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Audiobook10 hours
The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World
Written by Steve LeVine
Narrated by Mike Chamberlain
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
A Soul of the New Machine for our time, a gripping account of invention, commerce, and duplicity in the age of technology
A worldwide race is on to perfect the next engine of economic growth, the advanced lithium-ion battery. It will power the electric car, relieve global warming, and catapult the winner into a new era of economic and political mastery. Can the United States win?
Steve LeVine was granted unprecedented access to a secret federal laboratory outside Chicago, where a group of geniuses is trying to solve this next monumental task of physics. But these scientists- almost all foreign born-are not alone. With so much at stake, researchers in Japan, South Korea, and China are in the same pursuit. The drama intensifies when a Silicon Valley start-up licenses the federal laboratory's signature invention with the aim of a blockbuster sale to the world's biggest carmakers.
The Powerhouse is a real-time, twoyear thrilling account of big invention, big commercialization, and big deception. It exposes the layers of competition and ambition, aspiration and disappointment behind this great turning point in the history of technology.
A worldwide race is on to perfect the next engine of economic growth, the advanced lithium-ion battery. It will power the electric car, relieve global warming, and catapult the winner into a new era of economic and political mastery. Can the United States win?
Steve LeVine was granted unprecedented access to a secret federal laboratory outside Chicago, where a group of geniuses is trying to solve this next monumental task of physics. But these scientists- almost all foreign born-are not alone. With so much at stake, researchers in Japan, South Korea, and China are in the same pursuit. The drama intensifies when a Silicon Valley start-up licenses the federal laboratory's signature invention with the aim of a blockbuster sale to the world's biggest carmakers.
The Powerhouse is a real-time, twoyear thrilling account of big invention, big commercialization, and big deception. It exposes the layers of competition and ambition, aspiration and disappointment behind this great turning point in the history of technology.
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Reviews for The Powerhouse
Rating: 3.452382380952381 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
21 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5LeVine explains the battery and it's place in society quite well. The importance of the battery to the modern world, especially in terms of electric cars, was explained quite well. A lot more could have been done with it, though, to show how important batteries really are to modern technology. I felt the book read as if a good editor could have cut it in half - it read like an essay based on too little information, dragged out to make a book. A let down for me.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The book focuses on one company (Argon) and dedicates more space to its office politics than technology.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5With all the geopolitical difficulties that come from a dependence on oil, and all the deleterious repercussions of car emissions, it would help a great deal if cars could all run on batteries. Thus, the efforts to realize such capabilities are not without interest or importance. One might well ask, what’s the holdup? This book is the story of the effort by a fairly small group of scientists and engineers to invent, [actually, develop is a better descriptor], a battery sufficiently powerful, energetic, and dimensionally stable to provide power for a commercially viable automobile. The author competently explains the electro-chemistry of batteries, in particular, the characteristics of lithium ion technology. It transpires that lithium based batteries have the greatest “energy density” [measured in kilowatt-hours per kilogram (kw-hr/kg)] of any known battery chemistry. This criterion is very important because a battery’s weight should be as light as possible for both the performance and the cost of any car it powers. Lithium-ion batteries developed for cell phones and other electronic devices typically have energy densities of less than 200 kw-hr/kg. General Motors estimated that a battery would have to have an energy density of nearly 400 kw-hr/kg to be an effective power plant for an automobile. Moreover, it would have to maintain that energy density through 1000 charging cycles.Levine also does a good job of describing the technological hurdles that have to be overcome to reach those performance criteria. He focuses on the efforts of two institutions, Argonne National Laboratories, (a government-associated facility) and Envia Systems, Inc. (a Silicon Valley start-up company). His description of the organizational and managerial struggles at both institutions, while accurate, did not interest me much. Who cares what building number at Argonne housed the battery team? And who cares whether various members of the team received promotions from A-6 to A-7? Dealing with petty jealousies may be an important aspect of research and development, but it makes for tedious reading or listening. Too much of the book is devoted to describing the managerial decisions taken at both institutions, and far too much is devoted to describing the preparation of a particular bid by Argonne to the Department of Energy. Some of the tedium in the story might be justified if “the battery to save the world” had actually been developed. But, spoiler alert: alas, although the 400 kw-hr/kg criterion has been met in small, coin-sized cells, no large scale battery has yet been built that can maintain that energy density for more than a few cycles. Part of the problem is that if you change any one part of a battery, there can be unforeseen consequences over time, which can’t be predicted by testing. Another challenge is finding the right composition of coatings for the batteries in order to stabilize the voltage. Efficient manufacturing processes represent yet another obstacle. There is much that can go wrong, and a great deal of money and effort is necessary to achieve success. Thus, battery research must continue, and so the story has not yet ended. As of now, however, an affordable fully electric powered automobile is still a thing of the future. Elon Musk’s Tesla is a great performing car, but it is very expensive. Chevrolet’s Volt, while more affordable, is not fully electric. Stay tuned—on your battery powered radio. Evaluation: This book may prove of most interest to those in fields of research and development, and especially in the management issues posed in those circumstances.(JAB)