 Yeah, sodium chloride batteries, okay, with Ethan Allen, our chief scientist here on ThinkTech Likeable Science. Wow. What a great opportunity to start a Thursday. I'm Jay Fidel. We're going to talk about these new batteries and we're going to talk about how they impact electric vehicles. And if you didn't see 60 Minutes this past week, you hadn't noticed that Ford has put $11 billion into electric vehicle factories for trucks for the F-150s, which are now going to be the F-150 lightnings. They use the F-150s to appeal to the crowd that loves F-150s, but lightning means electric. Okay, this is going to change everything and batteries are central, right Ethan? Absolutely, absolutely. Batteries are increasingly important as we live in an increasingly electrified world, particularly as we try to get away from a centralized grid and have people's homes and vehicles all operating independently on electricity. Batteries are more and more important. Yeah, well, so we're on a roll here. We are doing electric vehicles and the big manufacturers are putting money into it, even if the government isn't doing all that we want the government to do about this. The industry is putting it in and the market wants it, you know, people want to go to electric. More than ever before, we are at a tipping point of turning entirely electrical. However, the batteries are an issue. They are heavy. They don't last as long as you want. I mean, either in terms of the charge or the lifetime of the batteries. So sodium chloride, sodium chlorine, how is that different than what we have now? What do we have now? Lithium? Yeah, we have lithium and sodium chloride, if you think about it, is table salt. I mean, it's incredibly easy to get. It's cheap. It's plentiful. This technology that they're talking about was actually originally developed back in the 1970s to make a sodium chloride battery. But the problem then was it was a non-rechargeable battery because once you've ripped the sodium and chlorine, chloride ions apart, particularly, well, both are very highly reactive species and they weren't very stable. You can't sort of from around store them and then reuse them. The basis, as I understand it, of this new battery that folks at Stanford have been developing is that they have a very highly porous carbon electrode that basically the chloride ions just pop into little pores and sit quietly and happily in the little pores until you want to essentially pull them out and reunite them with the sodium again. And so it actually makes for a battery that can be recharged. So recharge, the durability is not quite up to what we'd like, about 200 cycles, but usually these kinds of technologies, you know, they do improve with time. Well, how far away from a market product do we have here? I mean, Stanford sounds like it's almost theoretical research query. When is this going to get to Detroit? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, you hit on earlier, you know, batteries themselves are a system, right? They've got an anode, a cathode, electrolyte and some sort of casing and that combination can come in various sizes, various weights, withholding various amounts of power, ability to discharge at certain rates and all of these things are very important in a larger system that the battery is charging, right, whether it's your cell phone or a car or whatever, your home drill or whatever, because yes, a battery that is, you know, it may have great power, be wonderfully rechargeable, can deliver power exactly the right rate, but if it's too big or too heavy, it's not going to be good for a cell phone, right, or a hearing aid. A car can obviously be a lot bigger and a lot heavier, but again, you're always trading off. You want the maximum power for the minimum size and minimum weight are generally how you want to balance those things out. Yeah, I mean, you're going to develop a new technology. It shouldn't be for one product only. It shouldn't be, you know, for only cars. That's nice, but you're right. You listed a few of them, hearing aids, power drills, power tools of all kinds, and that means that you have to be able to make them small, be able to make them last, but if you can do that, you change the world, right? Right. And I think that if you start with cars, which are a great demand right now, the other demands for those other products are not as great as cars, that it's got to be a pathway to everything. But what strikes me, though, is that my recollection, Ethan, is that lithium is hard to get. You have to go either, I can't remember, to Africa, to China, somewhere remote, somewhere exotic in the backwoods to find lithium, and therefore it's expensive, and therefore it is subject to geopolitical supply chain issues. And this could be like chips, you know, where we can't get them. And that would really be a problem for all of these products. But it sounds like sodium chlorine is going to be easier to find, am I right? Right, right. I started out with that. That's one of the real beauties of this battery is that it's essentially going to be cheap, readily supplyable, and not subject nearly to the supply chain interruption that lithium ion batteries are right now. The other great thing about it is the charge density. This battery charges up even their prototype models to about six times the charge density of current lithium batteries. That means there's six times as much power for a given, essentially given size, weight, which is wonderful, right? I mean, that's tremendous. That means you can either shrink the battery smaller or put a lot more power into the same size of battery. So that's, again, a very, it's a game-changing feature. How about weight? Yeah, again, I mean, they're, as far as I read that article that are prototyping this, and they've built some small versions of it. And I don't know how it will scale up, but in theory with that kind of charge density, if it's anything like other batteries, which, I mean, it's fundamentally similar in terms of the basic infrastructure that is, it should then be able to either, with the same size battery, give you a lot more power, or give you the same power as