Remembering lithium-ion battery pioneer John Goodenough

Especially this bit:

> In Los Angeles County, a candidate by the name of John "Lower Taxes" Loew has run in every election for county assessor between 2000 and 2018. He explained that he changed his name in order to send a message about his political positions.[30] [31] In 2000, Loew received less than 1% of the vote[32] in the special election to fill a vacancy in the office. In 2002 and 2006, Loew lost the elections to incumbent Rick Auerbach by a 70%–11% margin in 2002,[33] and by a 77%–23% margin in 2006.[34] Loew ran again in 2010, where he finished in third place with 10.6% of the vote.[35] In 2014 he finished in fourth place with 9.47% of the vote.[36] In 2018 Loew again ran with the name "Lower Taxes" on the ballot and ended up in second place with 23.58%, forcing incumbent Jeffrey Prang into a runoff.[37] Loew lost the runoff to Prang by a margin of a little over 20%.[38]

He's had an amazing life and was amazingly productive right until the end and had his hand in quite a few recent battery innovations. Quite a life to celebrate.

Battery production scaling up is something that is a bit under appreciated by many. Basically where we are now is hundreds of ghw of batteries produced every year. Probably closing in on a twh soon. You can do the math and it adds up to a a million cars requiring basically whatever battery capacity they have in kwh times a million. Which means 1m model 3s with 60kwh batteries require 60gwh of batteries to be produced. Tesla is closing in on 2million vehicles produced per year right now and their share of the market is actually dropping because other manufacturers are catching up.

When the market hits 15 million vehicles per year, we'll cross the twh mark. There are of course other uses of batteries on the grid, in buses, trucks, in homes, etc. So, we're likely close to that already or past that point even.

The world produces about 23pwh of electricity per year. If you cycle 1 twh of batteries every day (which you wouldn't, typically) that adds up to 0.365 pwh. So, tripling the battery production gets us to 1phw of power cycled in a year. That's a lot of power to have on standby. And that is the main point because the average state of most batteries will be close to fully charged. You could drive your EV and drain the battery but on average not many people are going to do that at the same time. That's a lot of battery. And this man was key to inventing and developing them.

Trends are towards more batteries being produced cheaper using less and less expensive/rare materials. Sodium ion basically uses no lithium, cobalt, etc. There's not going to be a battery shortage long term.

Nature did a rather lovely short podcast interview with him after the Nobel. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03079-1

Or the international relations (peace/war studies) scholar Anne Marie Slaughter

But according to the Wikipedia page John Goodenough's dad, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, was born in Brooklyn and the son of Ward Hunt Goodenough. The links suggest he stemmed from a family that emigrated to America in the 17th century.