EETD Communications

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle published a brief interview with Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, a major author of UNIX, and thinker about the future of technology (“Joy discusses techie role in limiting pollution).” He made one comment that we would like to correct.

Referring to the the scientific community in the Bay area, he is quoted as saying “Innovations can also be done with batteries and engines – that’s chemistry – and thermodynamics, but we don’t have an intellectual community behind those. There are skills that don’t exist in the valley…”

In fact, this is not true. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, teams of chemists, physicists and materials scientists operate one of the pre-eminent research programs in the world to develop advanced lithium-ion batteries. This research program, funded by the Department of Energy’s BATT program (Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies) could lead to useful and affordable batteries to power plug-in-hybrid cars and eventually all-electric vehicles.

Development of a battery to power a plug-in hybrid car forty miles could free America from our reliance on imported oil and eliminate the carbon dioxide that contributes to global climate change– as long as the electricity to charge the batteries is made on a green grid (solar, wind, renewable energy sources).

We invite Bill Joy (and the Chronicle) to visit Berkeley Lab at any time to find out more about our advanced battery research, as well as all the other science–from biosystems and health to high performance supercomputing – that make the Lab a center for problem-solving and innovation.
Read the article in the Chronicle here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/13/BUBA15SUQT.DTL&hw=bill+joy&sn=002&sc=922

Read some articles about the lithium ion battery R&D  here:

Batteries of the Future 1

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2007/Feb/future-batteries-I.html

Batteries of the Future 2

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2007/Feb/future-batteries-II.html

The BATT Fab Lab

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2007/Jul/BATT.html

The Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies program website

http://batt.lbl.gov/

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 4:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.