The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Author:Steve Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

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If you asked the battery guys at what stage they understood that there was a problem with NMC 2.0, it prompted a nervous response. They would go quiet, glance around, and provide not quite precise answers. This conveyed the impression that either no one knew the precise answer or no one wanted to disclose it. The reason being that, if you looked at the situation squarely, you could not escape the conclusion that Argonne had in fact sold the companies a faulty invention. Not that the companies themselves were off the hook—the engineers, venture capitalists, and other executives and staff who had signed off on the licenses had to be in some hot water among their bosses, too. If anyone was predominantly responsible, it was the Thackeray team, because their names were on the patent.

Chamberlain, who had led the negotiations on Argonne’s behalf, said simply, “We didn’t know about it.” But how was that possible? “Because making a product is not the scientists’ objective. You have to look at a certain data set to notice the fade,” he said. “If you look at a different data set where all of your requirements are for capacity, you can actually miss the voltage curves.” He added, “That is why interaction with industry is so important, because if you are making a product, like a battery that is going into a car, you look at everything like this.”

What Chamberlain described was precisely why Riley’s team might manage to steal a march on the industry. The reason why no one had picked up on voltage fade was that it had been a problem in no other major battery chemistry. So when battery guys evaluated this new chemistry, they skipped the voltage. “There was a blind spot,” Riley said.

Papers Thackeray and Kang had published as far back as 2007 revealed weaknesses of NMC 2.0. The papers included charts revealing the fade phenomenon. Thackeray argued that that meant that Riley had stumbled over nothing new. But he was wrong. Thackeray and Kang published charts of voltage fade without explaining its significance, because they themselves did not grasp that it was a potential showstopper for the NMC 2.0. Riley did.

As for why Young-Il Jang did check for it, Kang said he himself tipped off his A123 counterpart. But if so, Young-Il was already prepared to find the fade because he had observed a similar phenomenon in a cathode on which he worked for his doctoral thesis in the late 1990s. That allowed Young and Riley to move faster to report the finding.

Whatever the case, Riley, armed with what he called a major scientific “scoop,” now pursued talks with both Chamberlain and Kumar. With the latter, Riley held out a seductive offer—A123 and Envia could embark on a year-long joint research project on voltage fade. If it succeeded—if they solved voltage fade—A123 would buy Envia for $120 million.

Kumar conveyed the offer to his board, which said that Riley was essentially attempting to steal Envia. If Envia

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