Mateo Jaramillo 向我介绍他的电池公司时，随口提到“电池效率并不特别高”。哦？那么这听起来似乎是不好的吧？
但 Jaramillo 不这么认为，他是 Form Energy 的首席执行官。效率是指电池提供电量与充电时输入电量之间的比率。当然，更高的效率总是好一些，但在他瞄准的市场中，最重要的是降低制造电池的成本。
Form Energy 电池中的核心成分并非昂贵的锂，而是古老的铁——人们在铁器时代就开始使用它（这场持续大约2600年的文明结束了）。当 Form Energy 的电池中的铁氧化时产生电力。它们通过用电来将氧化物还原回铁的方式进行充电。
Form Energy 面向的目标市场包括需要在电力丰富时储存能源并在需求增加时释放的电能公司。世界上某些地区安装了大量的风能和太阳能产能，导致某些市场的电价往往为负数：电能提供商甚至会付钱给消费者接受其电力，因为这比关闭发电机更便宜。
对于这些电能公司来说，即使建造成本低廉且能够储存大量廉价（有时甚至是负价）电力供日后销售的电池农场听起来是个划算的好交易，尽管这些系统体积庞大且效率低下。Form Energy 在8月份开始了它第一个商业项目的工作——这是为一家名为Great River Energy 的非营利性电力合作社在明尼苏达州建立的。
可能在未来不会有铁空气电池进入手机或电动汽车市场，但 Form Energy 并不是在试图征服每一个领域。他们遵循着英国人常说的“因地制宜”原则。
我在开始这封简报时提到 Form Energy，原因有两个：一是我热爱将电能从氧化中捕捉的想法；二是它是中国企业推动美国重返电池开发领先行列潮流中的一个部分。
美国让锂离子电池市场溜走了。约翰·古登保，德克萨斯大学的物理学家，在2019年分享了化学诺贝尔奖，这源于他对包括于1980年发明出更优的锂离子电池阴极材料在内的突破性成果。一家试图商业化这项技术的初创公司得到了奥巴马政府数亿美元的支持，但最终破产倒闭；而中国的一家公司则在2013年从破产中收购了这家公司——A123系统公司。与此同时，随着美国人的退出，其他中国企业纷纷涌入锂离子电池生产。
如今，中国在全球生产锂离子电池方面占据绝对主导地位，这些电池被用于电动汽车、手机、笔记本电脑、无绳工具等众多产品上。根据韩国的SNE研究数据，在今年前七个月中，仅一家中国公司CATL就占到了全球电动车电池产量的38%，而另一家公司比亚迪则以16%的份额位居第二。没有美国公司在前十之列。
不过，对于对抗全球变暖来说，好消息是，由于中国的锂离子电池价格和太阳能板（用于给这些电池充电）的价格下降了，这对全球来说是件好事情——正如我的同事大卫·华莱士沃尔斯上个月所写。但若能让美国不仅购买更多，而且还要生产这种地球拯救设备，这将对美国经济有益。
现在情况正在朝更好的方向发展。在拜登总统的领导下，《两党基础设施法》和《通货膨胀减少法案》中提供的激励措施推动了电池领域的大规模投资，包括提高本土锂离子电池生产产能的能力。此外，能源部斥巨资研发新型电池，包括前景光明的固态电池，这种电池使用固体电解质替代液体或凝胶。该计划还包括“长时储能冲击”，其目标是在至少提供10小时电力持续时间的电池中，到2030年将能量存储成本降低90%。
去年，拜登总统发布了一项行政命令：“当受到美国政府支持的新技术和产品被开发出来时，它们应尽可能在国内生产。”
联邦政府的举措“模仿了中国十年前的做法——通过需求和供给侧补贴以及政府支持来构建供应链”，哥伦比亚大学全球能源政策中心在去年的一份报告中如此表示。
考虑到中国在锂离子电池方面拥有巨大的领先优势，我很难想象美国能赶上，尽管仅仅满足国内需求也是一个受欢迎的发展。我认为美国超越中国的最有可能的路径将是新型技术，如 Form Energy 的铁空气电池。
我对电池设计师的创新力感到着迷——他们在元素周期表中寻找具有理想电负性的元素以及其他特征。能源部的研究与开发分支 ARPA-E 正在资助一些研究公司致力于电池化学的研发，包括锂空气、铝空气、锌空气、钠金属、钠β-氧化物流体、钒红流体和普鲁士蓝染料（真的）。除此之外还有非电池储能技术，例如泵送水至山顶或将热量以熔盐形式储存。
“一招制胜不可能让事实经得起推敲。”俄勒冈州威尔逊维尔的 ESS 公司首席执行官埃里克·德塞尔胡斯告诉我。 “有多少种沙拉酱？我们根本无法相信一种储能技术将赢得胜利。”
自2012年以来，一个由科技资助的思想库信息技术和创新基金会一直在敲响钟声，呼吁美国将重点放在电池开发上。该机构7月发布的一份报告称，“美国对中国电动汽车的回应应包括加快技术创新的研发投资、刺激消费者采用电动汽车（例如通过部署充电基础设施）以及防御性贸易措施。”
我与这份报告的作者 Stephen Ezell 谈了谈，他是基金会的全球创新政策副总裁。关于美中电池竞赛的走向他说道：“科技政策学者将在二十年后回过头来看看这个问题，并提出是否更具肌肉的政策措施能否成功。”我认为只要这成为国家的重点，“我们就能成功”。
美国的中间阶级在国家分化加剧的情况下缩小了规模，这种分化将全国分为富裕和贫穷两极。根据皮尤研究中心对人口普查数据的分析，去年美国中等收入家庭的比例降至51%，而1971年的这一比例为61%。（根据皮尤中心的标准，一个四口之家在旧金山每年收入22万美元则属于中等收入。）
如果您想了解自己是否位于缩小的中间阶级，请输入您所在的地区、收入和家中人数到皮尤研究中心计算器。一对四口之家每年收入22万美元生活在美国旧金山？中等收入。
“真正重要且重大的假设将会发现其‘前提’具有野蛮不准确地描绘现实的特点，一般来说，假设越重要，则其中的预设条件（以这种方式）就越不真实。原因很简单。一个假设之所以重要，是因为它通过很少的东西就能解释很多，即如果它从需要解释的现象周围复杂和详细的环境提炼出关键共性元素，并仅基于这些元素进行有效的预测，那么它是重要的。因此，重要性在于其描述性的假定是错误的。”
——米尔顿·弗里德曼，《积极经济学的方法论》，收录于《正面经济》（1966年）
新闻来源：www.nytimes.com
原文地址：Opinion | The U.S. Lost the Battery Race to China. Can It Make a Comeback?
新闻日期：2024-09-23
原文摘要：
Mateo Jaramillo was giving me his spiel about his battery company when he mentioned, in passing, that the battery was “not super efficient.” Oh. So that’s bad, right? Not in this case, said Jaramillo, the chief executive of Form Energy. Efficiency is how much energy you get out of a battery compared with how much you put in when charging it. More efficiency is always nice, of course, but for the market that Form Energy is going after, what’s far more important is keeping down the cost of making the batteries. There’s no costly lithium in Form Energy’s batteries. Instead, there’s plain old iron, which people have been using since the Iron Age (which ended about 2,600 years ago). Form Energy’s batteries produce electricity when the iron in them rusts. They’re recharged by using