we currently get, but from a much smaller package. Well, this is interesting because, you know, right now, when you talk about power drills and hearing aids and what have you, there's a zillion of them out there, and people have them in their ears, in their garages, what have you, and we live in a world of, we live in a world of batteries, you know, think flashlights, for example. Lithium batteries everywhere, okay? And, I mean, there's no household in the world that doesn't have a drawer full of these things, for better or worse. Now, you tell me we're going to have a new model that may look different, feel different, different characteristics, different price, pricing, we should talk about pricing. And for the cars, for example, it will be, it'll have to be a different container, won't it? So we're talking about remaking everything that requires batteries. We're talking about a, you said, Dame changer, but it's also a product changer. It's not like you could slip one of these, or is it, you tell me, it's not like you could slip one of these into an existing space where you had a lithium battery before, is it? Well, I mean, again, that all depends. If they, they can, if this, if and when this gets to a commercial stage, people will produce them, presumably in sizes and shapes compatible with a lot of current devices, and adjust them to give the right amount of power. Because yes, nobody's going to go back and want to, you know, take a, say a line of electric cars offline and redesign the car to make a whole new battery. It's going to be easier to design the battery to fit in the existing battery slot as a order. So when these come out, they may well look like other batteries or familiar with. They may come out in a variety of sizes and shapes, just as you have a little, you know, little silver flat batteries for hearing aids and very small devices. And then your AAA, your AA, your C and your D cells for normal household use, transistor batteries, right, those square rectangular batteries, then up to car batteries and up to now house batteries, right? That's a huge issue now as people increasingly are going solar. They're building, building in batteries into their home to collect energy so they are independent of the grid. Oh, sure. I don't know that that's, that's true. That's a huge place for them. Because, you know, batteries, well, it's largely a question of expense, but batteries really stand in the way of making solar a 24 by 7 by 365 proposition. If you can get better, cheaper, more durable batteries for backup home solar, wow, you're changing everything around solar energy, everything. People are doing that. I have actually some friends here who just recently remodeled their new home and built in essentially, I think, two giant batteries or two racks of batteries. I don't quite know how they come. And basically, they'll be selling electricity back to the grid at times and then using it, living off their batteries, selling off the excess power when they have it basically. Yeah, but if you give me a battery that's a sodium chlorine battery and you make it lighter, easier to move around, easier to install, better design, more durability. I mean, one of the problems about existing batteries for solar is they only last so long. You have to put a big charge in to get it overnight. But if you could put a bigger charge in and you could make it cheaper and lighter and smaller, you're going to be a very interesting product for everyone who has solar. A lot of people have solar and they don't have batteries because batteries have been expensive to say also that there's a tax credit problem in Hawaii about that. But the bottom line is that this would have a huge effect on moving solar battery combinations ahead all over the world. Right. If this technology pans out and is able to be scaled both down to tiny batteries and up to large batteries, it can be a real have a huge impact on things, not because the batteries in theory should be cheaper. And because of the issues of lithium that we were talking about, that is, if sodium chloride is just much, I mean, you don't pay that much for table salt, right? Yeah. Well, the thing is that it's like they always say, if your electric car battery, if you have an electric car with a big battery, the battery is only going to last so long. And then you have to take the car in, they have to swap out the battery. And the battery costs, you know, like 5,000, some really substantial amount of money to do that, because they don't last that long. If these sodium and chlorine batteries last a long time, that really changes the game on car batteries too, because you don't have to swap them out. Hopefully, they'll last longer. This will change it for the consumer. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out the greater charge capacity they have. But right now, the more limited recharge cycles, they only allow about 200 compared to 500 to 1,000 that a lithium ion battery can run. Yeah, you mentioned that. So is that holding them up? I suspect so. But you know, this is the people who design and move batteries in production are always weighing all these different factors off the size, the weight, lifetime, the rechargeability, the power capacity and the rate at which it can discharge. All those things have to be weighed off. And in different applications, different things become more critical. If you're doing hearing aid batteries, weight is a real key thing, right? You can't afford to have a heavy hearing aid battery. Nobody will want an ear pulled down all the time, right? Well, all these mobile things, you can't have it too heavy because nobody wants to go backward on this sort of thing. And a lot of people are happy, satisfied with the batteries they have now, like for the power tools, you plug it in, it's good for a long time. Don't have to worry about it. The other thing is cost. Okay, maybe it's early, but let's talk economics, for example. If I tell you that Stanford is working on this, I'm telling you it's a laboratory experience just yet. You have any idea about the patent process, the patent status here? And in terms of laboratory