trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere than carbon diox-
ide, but has a shorter life span in the atmosphere.27 But though natural gas
emits from 50 to 60 percent less carbon dioxide when combusted in a new,
efficient natural gas plant when compared to emissions from a typical new
coal plant, the smokestack emissions don’t tell the whole story. The drill-
ing and extraction of natural gas from wells and its transportation in
