Leading The Charge To Make Better Electric Cars

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Leading The Charge To Make Better Electric Cars

DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross.

Chances are pretty good you've got some lithium on your right now. Besides
being used to treat bipolar disorder, lithium batteries power our laptops,
iPods and smartphones.

Our guest, science writer Seth Fletcher, says advanced lithium batteries could
hold the key to an environmentally sustainable, oil-independent future. In his
new book, Fletcher chronicles the quest for batteries efficient enough to make
electric cars commercially viable, and he surveys the world's lithium deposits
and methods of extracting the metal.

Seth Fletcher is a senior editor at Popular Science magazine. His writing has
also appeared in Outside, Salon and other publications. His book is called
"Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy."

Well, Seth Fletcher, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's talk a little bit about
electric cars to begin with. It was interesting to read in your book that they
were with us at the beginning of automotive history. Tell us a little about
that, how far they got.

Mr. SETH FLETCHER (Senior Editor, Popular Science; Author, "Bottled Lightning:
Superbatteries, Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy"): Well, when the
automobile first emerged at the end of the 19th century, there were electric
cars, steam-powered cars, gas-powered cars all sharing the road.

It was unclear which one was going to win out. And in fact, electric cars had
some early advantages, which was really gas cars were loud and dirty and nasty,
and they had to be started with this hand-crank, which could sometimes backfire
and break your arm. And electric cars were clean and quiet and sort of
civilized, and they worked well in the city.

You know, they were used as taxis in Manhattan and Philadelphia and a few other
cities. But eventually what happened is that gas cars got better, eventually
the automatic starter came along. And once people got a taste for touring, as
they called it, which is just driving out in the country, one major weakness of
the electric car was thrown into stark relief, which is limited range and long
charge times.

So if you were driving out in the country, and you ran out of charge, you were
stuck. If you were driving a gas car, you could stop and get a tin of gasoline
from the general store and fill up in a matter of minutes. That problem has
actually plagued the electric car ever since.

DAVIES: OK. Now, there's been interest in electric cars. There was a flurry in
the late '70s, which we can talk about, and of course more recently. Tell us
why batteries were such a critical element of this technology.

Mr. FLETCHER: You know, you need energy to make a car go, and that's how you
store energy in an electric car. I mean, with a gas tank, one of the benefits
of gasoline and other liquid hydrocarbon fuels is you can just pour them into a
tank or a barrel and let it sit there. It's easy to store.

You can't do that with electrons. They have to be stored in a chemical system,
and that's the battery. It's - without getting too technical, it's basically a
highly controlled chemical reaction.

It's the best way we've come up with to store electricity. It's a tricky
problem. You know, if you want to take electricity on the road with you, you
have to have a way to store it.

DAVIES: Now, you tell us in the book that batteries go back to the early 19th
century, and they've been made with a variety of different materials, you know,
as technology has advanced. What makes lithium particularly well-suited for
batteries?

Mr. FLETCHER: Well, it just has intrinsic characteristics that make it the
chemist's ideal raw battery material. And the reason for that is because it's
the third element on the periodic table, which means it's the lightest solid
element, and it's also highly reactive, which means it just - it's so eager to
get rid of its outer electron and engage in chemical reactions. And it actually
doesn't exist in its pure form in nature. You have to process it out of
minerals.

If you've mining for lithium, you're never going to find big arm-sized veins of
lithium metal because they just don't exist. That reactivity makes it difficult
to deal with, but it also makes it possible to create a really high-energy
chemical system. And that's what you want out of a battery.

You want to be able to pack as much energy in the lightest object possible. And
lithium, because of these fundamental elemental characteristics, is a very
attractive option for doing that.

DAVIES: And while we're at it, what are some of the other interesting uses of
lithium outside of batteries?

Mr. FLETCHER: Well, the most famous that everyone asks me about is in
psychopharmacology. I mean it's used - lithium carbonate is used to regulate
bipolar disorder. It's also used in aluminum alloys for aircraft. You can use
it to make, you know, aluminum alloys that are lighter and stronger. It's used
in greases and ceramics, glasses.

It's been a specialty chemical for most of the time that we've been using it.
Only recently have people really started to pay attention to lithium, and it's
because of what's happened first with consumer electronics and now with the re-
emergence of the electric car running on lithium-based batteries.

DAVIES: And it used to be added to soft drinks?

