INTERVIEW: Nobel Prize winner M. Stanley Whittingham on storage, the big win, and a Yom Kippur delay

A key figure in the development of the lithium-ion battery, Dr. M. Stanley Whittingham was recently awarded the coveted 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing the honor with fellow researchers John B. Goodenough and Akira Yoshino.

Whittingham, who serves as Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Director at the Institute for Materials Research at Binghamton University, SUNY, holds the original patents on the concept of using intercalation chemistry in high-power density, highly reversible lithium batteries, providing the basis for subsequent discoveries that now power most laptop computers.

The foundation for the lithium-ion battery was laid during the oil crisis of the 1970s, when Whittingham began researching better ways to store energy from renewable sources like wind and solar.

Since then, much of the research done by Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino has been targeted at finding new materials for advancing energy storage, an industry that currently ranks as the most attractive clean energy investment between now and 2023, according to a new ACORE report.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

NPM: What role will lithium-ion batteries play in the renewable energy sector going forward and what impact will this have on storage ability?

SW: Right now, I think they’re playing a key role in both wind and solar farms. I think for both wind and solar–the output is very up and down. Not just on an hourly basis but second to second so they smooth out that power. There’s also a large amount of actual storage in some of these facilities. In West Virginia, there’s a wind farm that has 16 MW of lithium-ion storage there, so they can collect the wind power and give it out when it’s needed, not do it at exactly the same time. And my understanding is there’s an extremely large storage facility going into Southern California, several hundred megawatt hours. They already have approval to go up to 1 GW, which will be by far the largest storage facility in the world.

The other thing, though, is that they are enabling in some places the retirement of what we call old peaker plants. These are power plants that operate maybe five to 10 percent of the time each year. There’s one, a coal power plant, one right here in Binghamton. They put a battery storage facility in about 2009, 2010. Within the year that coal power plant closed down and has not operated since.

I think Bloomberg and BP did a study on lithium-ion batteries. They are now over 90 percent of the storage market. They’ve really taken over in the last year or two. And if you look at somewhere like New York State–the government here has mandated that there be 3 gigawatt hours of battery hours on the grid within the next five or six years.

NPM: Is there anything about your many years of research–a nugget that you can share from your research days–that we haven’t read about and that might be interesting to pass along to our readers? 

I think the key thing about that is when you look at that is how willing a large oil company (Exxon) was willing to support something not in the oil business. They really pushed batteries, fuel cells, solar cells, they got into coal a little bit. And I was just looking at something about this last night. There was a U.S. Senate hearing in about 1976 questioning Exxon as to why they were getting into all these other areas.

NPM: And what did Exxon say? 

SW: That they were going to be an energy company and they were not going to monopolize these other areas. The bottom line is that they are a very well-run company and every now and again they say things they probably shouldn’t say. I recall back in the 70s and 80s that they probably had the best climate change scientists in the world working for them.

NPM: What is the next step now for the lithium-ion battery? Where is it going and are there confirmed plans as to its implementation in specific tech projects going forward? 

SW: The lithium batteries are continuously improving. They’re becoming lower cost. We’re going to see them enter new markets; how fast they enter it is a political decision as much as anything. What you see happening I think–and you can see it–everybody has a smartphone now. It’s not tethered to the table. If you look in third-world countries, they never had a wired phone. They skipped that step altogether. They’ve gone from nothing to a wireless phone. They don’t have the infrastructure to put cables in. In the end I think it’s lower cost to give people wireless phones. For example, I gather that in some African villages they have a solar facility and people plug in their phones there. There’s no grid as we think about it.

NPM: What are your plans now going forward as far as your research? Is there a next phase? 

SW: I’m still funded by the Department of Energy. I have one project that is very fundamental and it involves eight to ten other campuses and national labs. We’re trying to understand batteries better so we’ll improve that. The other one is an applied project run out of Washington State, also DOE, and that one’s goal is to go to 500 watt hours per kilogram–that’s energy that’s double of what we have today.

I don’t know, you may have read that the governor of New York is pushing a greener environment. He wants more electric vehicles, he wants bus fleets to go at least 50 percent electric, he wants the grid to go green. He’s got five or six initiatives to really make things happen. I think us New Yorkers are proud that he, right now, is ahead of California.

NPM: One of the first questions I asked myself when I read about your research was, “Why did he not win the Nobel Prize before now?”

SW: We can’t ask questions like that. We’ll get our wrists slapped. You can find out in 50 years, I’m told. That’s when they open up the books.

NPM: What was your reaction when you found out that you were the Nobel Prize winner?

SW: I was in Germany at the time at a large battery meeting and I stepped out. I gave a keynote lecture in the morning and I stepped out and before I stepped back in the organizer said, “They’re trying to get a hold of you.” So she gave me her phone and it was two of the committee members from Stockholm. Her comment was, “You didn’t seem very happy, just shocked and surprised.” And obviously they told me this would be public in 30 minutes and not to say anything. Now this is a meeting of, I don’t know, 500 people. And it was just before lunch so it became public in that meeting while everybody was still in session. And then, you know, everything let loose.

NPM: Was it hard for you to keep quiet for those 30 minutes?

SW: Not really. I just sat and relaxed for those 30 minutes. I didn’t even go back into the meeting room until it was public. And the biggest challenge was I couldn’t get a hold of my wife to tell her. She was around but it was Yom Kippur that day and she and many others turned off their phone. She found out maybe, I would say, ten hours later, because in the U.S. that was 5:30am in the morning. She said she turned on her phone and it went crazy.