ENERGY
WINNING EV FORMULA W
Battery developers are racing full speed ahead to develop new technologies for electric cars, but which one will ultimately win out remains to be seen, reports Anthony King
hen a chequered flag waves in Hong Kong in December 2017, a whir of engines will announce the first street race of the new Formula E
season. Lithium ion batteries will power the racecars from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds. Electric cars are accelerating commercially
too. General Motors has already sold 12,000 models of its Chevrolet Bolt. Daimler announced in September 2017 that it is to invest $1bn to produce electric cars in the US. And Renault-Nissan says it will launch a dozen models of purely electric cars by 2022. Investment bank ING, meanwhile, predicts that European cars will go fully electric by 2035. ‘Batteries are a global industry worth tens of billions of dollars, but over the next 10 to 20 years it will probably grow to many hundreds of billions per year,’ says Gregory Offer, battery researcher at Imperial College London. ‘There
is an opportunity now to invest in an industry so that when it grows exponentially you can capture value and create economic growth.’ In the UK, the government announced,
in July 2017, a £246m investment injection in battery technology R&D. When chief scientific advisor, Mark Walport, was asked to review the case for a research institute to act as a focal point for battery technology, energy storage and grid technology, not surprisingly he recommended an initial phase focus on the automotive industry (see box p24). Currently, lithium ion chemistries are in
pole position as the power mode of choice. The first patent on a lithium ion battery came from John Goodenough’s group at the University of Oxford, UK, in 1981. Today, lithium ion chemistries dominate
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