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 secure 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, two-year account of big invention, big commercialization, and big deception. It exposes the layers of aspiration and disappointment, competition and ambition behind this great turning point in the history of technology.
My neighbor had given me this book with the promise "You'll love it." I really didn't believe him, but it only took a few pages for me to start wondering if he might be correct. This is a non-fiction account of the effort and race to build the next generation of battery technology that would power the electric car for a nation that wants a transportation system that will include a large proportion of all-electric vehicles over the next several years. The author, Steve Levine, gained access to some of the leading research facilities in the US and assembled a true drama of the people, intrigue, and high-stakes risks behind the effort. The author has produced a documentary that is a true drama as the reader is introduced to the personalities of the leaders behind the battery revolution. The story centers on Argonne National Labs and its eventual decision to compete for a government contract to develop the world's most advanced battery. It is a race against foreign competition, and with other labs and companies. Theft of secrets and ambitious development timelines create a story that I read with anticipation. The drama of research labs under high pressure is accurately conveyed and I finished the book with confidence that I got an accurate story artfully presented. Thanks, Mr. Levine. And thanks, Don, my neighbor.
Very little scientific value, but somewhat interesting from an economic perspective.
Having some experience in battery research myself, I was mainly incredible disappointed in this book. The book's subtitle makes it seem like it is relevant to the history of battery development as a whole, but its contents barely mention any research effort from outside the US. More specifically, the book almost solely describes battery development at National Laboratory Argonne and at start-up company Envia. The author gives no explanation for this choice of subject.
In my opinion, it's unforgivable to put the role of John Goodenough in a short chapter, to mention Sony in half a sentence and to completely omit the history of non-rechargeable batteries and non-lithium based rechargeable batteries. This just shows that the writer did little technical research.
From a business/economic perspective, it was interesting to read about a tech startup outside IT and outside Silicon Valley, but even then I would not consider it a very good book.
And finally, not taking into account the contents of the book, the writing isquite boring. Nick Bilton's book Hatching Twitter proved that it is possible to write amazing books about technology and business in the 21st century.
This is a great book that delves into the early history of how our batteries came about. It has a good bit of corporate espionage as well. What I'm getting at are Chinese scientists coming to America, seeing what we're doing, then going back to China to do it on a bigger scale for less.
There's lots of competition between these scientists, and hardly any are American the closer we get to today. And wow, these scientists have big egos!
I read about half of this book before losing interest. That's not to say it's a bad book or bad topic, it's just that you kind of get all you need to in the first several chapters.
Fantastic nonfiction work on the development of a new higher efficiency battery that could be used for cleaner energy. I had no idea this was such a logjam for companies and the research detail in this book was interesting and understandable even for a non scientist like myself. Parts of the story read almost like fiction due to the larger than life personalities of many of the researchers involved. It was interesting enough to read in one sitting.
I received this book as part of the good reads giveaway but the opinions are my own.
This is an attempt at a Michael Lewis-style behind-the-scenes. But without Lewis's skill at extracting interesting personality traits or motivation, there's nothing here.
An endless series of play-by-play descriptions of board meetings and product pitches, which (spoiler) go nowhere.
No history of battery technology or infrastructure. No scientific description of how batteries actually work.
Only a series of big promises that didn't pan out. Like this book.
Very interesting history of the behind the scenes of the start of the battery industry. Much more intense that I would have ever expected. Only a small amount of science is discussed behind the batteries. Fantastic history recap for the industry though.
[Disclosure: My company TalinoEV sells lithium-ion battery powered motorcycles (called tricycles, bajaj or tuktuks) to the South East Asian market.] Steve Levine's book, The Powerhouse is an eye opener for a number of reasons, most of which augur well for the United States' role in the world's use of this technology. Firstly, author Steve LeVine posits that the lithium-ion battery sits as the transistor's "equal in terms of social and economic consequence. Not to mention pure ubiquity, inventions without which the lives of the majority of the world's population... would be utterly different."