Mr. FLETCHER: Yes, actually. That's - it was used as sort of a curative in the
late 19th century. I mean, it was a mineral water. And it was added to soft
drinks. Actually, 7-Up was originally a lithiated beverage, and it was marketed
as a hangover cure.

Eventually, lithium was sort of regulated out of soft drinks, and then - so it
became the de-lithiated 7-Up we have today. But, yeah, it was sort of a faddish
curative towards the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.

DAVIES: OK, let's talk about the development of lithium batteries for
automobiles. There was a burst of effort in the late '70s to develop electric
vehicles and therefore better batteries, I guess driven primarily by the Arab
oil embargo and rising gas prices, right?

Mr. FLETCHER: Right. Well, it actually began a little earlier than that, with
the - when the smog problem in particularly the Los Angeles basin became so
acute that, you know, at least one California politician was talking about an
outright ban on the internal combustion engine, which it's kind of shocking to
imagine.

You can never really imagine someone proposing banning the internal combustion
engine today, but the smog problem was so immediate and so acute that people
were talking about this, and car companies and researchers started looking for
ways to develop alternatives, among them electric vehicles.

And then that sort of established a base of research and interest from industry
and academia that really accelerated when the oil crises hit in the early '70s.
And that lasted pretty much throughout the '70s. And it wasn't until the
recession hit at the end of the '80s, and then oil became cheap again, and we
entered this new era of cheap oil in the booming '80s that nobody really cared
about electric vehicles anymore.

Nobody - as long as gas is cheap, there is not much of an incentive to develop
alternatives unless, of course, you're concerned about environmental impact
from carbon emissions. And that's part of the equation today, of course. But,
yeah, it came out of this environmental crisis and then this energy crisis.

DAVIES: So how did lithium batteries become widely used in small electronics?

Mr. FLETCHER: What happened in the '80s in Japan, the consumer electronics boom
was beginning, and at the same time, toxic batteries, with mercury and lead and
cadmium and other heavy metals, were building up in Japanese landfills, and
they were contaminating the environment.

So, Japanese electronics manufacturers were looking for not only just - not
only a higher energy battery and a lighter battery, but a less toxic battery.

And Sony eventually picked up some of the research that was already published.
And in 1991, they came out with a lithium ion battery as we know it today. And
it proliferated. It enabled the proliferation of the cell phone, the laptop. It
was one of the major breakthroughs that led to all of the portable gadgets we
have today.

DAVIES: And so, what are some of the challenges in making lithium ion batteries
big enough to power a car?

Mr. FLETCHER: Well, I mean, you can link a lot of the existing batteries
together to power a car. The Tesla roadster, which is that really hot, electric
sports car that came out and was unveiled in 2006 by this California start-up,
that's actually powered by 6,831 lithium ion laptop cells all wired in series
and placed in this giant box and controlled by computer circuitry.

And so they figured out how to do it using the commodity batteries that were
already out in the world. The key challenge here is to come up with something
that is - that will store as much energy as possible, that's really safe and
that will last a really long time.

And that has led the major automakers to work with battery makers to find
alternative chemistries. One of the drawbacks of the batteries that are in our
laptops and cell phones is that the particular electrochemistry they use has
some safety drawbacks.

I mean, you remember the exploding laptops I think it was 2006, a bunch of Sony
laptops exploded. Now, if you talk to the guys from Tesla, they will say that's
not really a problem, we can engineer the system so that it's safe.

Mr. FLETCHER: But the biggest automakers have decided to go a more cautious
route and look for alternative chemistries, which are safer but maybe less
energetic. And then they have to come up with ways to package those cells into
a big battery that does everything they need it to do.

There are a bunch of different ways to mix the chemistry to make different
kinds of lithium-ion batteries. But in almost all cases, you're giving
something up.

You can make it safer, but you're giving up a little bit of energy. You can
have more energy, but you're giving up some power, which is the ability to dump
out energy really fast for accelerating. So finding that balance is something
that carmakers and scientists are still struggling with. I don't know if
there's any single answer yet.

DAVIES: We're speaking with Seth Fletcher. He's a senior editor at Popular
Science magazine and the author of the new book "Bottled Lightning." We'll talk
more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: If you're just joining us, our guest is Seth Fletcher. He's a senior
editor at Popular Science. He's written a new book called "Bottled Lightning:
Superbatteries, Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy."