electricity to return the rust to iron. Form Energy’s target markets include electric utilities, which need to store power when it’s plentiful and dribble it out when there’s demand for it. So much wind and solar generating capacity has been installed in some parts of the world that electricity prices in certain markets often go negative: The utilities literally pay customers to take their power because that’s cheaper than shutting down generation. For utilities, a battery farm that’s cheap to build and soaks up lots of inexpensive, or even negatively priced, electricity for later sale sounds like a great deal, even if it’s bulky and inefficient. Form Energy broke ground in August on its first commercial project, for Great River Energy, a nonprofit electricity cooperative in Minnesota. There probably will never be an iron-air battery in a cellphone or electric vehicle, but Form Energy isn’t trying to conquer every niche. As the English say, horses for courses. I began this newsletter with Form Energy partly because I love the idea of capturing energy from rust, and partly because it’s part of a wave of American companies that are helping the United States try to get back to the leading edge of battery development. The United States has let the lithium-ion battery market slip away. John Goodenough, a University of Texas physicist, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for a variety of breakthroughs, including developing in 1980 a better cathode material for lithium-ion batteries. A start-up that attempted to commercialize it got hundreds of millions of dollars from the Obama administration but went bust. A Chinese company bought the start-up, A123, out of bankruptcy in 2013. Other Chinese companies plunged into lithium-ion battery production just as Americans were pulling back. Today, China utterly dominates the global production of lithium-ion batteries, which go into electric vehicles, cellphones, laptops, cordless tools and much more. One Chinese company, CATL, accounted for 38 percent of global production of electric vehicle batteries in the first seven months of this year, while another, BYD, was second at 16 percent, according to SNE Research of South Korea. No American companies were in the top 10. Mind you, it’s wonderful for the fight against global warming that China has brought down the price of lithium-ion batteries and the price of solar panels, which help charge those batteries, as my colleague David Wallace-Wells wrote this month. But it would be good for the U.S. economy if Americans were making, not just buying, more of that planet-saving equipment. Things are moving in a better direction now. Under President Biden, incentives in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are spurring major investments in batteries, including domestic production capacity for lithium-ion batteries. Also, the Department of Energy has pumped billions of dollars into development of new kinds of batteries, including promising solid-state batteries, which use solid electrolytes instead of liquids or gels. The initiative includes a “Long Duration Storage Shot,” whose goal is to reduce energy storage costs by 90 percent from their 2020 level, in batteries that provide at least 10 hours’ duration, by 2030. Last year President Biden issued an executive order that “when new technologies and products are developed with support from the United States government, they will be manufactured