Comments on: I like batteries almost as much as magnets

By: sandrar

sandrar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:04:44 +0000

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. :) Cheers! Sandra. R.

By: Marcin Tustin

Marcin Tustin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:55:50 +0000

Tom, I take your point about the existence of this problem being available to those in academia, but that doesn’t extend to investors, nor does it mean that commercialisation of incremental improvements is currently guaranteed.
In any case, on taking fine points as we have been, we would need to see the exact proposal – it’s entirely possible that a prize would be pure bunce for whoever solved the problem.

By: Scott Edwards

Scott Edwards — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:50:16 +0000

Go watch “Who Killed the Electric Car?” GM had electric vehicles in the 90′s without a combustion engine and they lobbied against their own product. My question is why did GM have to ‘remake’ the technology when they already had it. The problem has always been in the battery technology but they even bought out one of the battery companies back in the 90′s and then closed the division.. GM is hopeless

By: Joe S.

Joe S. — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:25:40 +0000

Who died and made John McCain an electrical engineer? How does he determine the benchmarks for a breakthrough innovation? How does he consider himself qualified to appoint the scientists who will determine the benchmarks for a breakthrough innovation?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the award goes to a company named Haliburton, and that once they pocket the taxpayer’s money, that’s the last you hear about their battery, which it’ll be revealed doesn’t work so well outside of the controlled laboratory environment.
We always trust politicians to do an engineer’s work, and then we’re always surprised when the levee breaks.

By: tony

tony — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:47:20 +0000

Exxon will give the inventor $500 million.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:23:24 +0000

Yeah… I don’t know much about the proposal itself, but the idea of awarding monetary prizes for loosely-defined scientific goals seems pretty unproductive. In academia, at least, research isn’t done on credit. You can’t buy equipment or pay graduate students on the promise of potential prize money in the future, so who’s going to pay the bills for such a massive undertaking? If McCain really cared about this, he should probably give the money to the NSF or DOE, to be doled out as grant money to universities and national labs based on the merits of their research proposals. This would, however, require actually spending the money on science, which I don’t think is the actual goal.
And as Drum points out, on the industry side of things, $300 million just doesn’t rate. GM *lost* over 100 times that last year. So this kind of incentive seems unlikely to shift anyone’s R&D programs.

By: Marcin Tustin

Marcin Tustin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:12:50 +0000

Well, from my perspective (having been on the fringes of computing academia in several roles for some time) it looks like there is a lot of tech being generated, and the transfer part is hard, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that until science is converted into clear designs, it is a very private good indeed, notwithstanding the publication of papers and patents.
The other part is that commercial exploitation is not actually a part of researchers careers as such, and they don’t have to really alert anyone else to how valuable or potentially valuable their stuff is; on the flip side if they want to make that leap, intellectual property rights, at least at UK universities, are often unclear, thus making the potential value of taking that step unclear.
I know that the US is much better at technology transfer, but still, I doubt this can but help.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:35:43 +0000

I’ll delete the extra post. Apologies if the comment system is being wacky.
Your last point is a good one, but I’m skeptical of those that came before it. Here we need to have some faith in the market: there’s such a huge potential windfall to such an invention that the problems you outline seem unlikely to occur. If the prize were to result in a public domain better battery, that’d be great. But there’s not much reason to believe that it would remain outside the public’s hands even if it were patented. At that point it’s a question of whether we’ve spent more in tax dollars on the prize than we’ve saved by preventing its inventor from charging licensing fees.
Finally, I’ll note that a quick glance around the internet will show that outsiders who’ve come up with allegedly revolutionary energy technologies do not have a particularly hard time getting exposure. Consider Steorn’s efforts with Orbo last year, for example. Very few people thought it had much promise, but it was given a fair hearing anyway.

By: Marcin Tustin

Marcin Tustin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:29:16 +0000

…and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t hit “post” twice.
The other thing a prize does is grab the attention of those in academia who might not have thought of working on this problem. Markets are not always that good at transmitting information.

By: Marcin Tustin

Marcin Tustin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:25:47 +0000

Well, you haven’t taken into account the particular problems with technology transfer out of research, and the patent system. If McCain’s prize is defined by well-drawn legislation it could help solve these problems.
The big win would be to make receipt of the prize conditional on foregoing the right to patent the technology. This would mean that even if the person who comes up with the best tech is terrible at moving it to market, someone else would be able to do so.
Another big win would be to insist that any allocation from the prize fund be drawn down to meet costs of commercialisation, which would again prevent someone winning the prize, then doing nothing. It would also help anyone who wanted to commercialise their invention, but who didn’t happen to be a major commercial undertaking, to start selling, even if just by calling people up who might wish to buy their expertise.