OK, so now that there is renewed interest in electric vehicles because oil has
gotten more expensive, because it's considered a national environmental and
energy priority, you've got several manufacturers coming up with some new
products. The Chevy Volt may be the best known.

Now, let's just get some basic. How is the Chevy Volt different from, say, the
Prius?

OK, the Prius is what's known as - it's a conventional hybrid, sometimes called
a full hybrid. It has a small battery and a gas engine, and those work together
to drive the car. And it can drive on short distances on battery power alone.
But we're talking, you know, a couple miles and at low speeds.

That battery is not charged from the grid. It's just charged by the engine.
It's this self-sealed system. It cuts back a little bit on gas usage, and it's
very good for a lot of applications.

What the Volt does is it takes a much larger battery that charges from the
grid, and it has a small gasoline engine that, once that battery is depleted to
a certain extent, kicks in and feeds electricity to the battery. It's a plug-in
hybrid model.

Now, something like the Nissan Leaf, which is a purely electric vehicle, has no
gasoline engine whatsoever. It's just all batteries and motors and plugs
straight into the grid, charges from your wall, and that's - those are the ends
of the spectrum on hybridization.

And there are a bunch of different ways you can combine batteries, motors and
gas engines and diesel engines in between. And I think right now carmakers are
trying to figure out which of those is going to be the best bet for the most
people.

DAVIES: When you look at a vehicle like the Volt, how long does it take to
recharge its batteries when they're depleted? And what's the energy cost to a
consumer of doing that, of taking the juice out of their home grid?

Mr. FLETCHER: As a general rule of thumb, these cars can all charge overnight
from your 220. You need a dedicated charger. They can also plug straight into a
110 outlet, but it takes a really long time for those to charge. So most people
are not going to go for that.

As far as the energy costs, I mean, it depends on the cost of electricity in
your area, but they're compared to four plasma TVs or an appliance like a
washing machine or a dryer, something like that. There are numerous studies
comparing the cost per mile of gasoline versus electricity. And I believe in
almost all cases, it is cheaper.

DAVIES: The electricity is cheaper.

Mr. FLETCHER: Yes, yes.

DAVIES: Now, you actually went and drove an electric car. You drove the Chevy -
I guess you've driven several of them, right?

Mr. FLETCHER: Yes, yes.

DAVIES: Tell us: Is it a fundamentally different experience from driving an
internal combustion vehicle?

Mr. FLETCHER: You know, yes and no because what is fundamentally different is
that it's silent. When you get in and turn the car on, you don't hear, you
know, you don't hear an engine firing up. It's just on. You hit the
accelerator, and you go. The only sound is rolling tire noise and wind noise.

And so, that's very different. And another thing that's different is that they
are very fast from a stop because they - one quirk of the electric motor is
that they have all of their torque available immediately.

So from a stoplight, a car like the Nissan Leaf, which has a top speed of like
90 miles an hour, 94 miles an hour, will feel very fast compared to any other
hatchback like it when you're just driving around town.

So they're fun to drive. And I say no, they're not fundamentally different
because the carmakers have worked very hard to get around the traditional of
the electric car as a golf cart. They worked very, very hard to make the Volt
and the Leaf in particular familiar.

You know, when you get in, it feels like a nicely appointed sort of midrange
compact car. It feels familiar, with enough high-tech flourishes that you feel
like you're in something special. You have the unique drive characteristics of
an electric car. But it's not going to freak people out. They want it to be
comfortable and alluring.

DAVIES: And are these cars now widely available? Can you get them in showrooms?

Mr. FLETCHER: In some places. I wouldn't say widely available, but they're
being gradually rolled out and will eventually be available nationwide.

Right now, you can get them in East Coast, West Coast markets, certain cities
throughout the country, Colorado, you know, Austin, Texas. You can get Leafs in
Nashville because Nissan is there. And so, it's a very big thing for that
community.

But the reason they've done this gradual roll-out is because buying an electric
car and owning one is different enough that they want to have time to hand-hold
people through the process at the beginning.

They don't want any horror stories of people getting a car and not knowing how
to charge it and trying to install their own charger in their garage, and it
shorts out their, you know, their wiring.

They want to take this slowly and make sure that the dealers are trained, that
the technicians are trained. And so that's why it's a slow - that's part of the
reason why it's a slow roll-out.

So right now, I think that Nissan has said it's going to build 50,000, I
believe, 50,000 or 60,000 Leafs for the 2011 model year, and there will be
about 10,000 Volts throughout the country in 2011.