That got my attention. After all, the transistor is what made silicon valley, "Silicon Valley." It was an eye opener also in that I did not fully realize that large-form lithium ion batteries for transportation use is such a very recent phenomenon.
While lithium ion in small-form has been used since 1991 for Sony video cameras, and then subsequently in the early 2000s for laptops (and then in the mid 2000s for smart phones) it was only in the 2011 Chevy Volt that the large form lithium ion battery was used for transportation, according to the book.
There is a lot of hand wringing about whether the 200 mile distance threshold can be reached for developed country vehicles. And this is where much of Argonne labs' massive research is being devoted. However, from what I see on the ground, (and to echo Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption) - much of what lithium-ion even in larger form batteries (eg, 40 Ah) can do right now is "good enough." Christensen talked about how incumbent companies ignore new technologies that don't serve the needs of their customers or fit within their existing business models. That fits the GM described in the book to a "T". However, as the new technology, which excels on completely different attributes than the incumbent's product, continues to mature, it eventually takes over the market.
The hand wringing to me is akin to asking if a particular brush can paint the side of an aircraft carrier. Of course, this developed country problem will require large, specialized technology. However, to carry the analogy further, in large swaths of the world, another brush - a toothbrush - has been performing its job perfectly: up, down, up, down. day in and day out. It is the perfect tool for its use - short haul, quick, on-demand bursts of use. In South East Asia, the main market for lithium ion batteries is the same market that has given Uber its multi-tens of billions of dollars of valuation - it is the short haul, on-demand, point-to-point, daily use in dense urban settings (requiring 3-6 km trips) that is perfectly suited for Goodenough's lithium ion battery invention.
The answer to how to pay for the cost of the lithium ion battery is also in South East Asia and how data plans are consumed - in pre-pay/pay-per-use increments. It is called sachet-sized billing, and it is uniquely the opposite of Costco-sized developed country selling. By breaking sales sizes down in granularity, most anyone of the two or three billion "rising global middle class" can buy - and profitably use - a lithium-ion battery that is "good enough" to last 60 km (or 10 money-making trips on a tuk-tuk).
The technology to harness these granular payments in conjunction with 'good enough' lithium ion batteries are available today - IoT, bitcoin/blockchain, cloud SAAS switching - are are often very strongly U.S. technology. A TEDx talk by Jeff Chamberlain (a prominent character in The Powerhouse) talks about this 'energy Manhattan Project' changing everything. I now have a better perspective on why, thanks to this book.
As a fan of Steve Levine's "The Oil and the Glory", I was excited for his take on battery development. There are few oil market disrupters with more potential than a safe, affordable, high quality battery for electric cars coming on the market.
The book shows ample commitment to the subject (Levine spent several years at Argonne National Lab), but he didn't luck out on being present for that next big development. Instead, he worked with what he had, which was a snapshot of battery development at a particular moment of time.
I was left feeling appreciative of the strength of our national labs and a little more educated on battery chemistry, but it wasn't the page turner that I expected. The big picture context didn't come in until Part III, where Levine briefly addresses global oil markets and what batteries would have to do to compete.
Quite poorly written, but the topic is kind of interesting. Book provides a glimpse of the greed, wishful thinking, and b...hit behind the hype about batteries (in this case). Hype is out of proportion relative to actual progress and likelihood of progress.
In hindsight, the roadmap for product development seems to be much more foggy, serpentine, and random than invisible hand purists might suggest. While it is seductive to think that the best ideas and products win with ease in the free market, we often take the immense scientific, engineering, and business challenges involved in effecting transformational technologies massively for granted. I think a lot about human-contrived discontinuities in systems when it seems like it would be a slam dunk to not have those discontinuities, e.g. the common valley of death in the middle of the technology readiness level (TRL) scale.