development, somebody has to fund it. I imagine existing battery manufacturers would be interested in funding this, no? Any ideas about that? Yeah, I mean, most universities have now these so-called tech transfer, technology transfer departments, you know, where they take products they've been, they've developed either with university funding or National Science Foundation funding or National Institutes of Health, you know, governmental funding of some sort. And they have a whole department that then would talk, in this case, to battery manufacturers and people who manufacture the subcomponents of batteries and try to see how this research, you know, how they can turn over this research in a controlled way to these people to use and at the same time, then bring money into the university, which could then be used to sponsor further research. But at the time, that is, I think, extremely variable. It does seem, given the interest in batteries right now, I suspect it'll be fairly rapid for this one because so many people want, you know, better batteries basically. I mean, you commented many consumers are satisfied with their batteries, but manufacturers of cell phones to automobiles to whatever are always looking for the next big thing, right? The battery that is better, that is cheaper, that is more powerful, that is longer lasting, that can be recharged more cycles, whatever it may be. So they have a vested interest in seeing this technology move forward very rapidly. Can you imagine if Apple, for example, I'm an Android person myself, but let's say Apple, for example, came up with a phone that weighed half as much or that had a charging capacity that could go six times longer. You know, that has been a problem for cell phones for a long time. You can't get more than a day out of it, no matter what you do. If I gave you one that lasted a week, whoa, and arguably one that's less weight and hopefully one that lasts longer in years, gee, the cell phone manufacturers would go crazy about that. This would feed right into the whole need to make a new version every six months. Everybody would flock to buy these new phones, I'm telling you. If you take the battery, you can do this on every phone anymore, but if you take the battery out and put it in one hand and the rest of the phone in the other hand, it's about the same weight. The little tiny battery is as much weight as the whole phone is. Can you imagine cutting that down and can you imagine making that last so much longer? You're right. The cell phone industry would change. It would be a complete game changer to have a new kind of battery, cheaper, more durable, and so forth. Wow, wow, wow. I mean, if you think about how battery technology has changed over our lifetimes, essentially the only main batteries we dealt with were flashlight batteries, the big clunky D-cells, and those, you had one use out of them. They didn't really last very long. Now, while we've got that same packaging basically because that became a standard size, we've got batteries that you can recharge multiple times, that last much longer, and probably given inflation costs are actually much cheaper. Actually, all this reminds me of the military, not to be think much of the military after Afghanistan very much, but the trooper in the field, he's got some kind of light on his helmet or whatever that is. He's got a radio and radios among the troopers are really important gear these days, and God knows what other things he carries around with him which require batteries. I mean, this is a tactical device. It's a device every trooper has, and therefore the military would be very interested. Yeah, I mean, and the increasing use of drones. Now, there's another classic example. There you go. How are those drones? It's batteries. And if you can make a smaller, lighter, longer lasting, more powerful battery, you can use your drone all that much better, right? You can surveil areas that doesn't have to come back to base nearly as often. It can fly higher and longer or whatever, carry more payload. Yeah, it's a huge thing. Yeah, think about this too. If you talk about drones, one of the problems is that so far nobody's figured out how to power a jet plane. It's liquid fuel. It's fossil liquid fuel. But if you could have a battery that was so powerful that it could drive the plane, it wouldn't be a jet plane anymore. It would have to be more like propellers, like with a drone. But nevertheless, if you could power this plane by high efficiency batteries, that would change aviation. It would change small planes. It would change personal aviation. It would make some of that science fiction come true. That's right. It was just a few years ago that the little solar powered, what was its name, solar powered small plane circled the globe, right? Yeah. While running off of direct off of solar power, right? And if you combine solar power all over a plane with some small, lightweight batteries so it can charge up and it can fly a little bit during the night, then you begin to get something that might be really worthwhile. So what are the obstacles to developing this? I mean, if I'm, for example, I'm a battery manufacturer and I have billions invested in my battery factories and my supply chains around the world, query, do I want this or would I rather stand against it and maintain the status quo? You know, there are economic and competition considerations that may actually have a negative effect on the development of a new technology like this. What do you think? Which side of the equation is stronger? Yeah. I mean, you see that battle all the time right now. There are people who are heavily invested in fossil fuels, various sorts of coal mining and there are people who are invested in solar wind, biomass, you know, the other end of things and those are always going to be competing and the more infrastructure you have for the older technology, sort of the harder it is to break away. But we're seeing, I mean, we've seen, you know, these huge advances in solar, you know, over the past 20 years where solar power has become, you know, going from being essentially non competitive at all to