DAVIES: And how do the costs compare to a comparable gas-powered car?

Mr. FLETCHER: They're more expensive, and that's one of the drawbacks right
now. They're not ludicrously expensive, but the Volt starts at $41 and change,
$42, and if you get options, it gets up closer to $44,000.

There's a $7,500 federal tax credit, which brings that down. There are state
tax credits, too. Colorado has a very good one, and so does California, for
example. But they're more expensive.

And the Leaf starts at roughly $32,000, between $32 and $34, depending on the
options. So they are more expensive than conventional comparable vehicle, but
that's - I believe that's just the price to pay for new technology.

I mean, the problem right now is that batteries are built in such small
quantities, it's such a new thing. You know, of course there are billions of
lithium ion laptop cells and cell phone cells built every year.

But the batters that go into these cars are so new and built in such small
quantities that they're still expensive. And the next step is to scale them up,
and the more of these cars that are built, the more batteries that are built,
the prices will come down.

I think that the automakers understand that soon, probably within the next five
years, they really need to be able to sell these cars without government
subsidies because you can't have something that's subsidized forever.

DAVIES: So let's talk about what it'll take for electric cars to be attractive
not just to people who are affluent and particularly interested in
environmental or energy savings or, you know, are gadget buffs, but folks that
- just ordinary consumers that want, you know, value, power, economy.

One thing that would help would be cheaper batteries, and that will happen as
production gears up, right?

Mr. FLETCHER: Yes, yeah.

DAVIES: And then what about the relatively short range that it has? I mean, how
far can one go on one of these now, and what are the prospects for changing
that?

Mr. FLETCHER: Well, in a purely electric car like the Nissan Leaf, you can go
100 miles, roughly. If you're driving fast on the interstate, less. If you're
driving cautiously around town, a little more. You know, I've heard of people
getting 120 miles out of it.

But that limitation means that you're not going to take a road trip, and it's
going to be a second or third car primarily for most people. And the Volt of
course gets about 40 to 50 miles off of a charge, less of course if you're
driving, again, fast on the highway. But then it has the backup gas engine to
extend that range.

And I think that is part of the reason - that range limitation, once again is
part of the reason that many people are betting on cars like the Volt and other
plug-in hybrids to be the sort of fix-all solution for most American drivers.
Around town, you never use any gas, but you can take a road trip - you can
still take a road trip in it if you don't mind buying gas.

DAVIES: Seth Fletcher's book is called "Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries,
Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy." He'll be back in the second half of
the show.

I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross.

We're speaking with Popular Science senior editor, Seth Fletcher, about lithium
batteries, the prospects for a commercially viable electric car, and the
dramatic rise in the extraction and use of lithium. His new book is called
"Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy."

Let's talk about lithium itself, the raw material.

Mr. FLETCHER: Mm-hmm.

DAVIES: What does it look and feel like?

Mr. FLETCHER: Lithium metal is too volatile to exist in nature in its pure
form. You have to extract it from minerals. But once you've isolated it, it's a
bright silver metal. It's shiny. It's soft. It's sort of like cold brie cheese.
And it has to be stored in oil to keep it from reacting with the moisture in
the air. Lithium carbonate is the way that it's generally traded in the world
market, and this is just a powder that looks like baby powder. And it's sold as
a chemical in bags. So those are two primary forms in which you encounter
lithium.

DAVIES: OK. And where does one find it? And how is it mined or harvested?

Mr. FLETCHER: The majority of it, right now, at least for batteries, comes from
Chile. The Chile - northern Chile in the Atacama Desert is the sort of
wellspring of world lithium supply. It's also somewhat true of Argentina and
northern Argentina. And then Bolivia has large reserves, but those are
untapped. Most of it comes from these high altitude salt lakes in the Atacama
Desert. And what has happened over the years, these are ancient salt lakes that
dried up and left behind this sponge of salt. And what has happened over tens
of thousands of years is that melt water has come down from the Andes
Mountains, annually, leaching out minerals from the volcanic rock along the
way, eventually it settles in these salt lakes - salt flats, excuse me. And
what these companies can do is they just go in and pump the water out. Pump it
up, put it in pools that they bulldoze, bulldoze walls of salt, lay down
plastic so it doesn't leach back in to salar - salar is Spanish for salt flat -
and they let it evaporate in the sun until it's concentrated to about six
percent lithium. Then they truck it down to the coast and process it into
lithium carbonate, which is the powder looking substance.

