Bad battery "karma" – Taxpayers’ Green ‘Investment’ in Battery Company Withers

What I am waiting to hear is how far a battery electric car will drive at night in a North American winter using headlamps, wipers, heated rear window and (electric) heater. And after it is abandoned, trying to open the central locking. With 45 years experience in the motor trade (in England) — I suggest about 5 miles?

Oh dear, one crappy Green Looney Tunes company writing off on their stake in another crappy Green Looney Tunes company. Sounds like AL Gore and Bill Clinton territory to me.
Thanks God they still have Apple shares.

This report says that about $100 billion was spent on climate change in 2010 by governments in the top 10 world economies. The US spent $16 billion. Most of that would have been green energy projects since the amount is so huge.
http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Durban_dynamics_-_navigating_for_progress_on_climate_change/$FILE/Durban%20dynamics%20-%20navigating%20for%20progress%20on%20climate%20change.pdf

You know, the sad thing is battery technology is just now undergoing a much-needed technology update. I remember reading somewhere that battery storage is the singular technology that has undergone the least evolution of any power technology in the last century. Another sad thing is rushing something to market that should really await event horizon potential revolutions….
Agreed. Anthony posted an article only a short time ago on zinc-air batteries, which may (or may not) be poised on the brink of a similar revolution. Zinc-air, for those who have forgotten or came in late, has many times the energy density storage capacity of lithium, is built with cheap and abundant zinc (instead of relatively scarce lithium), and would be gangbusters super for energy storage, actually making PV solar or wind instantly suitable for full time power generation and electric cars feasible except for one little thing — like a lead-acid battery but much faster, zinc-air batteries build “dendrites” as they recharge into the wet solution that eventually short out the plates. Where “shortly” can be in as few as a single charge cycle, although engineering can and has extended it reliably past one.
What it hasn’t achieved (AFAIK) is reliably extending it to thousands of charge cycles, although lithium has just as big a problem with that (he says, typing into a laptop that will die if unplugged on its SECOND set of batteries in just four years). But there are a number of people and even some companies working on it. A breakthrough here would be revolutionary, as would breakthroughs in the lithium camp or elsewhere.
With that said, let me make an observation. I do not think the readers of WUWT are giving proper attention to the cost-benefit equation associated with technical research, or the nature of the optimization problem being solved. There are technologies out there waiting to be discovered that are vastly beyond the means of any individual, or any traditional group of investors, to search for, if you could convince a corporate or investment group to risk the money against a relatively slim and uncertain chance of payoff when they can invest the money in alternative ways and achieve a very predictable (and often, very nice) return with far less risk.
Yet the pay-off for those technologies is often spectacularly huge. Consider the laser. Sure, it was done at Bell Labs — a corporate entity — but it was done with government support from beginning to end (read the acknowledgements on the original papers). Bell had no need or desire to invest its own money in the development of a technology that no one could foresee was even possible or had any given particular advantage if developed — it could make money hand over fist doing nothing (and was, it was a monolithic monopoly at that point in time).
The pay-off for the laser has been what, a trillion times the original investment and still coming? If you are reading this, there is very likely at least one laser within a few centimeters of your fingers, and it isn’t entirely unlikely that your screen operates on laser principles. Not all government funded research or government money funnelled into corporations to develop ideas is bad or fails to pay off, and a single big hit pays for many, many failures. Only society as a whole can afford to amortize the really big risks in a scalable way to shoot for equally huge benefits, game changers that don’t just pay off for a day, but pay off for the rest of human history. The original laser bet is still paying off, and every day we reap still more benefit compared to the society we would still have without it.
It is by no means necessarily foolish for the government to invest our tax dollars in “Solyndra”s, in companies seeking to build a better battery, in seeking thermonuclear fusion, in trying to develop algae that will produce commercial quantities of biofuel out of air, water and sunlight at competitive prices, and so on. The payoff for success to society in all of those cases is potentially huge, and doesn’t stop in a year or ten years but will still be paying us back for both the money invested in the success and for all of the failures a century from now. One can argue that the investments should be more carefully chosen, that more care should be exercised to ensure that the money so invested cannot be looted in the form of golden parachutes or inflated executive salaries, one can always question the wisdom of making any given investment in retrospect, but it is nevertheless an easily demonstrable fact that without this sort of investment, our society would be vastly poorer. I worked for decades with a physicist who was also a grant officer for the Army Research Office, and I can go down a list of technologies that you would not be using (or would be paying a lot more for a far less developed version) if the ARO had not funded them and gotten the idea past the drawing board — such as your flatscreen display.
