The energy manhattan project that will change everything | Jeff Chamberlain | TEDxNaperville

there is a revolution coming there's a revolution coming with respect to energy how we think about how we create and how we use electricity in our daily lives and I'm here to tell you about that revolution and tell you what the scientific community is doing about it so that we thrive in it we not only survive the revolution but that we thrive and where I'd like to start is that word revolution is I was thinking about putting together this talk what images come to mind when I use that word we think about the Bolshevik Revolution of the French Revolution or the American Revolution and I really want you to think in your mind's eye what does that word bring to mind what kind of imagery and then ask yourself what images can apply to today if there are revolution in our society today what would bring you to your knees in a public place when I say that what do you think of a terrorist attack a bomb going off in an airport smoke fire gunshots what I'm here to tell you is what will bring you to your knees is what you see in this picture right here about three weeks ago I took this creep shot in the Denver Airport and I wish you could see the shots after this the look she was giving me but if you looked closely at this picture and you notice first of all she's trying to get some electricity to charge her battery and look closely at the picture and you see a custodian coming by and she has that look we've all had that look yes I'm sitting on the floor right next to a restaurant charging my phone why why is that where is this revolution coming from all of us all of us has experienced the anxiety of a low battery on our phone and I'm sure you could experience it just by seeing that picture I know I do so what I'm really saying is it's not that the revolution is coming the revolution is here we are tethered to a battery for our daily existence why how did this happen it's quite simple how it happened in my lifetime we started with a telephone that looks like the one on the left with a dial and a wire that goes into the wall well now the telephone is so much more than that it's everything it connects us to the word roll that connects us to our to our parents and our children and our spouses it connects us to our co-workers you know imagine not being able to send that email when you wanted to send it imagine not knowing the latest update on the Kardashian Kardashian family just imagine that it's how stressful that could be for you in fact I would predict right now that every single person in the room knows the charge on their phone within 10% what does that tell us it tells us the revolution is already here we need the battery we're tethered to it now compared to the telephone what's happened in the in my lifetime with respect to the battery this is a little bit of exaggeration but with a 9-volt battery I can buy almost the same battery today at Walgreens that I could buy when I was a child it has not progressed like the telephone has progressed like the computer has progressed now this revolution you can feel it I could tell whether you're laughter that the the emotions are there when you feel the stress and anxiety of a low battery but what I'm here to tell you is the next phase of that revolution what is going to happen I'm gonna describe for you what happens with the electricity grid that is an on demand product you might have heard those words before I'm going to tell you with respect to electricity what that means the grid was built over a hundred years ago in a very simple fashion electricity was produced by coal-fired power plant it was transmitted over a wire and delivered for use now what that means is and I'm not kidding you every time you turn a light switch on at home or turn on your television or plug in your computer there's someone somewhere and it might be a computer or human turning a knob up it is truly an on-demand product think of your mind compare that to buying shoes imagine if you want in a shoe store and the shoe is coming off the manufacturing line the instant you want to go buy it there is no other product I know of that is as on demand produced as electricity is think of Zappos right Zappos enables us to have a place where we can store all the shoes in one place before we buy them and as the grid is progressing what's happening is it's becoming much more flex there are new ways to create energy create electricity from the Sun and the wind there are new ways that we use it in the form of electric vehicles and and other devices in our homes and every one of those new ways actually needs a battery because of the fact that electricity is an on-demand product I cannot go and turn up a knob to turn the Sun up or turn the wind down with how much we need electricity on a day they our tower minute-to-minute basis so what that means is we need a warehouse like Zappos has you need to think of it like a digital video recorder we need a place where we can store our electricity and consume it at our convenience later just like we do with television today so even though you might feel the stress and strain of a battery problem associated with your phone what I'm here to tell you is that problem is going to be much more significant in the future it might be a generation away but imagine feeling that stress of a low battery with your phone and applying it to your ability to get from one place to another in an electric vehicle or worrying about do I have enough power in my hand that is coming for us but there's a even bigger picture and that is in places in the world where they do not have the luxury of a grid like we do so there's an opportunity to solve a first-world problem create better phones electric vehicles of a more substantially stable grid that allows renewables to come on to the grid but at the same time we'll be solving a third world problem and in creating an opportunity for people to create electricity store it and use it at their will and you can see even in the little quadrant here that shows the African children studying they're using an energy storage device it's an old one it's a plank of wood that they're burning and using the light from that so imagine if we could modernize that in the third world at the same time we solve our first world problems that is the revolution I came to talk to you about now I am grateful to have led a proposal that won a giant