In The Powerhouse, Mr. Levine gives the reader a rare inside peek into an intensive and government-driven research and development initiative, specifically for car battery research with the end goal of commercializable products, with the cathode material NMC 2.0 starring as the main character. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this book, but for serendipitously stumbling upon it at the local library while taking a class on electrochemical materials and devices which mainly talked about batteries and right before attending my first Batteries and Energy Storage Conference by AIChe. While the conference featured an inordinate seeming amount of speakers from Argonne National Lab, I learned in the book that Argonne is literally *the* Battery Hub-as designated by the US Department of Energy (and what a fight it was to win that title!). It was cool to have heard from at least one conference speaker who was mentioned in the book. I loved gaining the real world context presented by the author to augment my own education.
Regarding the Envia side plot, it's hard to distinguish the actions of Envia's leadership from that of someone like the infamous Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos. It's a simple recipe that resembles that classic meme:
1) Be doe-eyed entrepreneur(s). 2) Promise performance metrics yet to be demonstrated. 3) ??? 4) Profit
I suppose their saving grace was that their principal investigator was an actual nerd who understood the material and they also didn't play games with the health of others. It would be funnier if their collapse didn't entail as much job loss and wasted human capital (though perhaps industry gained some much needed lessons learned-on both the seller and buyer sides), but I do find a dark humor in it. As an adult it's always bemusing and somewhat comforting when adults reveal they don't actually know what their doing. I really was rooting for them to solve the voltage fade problem of NMC 2.0, but of course there is a reason you don't hear about this company anymore.
Unfortunately, Mr. Levine and/or his editors made some pretty confounding choices. First, the manic clickbait (readbait?) subtitle belies the author's evenly keeled presentation of the topic. I don't recall any specific point in the story where it is claimed that the exact battery (or specific battery material) under consideration will "save the world" as opposed to any of the other batteries in research and development at the time. Second, on page 18, when trying to explain what a battery is, it is stated that "When the battery [literally any battery including non-lithium-ion batteries] produces electricity...positively charged lithium atoms, known as ions..." which is a tragedy of a sentence, ironically confusing itself while trying to dumb it down to the reader.
But the biggest issue is that the narrative was set up to resolve previously started storylines, but it never did! Was voltage fade ever solved? Were there plans to solve it? What was the upshot of Wan Gang, China's Minister of Science and Technology, and his mysterious meeting at the Argonne Lab which opened the story? Did the writer forget about all about it? I wouldn't expect the biggest technical problems to have been solved by the time of publication, but how come when I google "what ever happened to cathode NMC 2.0" nothing definitive comes up? Inquiring minds want to know!
I thought this was going to be more on the scientific side and explain more of the batteries themselves, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the people that contributed to the battery to what it is today.
I was a little confused when he was jumping between people and different timelines as I was expecting this to be pretty linear, but I got used to it quickly. This book was more about the struggle of scientists, policy regarding the batteries, and funding. I didn't mind most of this, but it did get a little less exciting to read when it was repeating certain aspects over like the stress of the budget constraints and them taking extensively on those subjects.
One thing this book did get me interested about was possibly visiting the Argonne National Laboratory as it is in Illinois and wouldn't be to far away for me to visit on a weekend. They have tours, so I may want to visit it one day.
I think the ending was super sudden and I was expecting to get a conclusion on the voltage fade issue they were having with the lithium ion battery with the silicon-based anode to get that 200 kilowatt hours in a single charge which would get to 200 miles on a single charge. I know this book was made in 2015, but I thought I would see a conclusion or some kind of winding down of the book. I was reading and there was like 50 pages left, but that was just appendix stuff and I was like, "Bruh, it just stops there?".
Anyways, I liked the book and I learned that there has a lot of effort put into getting these electric vehicles to be on par with ICE cars.
I was hoping for much better explanations of battery science or battery manufacturing - Levine settles for very little scientific context behind the inter-lab and inter-company competition for battery development. He also hints at some really exciting technology - in particular lithium air batteries - without explaining their intended innovation.
There is, however, some pretty interesting observations about industrial policy in the us, such as the following.