It is a simple matter of fact that pure capitalism driving corporate investment to develop new products and technologies using money individually risked by human investors is inadequate to the task of developing breakthrough products. The timeframe is too long — often decades — the risk is too great — dozens of ideas fail, dozens of pathways turn out to be dead ends — before one pathway leads us to the next level of understanding. Individual investors or even large corporations wither and die before hitting the jackpot. Yet the jackpot is often huge — tens, hundreds of times the cost of all of the failures! Much of our current scientific “wealth” comes from just such high risk long time frame payouts, where many modest investments made by our government eventually lead to a return on all investment.
In the process, we derive various other benefits. For one thing, it helps sustain our educational system, which produces countless benefits for all of society. Ignorance is the devil itself, the source of all human misery, and education and some degree of attendant wisdom are the universal anodyne that can lead us to a peaceful and prosperous existence. For another, it fuels serendipity — people studying and striving to discover one thing often find something else, entirely by accident. Even the outcasts of the process enter society and work for those very corporations that seek to develop new ideas into products and have a greatly increased chance of making a high-payoff contribution.
Could the process be improved? Possibly, but there are tradeoffs. If you only fund “sure thing” projects, you are almost certainly being far too conservative. DARPA, for example, funds a lot of very wild and esoteric research, but again the payoff from any of the ideas can be as huge as the Internet itself (which used to be called “arpanet”, we might recall, to remind us of who really developed it — it wasn’t Al Gore, all claims to the contrary).
Open political debate over what is or is not a good government funded or guaranteed investment is certainly a good thing to engage in in a free society, but Randite arguments that the right number is “zero” are so obviously false that they only hold up if you completely blind your eyes to the acknowledgements section of almost every critical paper ever published that is associated with a new idea or eventually leads to new patents, new products. Improved oversight? Perhaps. Better choice of investments? Arguably. But even though Solyndra failed that is not a sufficient proof that trying to support it was a bad idea in the first place. One might try to support ten failures like Solyndra and still build a ten billion dollar a year industry (and growing) on the eleventh success, pay for all of the failures in the first few years, and reap social “profits” in the form of increased wealth, jobs, and the benefits of whatever is actually being produced in the end.
As I’ve often noted, while anthropogenic CO_2 may or may not be a long term problem for civilization, even if the most catastrophic of prophecies was correct it would not matter. Within the next three decades, even modest continuation of support of research into carbon-neutral energy generation will almost certainly yield fruit that will strongly limit the production of CO_2 compared to egregious overestimates being made today, so that by 2050 total new carbon being burned will almost certainly be strongly decreasing independent of any direct and enormously expensive measures taken today. PV solar will follow a Moore’s Law down to costs per watt that make it a no-brainer for energy generation in plants installed with far more scalable engineering. Breakthroughs in zinc-air or lithium or still other storage will overcome the problem that the sun does not always shine. Fusion (a long shot with a quadrillion-dollar payoff) may come through. Factory-produced biofuels may drop in price even as mined liquid fuels increase in price to where a crossover occurs and future “oil wells” may be chunks of high-insolation desert covered with algae being grown in tubes (that produces cellose, protein, and various other things as side effects of the production of biodiesel, for example). If government investments can shorten the time to any of these things by as little as two or three years, three years of production might pay off decades of investment, but with it or without it, there is no good reason to think that we will double atmospheric CO_2 by 2100.
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Did you ever wonder if Obama’s original plan was to fund lots of Green Tech companies that rational sensible people knew would fail, rack up an impressive string of failures, then declare that since we MUST have the Green Tech to combat global warming, the government HAS NO CHOICE but to set up a government-founded and government-funded Green Tech corporation to develop, make, and sell the Green Tech? OF COURSE the funding wold have been limited to start up money, and some more until it gets profitable, and a little bit more to get it over the occasional economic bump in the road…
And it would eventually have been profitable, since the government can mandate anyone to use the Green Tech. They can mandate buying health insurance, they can mandate buying and using their Green Tech. And following the EPA sliding restrictions model, the required Green Tech would be to the latest standards, with the government’s Green Tech company being the only one supplying it when the standards are upgraded, which would then be tightened further whenever the free market could meet the current standards cheaper and better.
To the cries that the federal government can’t own and manage a business like that, unless they officially go socialist/communist, don’t worry about it. I’m certain they would have left the managing and ownership-of-record to proven Green Tech leadership, like GE. Yup, GE would have bit the bullet and made the sacrifice by agreeing to purchase the majority of shares at the government’s price, with the government holding on to only about 49.99% of the remaining ones, once the necessary Executive Orders were signed and perhaps some laws were enacted, and the needed government-mandated bureaucratic mechanisms were in place.
But then cap and trade fell through, the EPA’s reign of carbon terror may soon end after Inauguration Day 2013…
BTW, have you seen the reports that big corporations are backing down from supporting Obama, with GE distancing itself a bit? Did you see the latest GE TV commercials, where they are touting their innovation while getting much quieter about their eco-credentials?