project that is a consortium of great scientists and engineers across the country about a hundred and forty of us and now am helping lead that prod so what I'm going to do is translate that macro problem that I just described to you into the micro world that we operate in the ether that the scientists and engineers operate in I want to explain to you why it is that we think we can drive this revolution in the right direction now I'm going to start by explaining how a lithium ion battery works and I meant to tell you it's like any of you have gone scuba diving get ready for a deep dive I hope I don't give you the bends I gave you the big picture up top I'm going to do some deep dive in the science and I promise you in just a few minutes I'm going to pull back out okay here's how the lithium ion battery works when you charge your phone or your computer or your electric vehicle you actually dissolve ions in a liquid and those ions move from one side of the battery the cathode to the other side of the battery the anode they move back and forth it creates chemical reactions it creates difficulties in the materials surviving at for any length of time and you all know this everyone in the room here knows how long a little ion battery lasts in two to three years your laptop computer your cell phone the battery starts to die you can't hold a charge it's because you're moving this matter around remember this please this is one thing I want you remember for my talk you're performing a chemical reaction in your pocket every time you carry a phone with you and you're moving matter around now what does that mean I'm a midwestern er here's what it means to me I'm a bowler I think you have to be a bowler if you're born and raised in the Midwest my wife and I are on a couple's team it's a lot of fun and I was thinking how do I describe this imagine the object of bowling is to roll that ball down like Walter Sobchak or whatever his name is in the Big Lebowski roll that ball down and knock down all of the pins imagine for a second if the object of that game instead of rolling the ball down the alley and knocking down those pins was to go through the pins and then stay right there and not knock down a single pin I hope you're thinking the Jeff that's impossible and guess what when the first lithium-ion batteries was when research was being performed at Exxon in the 1970s by Stan whittingham he was told it's not possible to move a lift I on in and out of a solid-state material it's the same problem so this micro problem that we have is to design a better set of bowling pins design a better Lane design a better ball so that that battery can last forever and hold five times the energy cost one-fifth of what it costs today so that we can enable this revolution to serve our needs now what does that mean that Argonne National Laboratory just a few miles east of here where we're talking I'm going to describe for you how we get how we get to solve this problem we have something called the Advanced Photon Source which is a synchrotron we spin electrons around this ring that you see here at nearly the speed of light and when you move electrons that fast and bend them instead of going linear they spew off high intense x-rays and as a scientist I can tell you that really jazzes us up but you feel jazzed those x-rays are exciting the really intense there are a billion times more intense than the x-ray machine at your doctor's office and this is the translation I'll make for you everyone here knows x-rays Madame Curie figured this out a long time ago one of the very few people in the world to win to know bells we've all had things x-ray but what happens is x-rays scatter off matter in different ways and you can see bone density versus flesh versus tumors and it's been an incredibly helpful tool to humanity now with these super intense x-rays what we can do is we can go way way down and we can see the difference between manganese and cobalt we can actually see the atoms in action while they're moving inside of a battery that's what's so important about those intense x-rays now here's another great big tool that we have supercomputing this is called the Mira it's one of the top five fastest computers on the planet it's at Argonne National Laboratory it does ten quadrillion calculations per second you feel excited you feel the excitement of the ten quadrillion calculations per second I do only because I had to think about what that means it sounded like some made-up words to me so I really started to think about it your typical computer at home your desk would take it would take you 20 years to do that many calculations if we took every human being on the planet and had them do one calculation every second 24 hours a day it would take two weeks for seven billion people to do that and what can be done in a second on this computer now so what what does that mean it means we can design matter you see these images here we can by understanding very deeply quantum physics and quantum chemistry we can program this computer to predict a materials behavior before we synthesize it now let me translate that for you and again I guess I go back to my Midwestern roots and I think about I think about delicious baby back ribs and how imagine just think about the tangy sweet spicy flavor of baby Becker's and for my vegetarian friends audience this is a tofu a rocket tofu okay it's still tangy can you feel that we're getting close to dinner delicious now imagine if you are connoisseur and you want to make a lot of ribs imagine if you want to try different recipes and let's say you have a book of a thousand recipes of ribs how long would it take you in the kitchen to try every single one of those recipes to decide which one to make for you and your friends and your family what the supercomputer lets us do is is in a moment imagine in a moment if you could understand the taste of every one of those thousand recipes and pick the top three to make for your friends and family that's what the computer enables a scientist to do okay so we've got the great big challenge to work on that excites us we've got some great scientific tools that have just been developed in the last 15 years now how do we invent I hope everybody knows the legend that is Thomas Edison that he only slept four hours a night he was a genius he was he had amazing drive he invented the phonograph first and the light bulb later and he was a singular genius