A season of gratitude in an age of anxiety: November is the month when we celebrate Thanksgiving, a time to gather and reflect on what we’re thankful for. With the lingering pandemic and its attendant economic and political uncertainty taking a toll on our collective mental health, our annual rituals feel more important than ever. This year, I’m thankful for my family, my health, my art, my job, my home, and — batteries.
The last one requires explaining. It involves both Ford’s recent announcement of plans to build a new factory near Memphis, and the elephant in the anxiety room, climate change.
Since the Industrial Revolution, society has depended on fossil fuels like coal and oil to supply our ever-increasing demand for energy. But burning these fossil fuels means releasing the waste, which comes in the form of carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
Over the past two centuries, we’ve burned so much coal and oil that the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has skyrocketed to levels not seen in at least 3 million years. CO2 absorbs heat better than the nitrogen and oxygen that make up most of the atmosphere, which explains why the planet’s average temperature is rising to levels never seen in the 200,000-year history of humanity.
Blue Oval City represents more than just an economic windfall for the Memphis metro. It also signals a potential tipping point in the battle to tame climate change. More, better, and cheaper batteries are transforming the world — and that’s something to be thankful for.
And with that temperature rise come consequences we have only begun to see. In September, a Washington Post study reported that, between hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, flash floods in the South and Northeast, wildfires in California, and an unprecedented heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, about 1 in 3 Americans were affected by a climate change-related disaster in 2021. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report concluded that CO2 emissions need to start dropping in the next ten years to preserve any hope of avoiding climate change’s most catastrophic consequences.
The good news about climate change is that we have the technology to fix it. All we need is the will. The way forward is two-pronged: 1) clean up electricity, and 2) electrify everything.
Cleaning up electrical generation means weaning our society away from burning coal and natural gas. To do that, we need renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. As recently as a decade ago, supplanting fossil fuels with renewables was a laughable concept among those in the utility business. Coal and natural gas were cheaper than wind and solar. But the price tag for building renewables has fallen dramatically over the past ten years: The cost of onshore wind turbines has dropped 39 percent, while the cost of solar panels has fallen by a whopping 82 percent. Both are now less expensive to deploy than coal, and that’s good news for anyone who wants their children and grandchildren to occupy a habitable planet.
The problem with wind and solar is that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. If we’re going to electrify everything, we need better ways to store electricity — and that’s where batteries come in handy. Like renewables, battery technology has been the focus of intense research. Now, we’re beginning to see results: The cost of lithium ion batteries has fallen by 87 percent since 2008, and there are radical new technologies on the horizon with the ability to economically store energy on the massive scales required by the electrical grid.
Better batteries don’t just mean your smartphone stays charged longer. The reason we’ve been running our automobiles on gasoline for a century is that it’s an efficient way to carry energy around, and to use it when you need it. As a result, 29 percent of America’s CO2 emissions come from the transportation sector.
For years, automotive companies have said no one wants to buy electric cars, because they’re too expensive. Why the high cost? Because there’s not enough battery manufacturing capacity. Why don’t we make more, better batteries? Because they’re so expensive that no one wants to buy them. It’s a vicious circle.
But that conventional wisdom has recently been upended by a new generation of electric vehicles with ranges that rival internal combustion cars. Tesla, the pioneering EV company, is churning out almost a quarter-million electric vehicles per quarter, and its stock price is soaring, making it the most valuable automobile company in the world. Other carmakers have taken note, and are rushing to catch up. In May, Ford started taking pre-orders for an electric version of its best-selling F-150 truck. They expected a few thousand takers. Instead, more than 120,000 people have made a $100 down payment on a truck that won’t even roll off the assembly line until next spring.
Those numbers surprised everyone and go a long way towards explaining Ford’s recent announcement that it will be investing $5.6 billion in Blue Oval City, a new battery factory and electric vehicle assembly plant in Stanton, Tennessee. The six square-mile campus is designed to be powered by renewable energy sources, and includes an on-site battery recycling facility. It’s the largest single investment in the company’s history, which will create about 6,000 well-paying manufacturing jobs.
Blue Oval City represents more than just an economic windfall for the Memphis metro. It also signals a potential tipping point in the battle to tame climate change. More, better, and cheaper batteries are transforming the world — and that’s something to be thankful for.