@ur momisugly Latitude says:
April 5, 2012 at 7:07 am
The government invests heavily in the manufacture of a product….
…..then passes laws requiring you to buy that product
What could possibly go wrong?………………….
Wake up people….what do you think she meant?
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We’re having a test of that as we speak. Obamacare. Even relevant to AGW/Sustainability. Hopefully it will be struck down.

btw, I work for a company that makes parts for Fisker. While the CEOs get bonuses, their suppliers continue to wait for payment for parts and tooling. Will it be like waiting for Godot?

From Robert Brown on April 5, 2012 at 7:46 am:

Yet the pay-off for those technologies is often spectacularly huge. Consider the laser. Sure, it was done at Bell Labs — a corporate entity — but it was done with government support from beginning to end (read the acknowledgements on the original papers). Bell had no need or desire to invest its own money in the development of a technology that no one could foresee was even possible or had any given particular advantage if developed — it could make money hand over fist doing nothing (and was, it was a monolithic monopoly at that point in time).

*ahem* Gordon Gould is now more recognized as the inventor of the laser after decades spent fighting for patents. Practically all of his research was done with private money, and while in theory ARPA supplied some to the one company he worked at, he himself wasn’t directly involved due to security restrictions at the time. Thus government support was decidedly marginal, with free market capitalism doing the yeoman’s share of development and commercialization.

Curiousgeorge says:
April 5, 2012 at 8:34 am
@ur momisugly Latitude says:
April 5, 2012 at 7:07 am
The government invests heavily in the manufacture of a product….
…..then passes laws requiring you to buy that product
What could possibly go wrong?………………….
Wake up people….what do you think she meant?
=================================================================
We’re having a test of that as we speak. Obamacare. Even relevant to AGW/Sustainability. Hopefully it will be struck down.
=============
What’s going on over there? Is this for real?:
“The IRS is no longer strictly about taxes. “Top IRS officials have been working with Democrats on Capitol Hill to determine how the agency will enforce President Obama’s new health care law. Republican lawmakers estimate the legislation will require the hiring of many thousands of new (and armed) tax enforcement agents,” Fox News reported last month. “Under the new law, the IRS is required to fine taxpayers thousands of dollars if they do not purchase health insurance. In order for the government to enforce compliance, tax authorities will need information, for the first time, about people’s health care. Collecting that data will require more IRS personnel.”
In short, the IRS will act as an enforcer – armed to the teeth – for Obamacare, that is if it is not ruled to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in June.
The IRS is but one component of an increasingly tyrannical and militarized federal government.
“The Department of Homeland Security recently stoked concern by contracting a company to provide them with 450 million rounds of hollow point bullets. Now the federal agency is also purchasing bullet-proof checkpoint booths that include ‘stop and go’ lights,” writes Paul Joseph Watson today. “The purpose behind the bullet proof booths is unknown, but the DHS has publicly announced that it plans to increase the number of unannounced checkpoints manned by TSA VIPR teams and other federal agents beyond the 9,300 that were set up last year alone.”” http://www.infowars.com/bill-allows-irs-to-deny-americans-right-to-travel/
Looks like you’re being set up for something..

I’ve been keeping my eye on A123 for some time now since I work in automotive engineering. People have been leaving the company for the past several months. It’s only a matter of time before they go the route of Solyndra.