U.S. Being Mauled by the Clean Tech Tigers?

The Washington Post reports today that the U.S. risks falling behind in the race to become the world’s clean tech superpower:

[India, South Korea, China and Japan] are pouring money into renewable energy industries, funding research and development and setting ambitious targets for renewable energy use. These plans could outpace the programs in Obama’s economic stimulus package or in the House climate bill sponsored by Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).

“If the Waxman-Markey climate bill is the United States’ entry into the clean energy race, we’ll be left in the dust by Asia’s clean-tech tigers,” said Jesse Jenkins, director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland, Calif.-based think tank that favors massive government spending to address global warming.

…[E]ven though developing nations refused to agree to an international ceiling for greenhouse gases last week, China and other Asian nations are already devoting more attention to cutting their use of traditional fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal.

Still, many opportunities for success in clean tech remain open to the U.S., particularly the export of “next generation” technology:

[Mark Levine of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] said the United States is unlikely to “become the or even a leading photovoltaic manufacturer. But our scientific talent . . . has a good chance of developing the next-generation PV systems which we could either manufacture in China or another country . . . or license to foreign companies. . . . Even if the manufacturing is done abroad, this will lead to very real and large benefits to the U.S. from licensing fees, not to say sales in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Lead-Acid Batteries Go Back to the Future

Most of the buzz surrounding battery technology these days focuses on lithium ion or nickel hydride batteries. But battery researchers are starting to juice up old-fashioned lead-acid batteries with carbon. And firms such as Pittsburgh’s Axion Power are looking to make what is old new again. From The Economist:

A conventional lead-acid battery is a simple affair, made up of a series of cells each containing a positive electrode made of lead dioxide and a negative electrode of metallic lead. These are immersed in an electrolyte of dilute sulphuric acid. …

In Axion’s battery the negative electrode is replaced with one made from activated carbon, a material used in supercapacitors. Normal capacitors—those that power the flashguns in cameras for instance—can be charged and discharged rapidly, but cannot store much energy. Supercapacitors are meatier versions that are able to hold a reasonable amount of energy as well as taking it in and releasing it quickly. Some, indeed, are already used in tandem with the lithium-ion batteries in electric cars to boost acceleration and recapture energy during so-called “regenerative” braking. Axion’s plan, therefore, is to have the best of both worlds by building a lead-acid/carbon hybrid, or PbC.

The carbon in the hybrid, which is protected within a sandwich of other materials, is more effective than metallic lead at releasing and absorbing protons to and from the acid during charging and discharging. In tests, Axion says, its PbCs have withstood more than 1,600 charges and deep discharges before they failed, which is three times better than standard lead-acid batteries specifically designed for such deep cycles.

The lead-acid carbon batteries could be used in both hybrid vehicles and in mobile energy storage systems. The best part? An infrastructure for lead-acid battery production has existed for decades, and it wouldn’t take long to scale up production of a new and improved version.