and what I'm here to tell you is some of the stories of Thomas Edison are just a myth we love to tell the lie to ourselves that one person can go inside of a garage and invent something that changes the world and in reality Thomas Edison at one point had well over a hundred engineers working with them and he was a slave driver you can you can look this up when you go home at Google and see you exactly what I'm talking about so my point is why do we need 140 scientists and engineers to develop the next best battery to help us with this so let's talk about team work we have here Jay Cutler quarterback of my beloved Chicago Bears so imagine if instead of Jay Cutler we had the Thomas Edison of the NFL running the team yeah thank you we have Peyton Manning running the team the Thomas Edison of the NFL but how do we build the team let's go through some genetic engineering and let's let's copy him and let's build an entire team full of peyton manning's can you imagine how exciting that would be think that through it would be the best team ever until you actually start to think about it has anyone here ever seen peyton manning try to run the ball or throw a block he's terrible it's like his feet are made of cement and glue why because he's trained his whole life to be a quarterback the running backs have trained their whole lives to be running backs the linemen to be linemen the defensive ends to be defensive ends it is the same thing in the world of science why would we think is anything different we need physicists chemists chemical engineers mechanical engineers electrical engineers we need computational folks we need experimental folks to be able to do what we need to do to build that better set of bowling pins ok so we've got the great big challenge we've got the outstanding scientific tools we've got a world-beating team I haven't even told you yet the most thrilling part of this experiment of this project that we're doing and that is that we might fail we have the best scientific tools in the world I would say we have the best team in the world and we've got the best some of the best ideas in the world and yet we might fail that is thrilling we get up every morning this team of overachievers people that strive to get a PhD a massive overachievers and they're threatened every day with failure that is a thrill pushing yourself to that limit and deciding whether you can do something to change society is very exciting and Eleanor Roosevelt knew that many many years before we came around when she said do one thing every day that scares you and that is what this team is doing now I'll wrap this up by giving just a little bit of an update I told you I have to take you into a deep dive I'm going to show you some data and I'm only going to take about 30 minutes to describe every data point here in about six months five computational chemists figured out the behavior of 1,800 materials new bowling pins why is that important because all that matters to us is what's above that solid line that hard that that bolded line this is the idea of the ribs we know by developing materials in the computer 1,800 of them the top seven that we need to synthesize if we take in that same team and go on to synthesize those materials and test them it would have taken us ten years we've done the calculation we did this in six months so we are making progress even though we're doing something that scares us because we might fail another version of progress is combining you see these squiggles on the graph up here I won't go into detail in describing them except it is signal that comes right out of that big x-ray machine and we've coupled that signal out of the x-ray machine with the computer so that we can actually measure now the distance between atoms of the electrolyte that solve AIT's the ion and holds it and lets go of it when that ion moves into those bowling pins we've used the x-ray and the computers to help us find the design space that's needed to develop an electrolyte to go with those materials I showed you in the last slide to develop a better battery the team matters okay I'll finish up in a very short time span phones went from the Nokia indestructable brick to these iPads and and all kinds of wonderful devices that connect us with the world and what are we aiming to do I'm bringing you back up to remind you what is our mission we want to deliver batteries so that everyone can drive a Tesla and if you haven't yet I really encourage you to it it's an amazing car and it is the future of automotive transportation we aim to have the kind of battery that will let you drive a car like that and it'll be affordable and let you create your own electricity and use it at will but here's the real thing I want to leave you with we don't know where this revolution is going to take us we aim to deliver a cheaper Tesla and solar on everyone's rooftop with the associated battery we do not know where it's going to bring us and this is the case with most revolutions I'm going to give you just two examples three examples this is old tree beach in Chicago and in 1920 when the electricity grid was becoming prevalent and the horseless carriage was was kind of moving into the mainstream there's no way people predicted what Oak Street Beach would look like in one lifetime 60 odd years later an even more startling example the Wright brothers in their first flight flew that plane for 58 seconds in 1903 66 years later we landed on the moon that's almost impossible to imagine and the best example I will leave you with is the disruption that has occurred to media I can't imagine anyone predicting that the advent of the devices we use in the advent of the software and social media would have killed media as we knew it merely 15 years ago as scary as that sounds thinks about think about the opportunity we have democratized the media for good or for bad we all have a voice now that is listened to and what I would posit is if we do this right with batteries that same democratization will occur with energy and my point is it's something as pedestrian as a battery that will spur this revolution and what's underneath that is mankind's ability to understand and manipulate matter down at the atomic level to drive us to that battery thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

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Id: _Bfcm6s75OA

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 24 2014