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Drag-Out Fight Over the Next Generation of Batteries (III)
In November 2005, A123 had its coming–out party. The company had been operating in stealth mode for four years, quietly raising money, looking for customers. In that time, A123 had raised more than $30 million in venture capital from pedigreed investors such as Qualcomm, Motorola, and Sequoia Capital, so when A123 started talking about its plans for the future, the press was eager to listen. The Wall Street Journal, the magazine Red Herring, and a regional tech– industry publication all reported on the company that fall. Chiang, who had previous experience with a high–tech start–up, was a natural salesman. "We think this is equivalent to the impact lithium–ion batteries originally had on the electronics industry in the mid–1990s, where it unseated nickel–metal– hydride batteries as the standard," he told a reporter. A123's 36–volt "nano phosphate" battery packs were scheduled to start selling the following summer, in Black & Decker's Dewalt battery line of high–end power tools. Due to their ability to dump electricity rapidly, the batteries would soon be powering a series of saws, a hammer drill, and an impact wrench.
Hydro–Québec sent A123 a warning in late 2005, a letter accusing them of violating Hydro–Québec's exclusive license on U.S. patents 5,910,382 and 6,514,640, which the University of Texas held on Goodenough's lithium iron phosphate technology. The letter put A123 on notice: if they didn't stop building lithium iron phosphate batteries right away, they could expect a lawsuit.
But A123 struck first. On April 7 , 2006, the company filed an action seeking declaratory judgment against Hydro–Québec, arguing that "neither the lithium metal phosphate technology nor any other product made, used, or sold by A123 infringes" on either patent, according to a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. On September 8 , they requested a reexamination of the patents, arguing that they overlapped with several Japanese patents that were filed earlier. Three days later, the fight came to a very public head. The University of Texas stepped in and, along with Hydro–Québec, sued everyone involved in manufacturing and marketing A123's debut power–tool batteries: A123, Black & Decker battery, and China BAK Battery. "Nearly a decade ago," read an Austin American–Statesman article on the legal battle, "the University of Texas licensed two patents that were supposed to help power the next generation of laptop computers, cell phones and other staples of the tech age. Today, the university says, this longer–lived and more powerful lithium–ion battery is finally hitting the mass market . . . The problem, according to the university, is that Black & Decker is essentially bootlegging its technology."
The question at the core of the A123 saga is whether Yet–Ming Chiang transformed the chemical that John Goodenough patented into a new and eminently more useful compound, or whether his compound was essentially the same as what had come before.
A123's position is simple: Their cathode material has a different chemical formula, and therefore is a new invention that is the work of Yet–Ming Chiang and his colleagues. On the scientific front, Armand's argument didn't depart much over the years from the case he made in the pages of Nature Materials in 2003. After that, Linda Nazar became the chief agitator. Nazar and Chiang became well–known debate partners as Nazar continued to challenge Chiang's research on lithium iron phosphate and Chiang continued to respond. In 2006, Nazar published another paper on the subject. Then in 2008, she published a paper that further clarified the role of Chiang's dopant- in a way that was not at all favorable to Chiang. Naturally, Chiang hit back, publishing another paper in 2009. Nazar and her colleagues issued what she said was their final entry in the saga in 2010, and Chiang published a reply in the same journal.
In a phone conversation, Nazar seemed tired of the drama yet unable to let it go. She would say she didn't want to comment on the controversy, and then she would comment anyway. She was adamant that it was a scientific disagreement, not a clash of personalities, and because she has no financial interest in lithium iron phosphate batteries, it's not a business matter. "Scientifically there has been a disagreement on the nature of electronic conductivity enhancement in lithium iron phosphate," she said. "And the science speaks for itself. It shouldn't get down to anything personal between scientists; it's simply based on science. And the scientific community judges for themselves as well." A number of researchers in the field told me they believed the consensus is that Chiang's initial results were not as claimed, but no one was willing to be quoted saying it.
Peter Bruce, who, like Nazar, has served as an expert for Hydro–Québec in their litigation against A123, explained the state of the science, which is still unsettled. "The difficulty in answering your question is that it still today remains a controversial issue. As indeed does the issue of what actually is the limiting factor in lithium iron phosphate. Some people believe it's the electronic, and some people believe it's the ionic conductivity. And if it isn't the electronic conductivity, then it doesn't matter so much if you improve it." In short, "There's still a lot that's not understood about this material."
Nazar is quick to point out that, scientific discussions about why Chiang's invention works so well aside, it does work well. "Suffice it to say that he has a successful company," she said. "The materials seem to work electrochemically." Chiang, for his part, stands by the original results. He also said that in the years since the 2002 paper, he's discovered that the process of doping yields additional benefits, which he has published. "The behavior of these materials turned out to be richer than we had originally thought," he said. "It left a lot of opportunity for further improvements in the material."
While the scientific dispute among Chiang, Nazar, and others played out in the pages of peer–reviewed journals, the patent battles continued. By January 2007, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) had agreed to reexamine both patents, putting the litigation on hold until that process was complete. No injunction had been filed, so A123 was free to keep making Firestorm drill batteries. The patent office eventually rejected all the original claims of both patents. In response, the University of Texas then narrowed its claims. Finally, by May 2009, the PTO accepted the amended patents. The lawsuits were then free to move forward.
On the case of A123, John Goodenough is both harsh and magnanimous- not angry, but disappointed. The money, well, that he'd just like to use to endow a chair for a fellow professor at the University of Texas. On the science, however, he is blunt. "A123 didn't understand chemistry," he said. Nonetheless, Goodenough gives A123 credit for generating a crush of interest in a material that he at first didn't fully believe in. "They got a good material," Goodenough said. "And A123 did a very good marketing job. They are excellent marketers."
Michel Armand is still furious. To Armand, patents "are tearing the community apart." The saga of lithium iron phosphate is a "horror story" of "meanness and greed." "Oh, yeah, of course, he feels very angry," Goodenough said. "Because I must say Michel Armand was the one who recognized that the LiFePO4 was potentially very interesting."
In 2004, Armand returned to France, too disillusioned to work. "I was crushed," he said. "Batteries are the only hope for changing the fuels in transport. We know that the fuel cell won't make it for years. So I mean everything is in the hands of the battery people.
"It started very idealistically," Armand continued. "People in the 1970s didn't talk about global warming, but the movement in the USA was about resources being depleted and pollution. The feeling of emergency- that I was working for my grandchildren. But now I think my daughter's going to face the problem. I've " own from Europe to California many, many times. When you fly over Greenland, one time out of every five you have a clear sky. And you used to see the glacier coming straight to the sea- and no shore, or maybe a few meters. Now you see a hundred meters, one kilometer of land between the glacier and the shore." It was Donald Sadoway, an MIT electrochemist and a colleague of Yet- Ming Chiang, who had urged me to call Michel Armand. One afternoon Sadoway and I sat and spoke for two hours in his high-ceilinged, lamp-lit office, about his proposed alternatives to lithium-ion batteries, his years in the field, the story of American energy-storage research. As our conversation drew to a close, he nearly jumped out of his seat and said, "You need to talk to Michel Armand! He's just a broken, broken man. The last time he was here, you know what he said? He said, ‘The number- one property of lithium iron phosphate is that it is an excellent catalyst for human greed.' "
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