DAVIES: So no blasting? No gouging?

Mr. FLETCHER: No blasting. No gouging. No blasting. No gouging. No, it's a
pretty gentle process.

DAVIES: No fracking? No toxic chemicals?

Mr. FLETCHER: No fracking. No toxic chemicals. No fracking. No. It's, you know,
the Salar de Atacama actually holds a flamingo reserve a few miles north of the
largest lithium mines on the planet. And, in fact, it's a little misleading to
speak of it as mining. These companies primarily consider themselves chemical
companies - chemical processing companies. The SQM, which is the world leader
in this market, they actually produce a lot more potassium fertilizer which
they get out of the same brine. They get it out at the same time as the
lithium. And, in fact, for a long time lithium production piggybacked on the
production of potassium for fertilizer, for plant food. Yeah, SQM's number one
business is actually specialty plant nutrition. And lithium, until recently,
has been a sideline.

DAVIES: Now that there's more interest in electric cars, is there a concern
that, you know, the known lithium deposits will be inadequate for our needs in
the future?

Mr. FLETCHER: Not anytime soon. I - these things are hard to forecast 100 years
out, of course, because nobody knows what's going to happen. But when I was at
the Annual Lithium Supply and Markets Conference last January, an analyst got
up and basically told all the miners in the audience that there was going to be
such an enormous oversupply in the last half of this decade that only the
strongest were going to survive. There are a lot of people getting into the
lithium mining business right now, but there seems to be more than enough to go
around. And so I haven't seen anybody express concern about lithium supplies
for any foreseeable reasonable number of these cars, you know, in batteries.

Of course, I'll just point out a misperception. A lot of people speak of
lithium as if its oil. They talk about Bolivia or Chile being the Saudi Arabia
of lithium. But you don't burn lithium. Lithium is a metal used to make a
device that stores energy that's produced by other means. So it can be
recycled. The batteries can be reused. There is plenty to go around for quite
some time.

DAVIES: And there are lithium deposits in the U.S.?

Mr. FLETCHER: There are. Yeah. There's actually a salt lake source in northern
Nevada called Silver Peak. And then there's also a large clay-based deposit in
northern Nevada which this Western lithium company is developing. It's
interesting. Actually, Chevron discovered this in the 70s when it was thought
that lithium might be useful for fusion reactors. And, of course, fusion
reactors never came about, but they knew it was there. So this company has now
taken it over and they're developing it and they seem to have a fairly good
shot at opening up this very large resource here in the United States.

DAVIES: Yeah. And I have to say, I mean I was really fascinated to read your
description of what's going on in Bolivia.

Mr. FLETCHER: Mm-hmm.

DAVIES: A lot I didn't know, there, about political currents and how they
affect both relations with the United States and the possibilities for lithium
extraction there. Just talk a little bit about the politics of resource
extraction in Bolivia and how they're playing out.

Mr. FLETCHER: Right. Evo Morales is the president of Bolivia, he is a socialist
and he is a Aymara Indian, which the indigenous people it's - Bolivia is - the
estimates vary, but I think is 60 percent indigenous. And the people there feel
they have gotten pretty thoroughly screwed over by foreign mining interests for
hundreds of years, you know, since the conquest in Spanish. And now they're
trying to prevent these resources from being exploited by foreign interests. I
mean they're paranoid. And they want to develop it themselves. But the problem
is that they don't necessarily have the technical expertise it's going to take
to make this work.

DAVIES: And they have, you know, potential partners, some of whom want to
actually develop not just extraction infrastructure in Bolivia but actually
processing, and even on electric car industry?

Mr. FLETCHER: Mm-hmm. They've had a lot of suitors from France, from Japan,
from China. As far as I know, they've rebuffed all of them. That was at least
the case when I was there last year. For exactly this reason, and it's a very
sensitive political issue, domestically, because the people who live in the
area around the Salar de Uyuni are very poor and have been known to protest and
riot against the mining companies that are operating there. And there's a big
regional conflict between the people who live in that area and the people who
live in the north, who are sort of in charge of it. So even within Bolivia
there's a concern that the people of Potosi, which is the state where the Salar
de Uyuni is located, are not going to get their fair shake, or that this is -
all the money is going to end up going to the elite in La Paz.