- One reaon why the US National Labs have so many foreign-born researchers relative to the private sector is their unlimited scope for H1B applications (thanks to a working visa exemption from Congress). - There is much strategy behind the timing of scientific publishing. Publish too late and you'll miss the credit. Publish too soon and you'll be scooped on the next discovery by free-riders - Thanks to the Bayh Dole Act, passed in 1980, lead researchers gained partial ownership of discoveries they make with federal funding. This helped incent commercialization of research, and is widely viewed as a great boon to our economy. - While the jury was still out on the success of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, the SEMATECH consortium it is modeled off of sounded like a really exciting story, and one I wish Levine provided more color on
This was a well-written book with some good insights into how the story of new batteries started and continued. It’s still an ongoing story in 2018 so the book can be accompanied with a second volume in a few years to continue where it was left.
One thing I disliked was the fact that dates where rarely mentioned and it could get quite confusing to find out the orders of progresses and incidents specially since there were some flashbacks.
The other problem was that sometimes it gets involved in too much details and forgets the bigger picture, discussing the very scientific details that may not matter that much in real world and when marketing and consumer taste is involved.
I was expecting to see more of car brands involvement and their contributions which was only mentioned about GM and very briefly about Tesla and Nissan.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Good content, but it seemed a bit chaotic and jumped around quite a bit. I just finished reading an Enron book by Bethany McLean and couldn't help but observe a strong contrast in presentation. I'm a nerd, so technical detail is interesting to me. This book had sufficient technical detail, but it came up short in the organization. The chapter length was all over the place. Some of the descriptions of events seem to be culled from the same notes. The wasn't a strong sense of overarching narrative or guiding framework in explaining events. A decent read, but not a standout. If we could give half stars, it would be a 3.5.
The Powerhouse is the history of the electric car battery. It describes the big players that started the pursuit of the affordable, lightweight and reliable electric car. Commercializing research was a huge factor in this endeavor since existing battery technology would not solve the problem. The author describes working at Argonne National Lab and obtaining grants from the Department of Energy as well as partnering with car companies like GM. I was hoping for a more technical history as opposed to the history of the big players in battery development.
Chronicling the history of the lithium ion batteries invention through its many many decades of lab work to increase energy density & energy output through to the middle 2010s.
Steve tells the story of Argonne National Labs "Battery Guys" as they build battery research teams to create the future, branches off to cover an early battery startup & back to a major milestone for American battery research.
The book was a little hard to follow at times with many many names & plenty of timeline jumps forward & then backward. Overall a must read for battery nerds.
The book is on the long side for the subject and covers many topics ranging from politics, science, immigration, technology, STEM, women's issues and issues in the workplace, intellectual property and how to protect it, sales and selling, licensing, ethics and more.
I definitely recommend this book and it could have been better in some places.
More personalities of characters in the battery world, which is okay I suppose. Hardly anything written about Elon Musk. Interesting now to read this in 2020 and see how wrong legacy automakers are about EV's and how Tesla and other start ups are thrashing ford and gm around the market currently. The next decade is going to be exciting for EV's.
Interesting book that tells the tale of developing a super battery. IP was a much more significant topic than I expected. The story sometimes feels like multiple unrelated threads, but they still tied together decently.
A dry, but informative, commentary on the evolution of lithium ion battery technology. The focus on the recharge at Argonne National Laboratory and rise and fall of battery startup Envia was particularly interesting.
A lightweight book on a serious subject. Very little technical research, even for a nonfiction aimed at general readers. Full of somewhat unrelated anecdotes without a cohesive narrative. Too many contemporary nonfiction books, too little substance. Blame Michael Lewis! Waste of time.
Thought-provoking, especially in the historical overview of commercial batteries and the laboratory culture at Argonne and battery startups - but rather unfocused and imperfect in structure/tone. Still recommended as an intermittent read or audiobook.
A comprehensive view on the race to develop the most efficient battery. It details the capabilities of each team, the product development method and the challenges that face both labs and startups. Well written account of "behind the scenes" story of battery new product development.
Not for its literacy value .. but for being an easy and interesting read if you want to know about high level story behind Li ion battery developments. Not the most up to date of course ..