John Goodenough, who died Monday at the age of 100, invented an extraordinary time machine—one that is saving the residents of his adopted state of Texas this week, and that will play a crucial role in the planet’s future.
Goodenough’s obituary marks him as one of the last of a certain kind of American. He left Yale to join the wartime Army, then earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago on a government scholarship, studying under Enrico Fermi; first at Westinghouse and then at MIT, he helped lay the groundwork for what became Random Access Memory in computers; and then—moving for a while to Oxford before finally landing at UT Austin—he took on what became his life’s work. Batteries.
Exxon had recently patented a lithium battery design, but it was impractical; Goodenough figured out how to layer the cathode with cobalt and lithium oxide. It stored two to three times the energy of other batteries at room temperature; suddenly you could power all kinds of things. It took a few years, but eventually he was honored (at age 97) with the Nobel Prize. He was still at work when that tribute came, in an office with a painting of the Last Supper on the wall behind him. As I say, a 20th century man, setting the scene for the 21st.
Austin, Texas, is insanely hot right now—a heat dome has parked above the state, producing record temperatures day after day after day. San Angelo, for instance, out on the plains west of San Antonio, busted its all-time heat record (set last year) by three degrees; the state as a whole, the Weather Service warned, “has already experienced a yearly record number of hours of dangerously high heat index readings.”
So far the power grid has more or less held up, and a huge reason lies with the descendants of the batteries that Goodenough invented.
But so far the power grid has more or less held up, and a huge reason lies with the descendants of the batteries that Goodenough invented. Lithium-ion atteries the size of tractor-trailer trucks were deployed in several places around the state, in an effort to avoid the kind of catastrophe that came when ice knocked out much of the state’s power generation in 2021. So far, according to The Washington Post, they’re doing the job: “When a large coal facility got knocked offline during peak hours this week amid the stress of the extreme heat, energy that was being stored in batteries elsewhere in Texas was quickly dispatched to carry the grid through the evening. The batteries were also crucial to keeping the power on when a nuclear plant hiccuped and went offline earlier in the week.”
What the batteries do best, however, is store the abundant solar power that a Texas heat wave naturally produces, and allow you to use it a little later when the sun goes down. As an article in this week’s Scientific American points out, the riskiest hour for Texas electricity planners has become 8 to 9 in the evening, because air-conditioners are still going full blast, but solar panels—which during the afternoon are providing a fifth of the state’s power—are shutting down as the sun drops below the horizon. Happily, the wind tends to rise at dusk, so that helps spin the turbines. But the state has also relied on those huge battery packs—Goodenough’s time machine. And what’s being used now to deal with emergencies will more and more be the standard: Stuff batteries full of juice when the sun is shining, and then let them provide cheap power later. You don’t need the more expensive (and dirty) gas and coal plants.
The need for batteries is universal. California’s battery packs helped avert blackouts during their heatwave last summer; in the UK, authorities pay a billion dollars a year to turn off wind farms when the grid doesn’t need the power, and then it spends a small fortune buying electricity from Europe when it runs short. The IEA estimates grid storage for batteries could grow to 680 gigawatt-hours by 2030, up from 16 gigawatt-hours at the end of 2021. Australia is installing some of the largest batteries in the world, including on top of old coal mines—and partly as a consequence the country is starting to show that renewables can actually drive down demand for coal and gas.
None of this is to say that batteries are perfect. They catch fire (though perhaps not as disastrously, as fossil fuels) and lithium and cobalt mining can be deadly (though not on the same scale as coal mining). Happily, the spirit of innovation didn’t perish with Goodenough: There are all kinds of innovative battery projects underway—solid state lithium or vanadium or old-fashioned iron or even more old-fashioned brick. Plants are springing up across what we’re starting to call the Battery Belt in the South; South Korea’s LG announced big new plans in several states this week.
None of it comes easily, of course—Texas politicians spent the last legislative session trying to discourage renewable energy and prop up fossil fuels. But physics (and economics) are implacable: Some combination of conservation, solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries give us our best chance of surviving heatwaves like the one in Texas, and preventing even worse ones in the future.
Oh, and John Goodenough didn’t take any royalties for his inventions, just his university salary; “caring little for money, he signed away most of his rights. He shared patents with colleagues and donated stipends that came with his awards to research and scholarships.” More tech bros like that, please.