So it's a very complicated domestic situation. And it's almost kind of tragic,
because it could potentially be a boon for that area. If - even aside from
lithium, they have enormous deposits of potassium, just like in the Salar de
Atacama, so this is something they could sell and they can make money and
develop the area. But the political situation is so fractious that it's hard to
see it happening fast enough and reliably enough for, you know, multinational
corporations to really put up with it for too long when there's plenty of
lithium to be had elsewhere.

DAVIES: We're talking with Seth Fletcher. His new book about electric cars and
lithium batteries is called "Bottled Lightning."

We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: If you're just joining us, our guest is Seth Fletcher. He's a senior
editor for popular science and the author of the new book "Bottled Lightning:
Superbatteries, Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy."

Now are lithium batteries used to store power from electric grids?

Mr. FLETCHER: They certainly can be. And battery companies are hoping that this
is going to be a big new market. And it's, right now it's just being done in
grid scale storage - grid scale energy storage is what this emerging industry
is called. And right now it's just being done in a couple R&D projects here and
there. But the idea is basically that if you take a tractor-trailer and you
fill it with lithium ion batteries and they're placed in server racks, you walk
- it looks like the command post for some secret, you know, CIA supercomputing
project. You walk in and it looks like a server farm in a tractor-trailer.

But those are filled with lithium ion batteries being cooled by fans. And these
can be used to store electricity from solar farms, from wind power. And the
idea is that by storing energy from renewable sources like this, to use
whenever you want it, you can make intermittent sources like solar and wind
much more reliable. Because the problem, of course, with solar is that the sun
doesn't always shine. The problem with the wind is that the wind doesn't always
blow. And sometimes the energy that is generated when the wind is blowing isn't
used. So if you can store it, then you can develop a much more reliable source
of energy from renewable sources. And the electric power industry is very
interested in this.

DAVIES: Do advances in battery technology hold the prospect of, kind of,
transforming the electric grid in the way we get and store and use domestic
energy?

Mr. FLETCHER: It certainly could. I mean the grid is such a huge and
complicated and antiquated system that storage really needs to be a part of any
reinvention of the grid. And cars actually can play a certain role in that. I
mean one dream, and this is technically difficult but a lot of people are
working on this, is the idea of they call it V2G or vehicle-to-grid. And the
idea being that if you have your electric car plugged in and do you have a
smart meter, and the smart grid can not only decide when the most efficient
time to charge your car is; but if it suddenly needs energy it could even pull
some from your battery and pay you for it. That's technically difficult and a
long way off. But ultimately, you know, the dream here is to have this smart
system where energy is stored instead of wasted in giant grid batteries and in
cars, and it moves omni-directionally. You know, it's moved around and not
wasted and used as efficiently as possible.

DAVIES: Now, of course, one of the arguments in favor of electric cars is that
they don't impact the environment when they're, you know, running down the
street on electricity. But others say well, you know, there are environmental
impacts of producing that electricity in the first place. We get a lot of
electricity from coal-fired plants.

Mr. FLETCHER: Well, I mean I think you have to think of electric cars as part
of a larger system. I mean if you look at the energy mix of the United States
as a whole, not all electricity comes from coal. A lot of it comes from
hydroelectric, natural gas. Mile per mile, an electric vehicle emits less CO2
than a gas powered vehicle. You know, if it comes from the dirtiest coal-fired
power plant, it's not a dramatic improvement in CO2. But, again, electric cars
are part of a bigger system that we need to build. We need to reinvent the
grid. We need to move to cleaner energy production. And then electric cars can
become, you know, truly zero emission if they are running off of wind or solar.

But you're right. I mean there are trade-offs for all energy production.

DAVIES: If electric cars become far more widely available, would that put
stress on a power grid if everybody's plugging in overnight?

Mr. FLETCHER: Not anytime soon. There's a lot of slack electricity in the grid
right now. Millions of electric cars could be charged using the energy that
just goes sort of unused overnight, and particularly if you get people to
charge overnight by, you know, giving them a break on the price of electricity
overnight - time of use metering, as it's called. Where there is a potential
problem is if you get a bunch of electric cars, say, in a cul-de-sac that has
an old transformer, it could blow that transformer. That transformer might need
to be replaced, but that's a pretty small problem. I mean transformers are
replaced all the time.

You know, if you're talking about replacing all 300 million cars in America
with electric vehicles, it's not going to happen for so long that who knows
what's could happen in the meantime. The grid could become much more efficient.
Who knows what we'll be generating electricity with then.

