Willing to place itself at the front of technology considered critical to transportation's future, Big Blue is throwing its mass behind batteries. On June 23, IBM announced a mass effort to increase the performance of rechargeable batteries by a factor of ten. The plan is to design batteries that will make it possible for electric vehicles to travel 200 to 300 kilometers on a single charge, up from 50 to 100 miles currently. "We would like to see if we can find a very different battery technology," says Chandrasekhar "Spike" Narayan, who supervises the Science & Technology Organization at IBM Research's Almaden lab in San Jose , Calif. To do that, IBM is leading a group that will create batteries using a combination of lithium and oxygen rather than the potentially flammable lithium-ion mix that now dominates advanced customer electronics and early electric-vehicle batteries. The new batteries could be used to store energy in electric grids as well.
IBM is also willing to reclaim U.S. leadership in battery tech from Asia . While a lot of of the original advance for the batteries that power today's laptop computers and cell phones happened in the U.S. , those batteries now come mainly from Japan and Korea . Industry leaders have called for just this kind of concentrated effort along with concern that the U.S. will miss out on one of the most key technology shifts in history, the switch from gasoline to electricity as the primary power source for light vehicles. The struggle is that the U.S. will trade its current dependence on the Middle East for oil with a new dependence on Asia for vehicle batteries. Battery technology would describe the future, and if we don't act quickly it will go to China and Japan .
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