Can Batteries Solve Everything? (Rebroadcast)

Instigators of Change

As the summer - and lots of record-setting heat - drags on, you might wonder how we can slow global warming. But, even for a scientist and entrepreneur like Jay Whitacre, who has spent decades thinking about how to get Americans to embrace cleaner energy... it’s complicated. Should you, for example, buy an all-electric car? Actually, it depends on where you live (we’ll explain). Whitacre, one of the country’s foremost experts on batteries and a professor at Carnegie Mellon, says that getting batteries - for cars, for large-scale energy storage - from where they are to where we want them to be is going to be tough. Plenty of money is flowing into new technologies, but what is likely to move the needle? Whitacre says there’s a real tension between what investors are willing to pay for and how quickly batteries can revolutionize our lives.