But I'd you ask, you know, people like the Electric Power Research Institute,
they will tell you that several million electric vehicles in a grid right now
is no problem. Again, if you just need to watch where they are, replace the
transformers if they're old, and if they're going in an area where a bunch of
electric cars are going in.

DAVIES: At the end of your book you describe some of the cutting edge research
into this stuff. And you describe this concept: the lithium air battery.

Mr. FLETCHER: Mm-hmm.

DAVIES: Explain what that is and how it might change things.

Mr. FLETCHER: So the lithium air battery is the dream. It's the ultimate goal
for a lot of researchers and it's very far horizon. It's just a battery that
reacts on the - it works on the reaction of lithium with oxygen. There are many
proposed ways to build one or to design one. But the idea is that it has
incredibly high potential charge capacity. So it could be - it could store as
much energy - usable energy maybe as gasoline. This is debatable contentious
point, but this is what proponents of lithium air will argue that, you know,
when you factor in the amount of energy that's lost through, you know, a gas
engine and wheels and breaking and everything, lithium air could theoretically
match the energy density or at least approach the energy density of gasoline.

Gasoline stores a lot of energy. This is why it has powered our economy for so
long. And batteries right now pale in comparison to the energy storage. You
know, the amount of energy that you can fit in a gallon of gasoline is pretty
tremendous. And lithium air is one of these far horizon chemistries that people
see that potentially approaching the energy density of gasoline and that's
ultimately what it's going to take for us to have a car that - an electric car
that you can hop in and go 500 miles on a charge and then recharge very
quickly.

I was at one conference one year when somebody mentioned lithium air, and a
bunch of engineers in the audience just laughed. But if you talk to the people
who are seriously working on this, they won't laugh. It's their dream. The
ultimate goal of the battery researcher is to match the energy density of
gasoline and lithium air offers one possible way forward towards that.

DAVIES: Now what the government does or doesn't do can have a powerful impact
here both in, you know, regulations which encourage the use of energy-efficient
vehicles, as well as, you know, subsidies - either directly to consumers for
buying them or, you know, to companies for developing the research and
manufacturing capability. Are special interest politics a big part of this?

Mr. FLETCHER: Hmm. Well, the Obama administration is very supportive of the
battery industry - battery research, and I'm not sure that that has to do with
special interest politics so much as the interest of the people in the
administration, particularly Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who is very, a big
supporter of the electrification of the automobile, battery research. People
who believe in electric cars have the ear of the administration.

But special interest politics, I mean, you could look at the budget debate
that's going around right now. There's pressure from one side to cut funding
for low emissions vehicles while keeping subsidies for oil companies. And yeah,
you see this play out all the time.

DAVIES: Yeah. Just as I listen to you describe the possibility of getting
batteries to the point where they really compete with gas-powered engines, I
could certainly imagine, you know, existing oil companies paying lobbyists to,
you know, defeat subsidies for consumers that buy electric cars and cut back on
some of that research money.

Mr. FLETCHER: Absolutely. I'm not sure how much of a direct threat the oil
companies right now feel that the electric automobile is. They're insanely
profitable and electric cars are going to be produced in small numbers for
quite a while. But ultimately, yeah, this is going to be a battle between the
people who currently run the energy economy and stand to lose out if we shift
to something completely different. How that will play out, I don't know. It'll
be very interesting to watch.

DAVIES: Well, Seth Fletcher, it's been really interesting. Thanks so much.

Mr. FLETCHER: Thank you.

DAVIES: Seth Fletcher's new book is called "Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries,
Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy." You can read an excerpt on our
website, freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, Ken Tucker listens to the new album from Brad Paisley.

This is FRESH AIR.
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Brad Paisley: 'Country Music,' Defined

DAVE DAVIES, host:

Brad Paisley is one of the biggest stars in country music, admired especially
for his guitar playing and for the way he mixes elements of country and rock
music without pandering to either audience. His new album is called "This Is
Country Music," and rock critic Ken Tucker says it's less a manifesto than an
enjoyable way to hear him expand his fan base.

(Soundbite of song, "This Is Country Music")

Mr. BRAD PAISLEY (Musician): (Singing) You're not supposed to say the word
cancer in a song. And telling folks Jesus is the answer can rub 'em wrong. It
ain't hip to sing about tractors, trucks, little towns, and Mama, yeah, that
might be true. But this is country music and we do.