fossil fuels to being highly, highly competitive in many cases, a much better deal basically than fossil fuels. Just wonder if this battery technology would be useful, you know, the remarkable discovery that you could use sodium and chlorine together and achieve this reaction. Does that go beyond batteries? Does it go beyond, you know, the technology of batteries? Could it be used somewhere else? I mean, could I use it, for example, in medicine? Could I use it where I need a really tiny device that would have this kind of reaction? Maybe it's along the lines of a battery, but not quite. I mean, for example, what is this aspirational thing, maybe it's happening now, is where you send a device into the body in order to check some things out, you know, take some metrics for medical purposes. Maybe this kind of technology can be miniaturized and can be used in all kinds of tiny devices like that. Right. I mean, already things like pacemakers, neural stimulator devices, I actually have one of those implanted to me. Yes, it's got a battery basically. It's implanted. I do wish it were smaller. And it will last longer. Right. Well, yeah, mine's pretty good. They say five to seven years before I need to have a recharge. So that's pretty good. But yeah, but pacemakers now, there are zillions of them out there, right? And they all, they're very dependent on their battery. And if you get a battery again, that's better, lasts longer, smaller, lighter, all these same factors come into play again. So yeah, the medical must be a huge, huge consumer, basically, or potential market. You talk about dual use, you know, and funding through the federal government and the military. And it's all true. But, you know, right now, the federal government hasn't given as much research money as it was before. Right now, the federal government's having trouble even just paying the bills or at least, you know, dealing with the national debt ceiling and all that. And we talk about Ford putting $11 billion into electric truck manufacture and providing, you know, tens of thousands of jobs in the process. And we talk about these advances at Stanford. It all sounds like an alternative system. And what I mean is, the federal government per se, the, you know, the research capability, the research support capability of the federal government has not kept up with the demand has not kept up with the science, if you will. This is being handled by industry, you know, from stem to stern, it's being handled by industry and of course by industry as a contributor to research universities like Stanford. Are we seeing a change in that somehow? Are we seeing a change in the way private industry and educational institutions are stepping up to the plate on new designs, new devices, new ideas? Well, I mean, I think, and I think there's a couple of good examples of how essentially public private partnerships, whether formal or informal or critical, a lot of the base research, the private industry won't do, they won't let scientists sort of sit there in a lab and just tinker at will. They want their research understandably to be focused on what they perceive their needs to be. But a lot of really good research comes out of sort of accidents, serendipity, you know, just random, random events or, you know, somebody sort of an offshoot of one process discovers another. And so, I mean, if you look at, for instance, weather forecasts are arrays of satellites that live. All that technology was initially developed with government funding, but it would never have been, the government would never have funded all the satellites, basically, it was commercial vendors that saw there was a market there, and they could make money out of it. You look at again, the development of vaccines and our COVID vaccine is a really great example. Initial research was done in a slew of universities and research centers around the globe. They all fed their findings to some common databases and companies sort of took over and turn that into viable commercial products and valuable products, right, like vaccines. So I don't think it's one or the other. I agree with you. It seems a government share of support has been decreasing recently, which is disturbing, particularly in an age when we're ever more dependent on our science and technology. But it does seem like industry has also stepped up a good deal and it's actually supporting more now. So, yeah. I want you to say though, it sounds like to me, you need both. Absolutely. They have their own roles and government must be involved if we had to move at the most efficient, most maximum speed. And so I think maybe when government comes back, that's the most optimistic thing I've said in weeks. When government comes back and Congress is functional again, and we can focus on this, then government would take a more active role. It would incentivize Stanford and other research universities. And we'd come up with a lot more products, a lot more inventions, a lot more discoveries like this. And we need that because it's a global competition. And if we are to maintain our leadership, we must maintain our research product so that we need government. Thank you to industry for participating, but we need government. Absolutely. And I mean, National Science Foundation, for instance, has been budgeted at least for considerable increases, depending on what version of the budget you look at. They're being tasked with more and more things, but there is a recognition by this administration that sort of fundamental science is really an important component of a good culture, a good society. And that drives a lot of technology, drives a lot of the economy, ultimately. So yeah, they are, they're very much government and private industry work hand in hand, they have to. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to that, Ethan. I'm also looking forward to our next show together. So let's keep scanning the horizon for other important transformative developments like this one, other sea changes in science, so we can have a further discussion. Ethan Allen, our chief scientist at ThinkDec Hawaii. Thank you so much, Ethan. Aloha, Joe.