in the United States whenever feasible and consistent with applicable law.” The federal government’s initiative “mimics what China did over a decade ago by using demand- and supply-side subsidies and government support to build a supply chain,” Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy said in a report last year. China has such a big lead in lithium-ion batteries that I have trouble imagining the United States catching up, although simply supplying domestic needs would be a welcome development. I think the most likely path for the United States to leapfrog China is with new technologies, such as Form Energy’s iron-air battery. I love the creativity of battery designers, who rummage through the periodic table for elements with the ideal electronegativity and other characteristics. ARPA-E, the research-and-development branch of the Department of Energy, is funding start-ups that are working on battery chemistries including lithium-air, aluminum-air, zinc-air, sodium metal, sodium beta-alumina, vanadium redox flow and Prussian blue dye (yes, really). There are also energy storage technologies that aren’t batteries at all, such as pumping water to the top of a hill or storing heat in the form of molten salt. “One-size-fits-all doesn’t pass the sniff test,” Eric Dresselhuys, the chief executive of ESS of Wilsonville, Ore., which makes an iron flow battery (different from an iron-air battery), told me. “How many different kinds of salad dressing are there? It’s impossible to believe that one energy storage tech is going to win.” The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-funded think tank, has been banging the drum since 2012 for the United States to focus on battery development. A report it released in July said the U.S. response to China on electric vehicles “should include investing in R&D to accelerate technological innovation, stimulating consumer adoption of E.V.s (e.g., by deploying charging infrastructure) and defensive trade measures.” I spoke to the report’s author, Stephen Ezell, the foundation’s vice president for global innovation policy, about where the battery race between the United States and China is headed. “Tech policy scholars are going to look back on this in 20 years as a test case of whether more muscular policies can succeed,” he said. “I think so long as we do make it a national priority, we can succeed.” America’s middle class has shrunk as the nation has become more polarized between rich and poor. The share of Americans living in middle-income households shrank to 51 percent last year from 61 percent in 1971, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. (For Pew, middle income begins at two-thirds of median household income and extends up to double the median.) To find out if you’re in the diminished middle class, enter where you live, what your income is and how many people live in your home into this Pew Research Center calculator. A family of four in San Francisco earning $220,000 a year? Middle income. “Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have ‘assumptions’ that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense). The reason is simple. A hypothesis is important if it ‘explains’ much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone. To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions.” — Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” collected in “Essays in Positive Economics” (1966)