Do you like to...

KEN TUCKER: Brad Paisley doesn't possess the most distinctive voice in country
music, and his guitar solos have a lot of arena-friendly rock 'n' roll
flashiness. But he's become a huge country star on the basis of just this
combination of aw-shucks ordinariness and ostentatious skill.

On the title song that began this review," Paisley recites country-music
cliches and then injects them with value by reminding us that many cliches are
truths. Over a tight little melody that deliberately avoids pumping itself up
with hot airiness, he boldly asserts the obvious: that some of these images -
trucks and tractors, the American flag and senior citizens – aren't hip, and
they sometimes get politicized. But they still exist in pure forms unto
themselves, certainly not in the pop culture of the young, but in the small
towns he also salutes. In a similar way, Paisley small-scales the important
stuff in a song such as "Toothbrush," about the little moments in everyday life
that resonate emotionally.

(Soundbite of song, "Toothbrush")

Mr. PAISLEY: (Singing) Love starts with a toothbrush, a big razor and a Dixie
cup. A little splash of aftershave, before you leave for that first date. I see
stars in both your eyes, after that long kiss goodnight.

Forever starts with a suitcase. Sneaking out the window to get away...

TUCKER: "This Is Country Music" is Paisley's follow-up to his best album to
date, "American Saturday Night," from 2009. That was an unusually direct and
provocative collection that included "Welcome to the Future," a song
celebrating the election of Barack Obama – and was a bit polarizing for
Paisley's audience.

He recently told The New York Times, "American Saturday Night" was sort of was
my "The Times They Are A-Changin" album. It was, you know, telling the choir to
think outside the box. Then, he added, but it didn't feel right to do that
again, and, referring to the new album, we're not asking people to go places
where it's not comfortable because at some point, the choir's going to go to
another church. In other words, "This Is Country Music" is very consciously a
more conservative effort, an album meant to reassure rather than challenge.

There's the generous 15 songs on "This Is Country Music," and rather than
offering filler, the album is programmed in a shrewd way. It's front-loaded
with the most commercial, pop-catchy tunes, such as the title song, Paisley's
salute to the '80s country group Alabama, and a duet with former American Idol
Carrie Underwood.

As the album proceeds, however, it becomes more hardcore country. There's some
gospel bluegrass with guest star Marty Stuart, an eccentric salute to Clint
Eastwood called "Eastwood," and what's probably the best song on the album,
"Don't Drink the Water," a duet with Blake Shelton consisting of fiddle and
steel-guitar-infused honky-tonk.

(Soundbite of song, "Don't Drink the Water")

Mr. PAISLEY: (Singing) Empty house, empty rooms, empty bottle of Patron. I need
to go out but not around here. There ain't nowhere we haven't gone. There's
this travel agent that I know who says Cozumel is real nice. And so he got me a
deal on a flight and a room and a little bit of free advice.

Don't drink the water. I told him that's OK. I ain't going down to Mexico to
drink the water anyway.

Blake ain't you been there before?

Mr. BLAKE SHELTON (Musician): Yeah, I've been there a time or two. They got
some sweet senoritas that are more than glad to meet you. But I'm telling you
boy whatever you do.

Don't drink the water.

TUCKER: "This Is Country Music" contains a few of Paisley's characteristic
novelty songs, like "Working on a Tan" and "Be the Lake" - which I only wish
was as Zen-like as its title sounds. And by allowing guest appearances from Don
Henley and Sheryl Crow, Paisley provides a safe haven for middle-aged rockers
searching for where their middle-aged audiences went.

Turns out, like almost everyone else who's actually buying music instead of
plucking it off the Internet for free, those folks are listening to some form
of country music, and Brad Paisley has made himself the red-hot center of this
commercial universe.

DAVIES: Ken Tucker is editor-at-large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
Brad Paisley's new album "This Is Country Music." You can join us on Facebook
and follow us on Twitter at nprfreshair. And you can download podcasts of our
show at freshair.npr.org.

(Soundbite of song, "Old Alabama")

DAVIES: For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.

Mr. PAISLEY: (Singing) She'd rather wear a pair of cut-off jeans than a fancy
evening dress. And with her windows rolled down and her hair all blown around,
she's a hot Southern mess.

She'll take a beer over white wine and a campfire over candle light. And when
it comes to love, oh her idea of a romantic night...
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