Energizing the World: Quantum Computing, Batteries, and the Energy Future
Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Dr. Michio Kaku Published: 2023, Doubleday ISBN: 978-0385548366
Edison vs Ford: A Bet Nobody Expected
Kaku opens Chapter 9 with a story I didn’t know. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were actually close friends. They used to vacation together and make bets about which energy source would power the future. Edison backed the electric battery. Ford backed gasoline.
If you were standing there listening, you’d pick Edison every time. Electric batteries were quiet, clean, safe. Gasoline was noisy, toxic, and the idea of gas stations on every corner sounded ridiculous.
Ford won though.
Why? Two reasons. First, the energy density gap is brutal. The best batteries store about 200 watt-hours per kilogram. Gasoline stores 12,000. That’s a 60x difference. Second, massive oil fields were discovered in the Middle East and Texas, and gasoline became dirt cheap. Working-class Americans could suddenly afford cars.
Edison’s dream of electric transportation just couldn’t compete.
The Solar Promise That Keeps Slipping
Back in the 1950s, futurists promised that solar panels and windmills would give us free energy. Cheap, clean, reliable. That was the vision.
Reality turned out different. Renewable energy costs have dropped over the decades, but slowly. The fundamental problem is storage. When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, your energy output drops to zero. You need batteries to store that energy for later.
Batteries, unlike computer chips, don’t follow Moore’s Law. There’s no predictable doubling of performance every couple of years. Battery improvements happen when someone discovers a new chemical compound or a more efficient reaction. Slow, unpredictable work. The chemistry inside batteries doesn’t obey any simple scaling law like transistors on silicon.
This bottleneck is holding back the entire clean energy transition. We need better batteries, and we need them badly.
200 Years of Batteries (And Not Much Has Changed)
Kaku gives a quick history that puts things in perspective. Luigi Galvani rubbed metal against frog legs in 1786 and noticed they twitched. That discovery showed electricity could drive muscle movement. Then in 1799, Alessandro Volta built the first actual battery, generating electricity from a chemical reaction on demand.
The basic design hasn’t changed much since. Two electrodes, an electrolyte, ions flowing from anode to cathode. What changed over 200 years is mostly the chemical composition. Chemists have been tediously testing different metals and electrolytes to squeeze out more voltage and more energy.
For most of those 200 years, nobody cared enough to push battery technology forward. There was no market for electric cars, so there was no pressure to improve.
The Lithium-Ion Era
Things started changing when global warming concerns and the electronics market created real demand. The lithium-ion battery became the success story. It’s everywhere now. Phones, laptops, electric cars, even jetliners.
What makes lithium special? It’s the lightest metal on the periodic table, which matters when you want portable batteries. Its atomic structure has a loosely bound third electron that’s easy to remove, making it efficient at generating current. The lithium-ion battery uses a graphite anode, a lithium cobalt oxide cathode, and an ether electrolyte.
The impact was big enough that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists who perfected it: John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino.
Even lithium-ion, the best battery we have, stores only about 1 percent of the energy in an equivalent weight of gasoline though. For a carbon-free future, we need something much better.
Beyond Lithium-Ion: The Search Continues
Kaku covers several candidates that researchers are working on.
Lithium-air batteries allow oxygen from the air to interact with lithium, and their energy density is ten times that of lithium-ion. Puts them close to gasoline territory. They only last about two months though, which is obviously a problem. In 2022, Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science and SoftBank announced a promising new type, but details were scarce.
The SuperBattery from Skeleton Technologies and the Karlsruhe Institute combines a lithium-ion battery with a supercapacitor. The result? Charging an electric car in fifteen seconds. Tesla acquired Maxwell Technologies to pursue similar supercapacitor hybrid approaches.
Beyond these, there’s a whole list of experimental work: NAWA Technologies using nanotechnology for 10x battery power, University of Texas removing toxic cobalt and replacing it with manganese and aluminum, Chinese manufacturer SVOLT doing the same, Finnish researchers using silicon-carbon nanotube hybrid anodes, Monash University in Australia working on lithium-sulfur batteries that could power a phone for five days, and IBM looking into seawater-based batteries.
All follow the same 200-year-old strategy. Try different chemicals, test, iterate, hope for a breakthrough.
Where Quantum Computers Come In
Instead of testing hundreds of chemicals one by one in a lab, quantum computers could simulate those chemical reactions virtually. The complex reactions inside batteries don’t follow simple laws. They’re governed by quantum mechanics, and classical computers struggle to model them accurately.
Quantum computers, by their nature, are good at simulating quantum systems. Model battery chemistry in a quantum computer, test millions of virtual combinations, find the optimal materials without ever stepping into a lab.
The automotive industry is already investing. Daimler created a Quantum Computing Initiative back in 2015 and started working with Google and IBM in 2018. They’re not just looking at batteries either. Virtual wind tunnels for aerodynamic testing, optimizing manufacturing processes, reducing drag on car designs. Airbus is using quantum computing for fuel-efficient flight paths. Volkswagen is optimizing bus and taxi routes in congested cities.
BMW jumped in around 2018 with Honeywell’s quantum computer, looking at better batteries, optimal placement of charging stations, supply chain optimization, and aerodynamic improvements.
My Take
As an engineer, I appreciate that Kaku is honest about the timeline here. Battery technology hasn’t had its Moore’s Law moment, and it probably won’t get one from classical computing alone. The chemistry is just too complex.
I notice a pattern in these chapters though. Quantum computers are presented as the solution to every hard simulation problem. While that’s theoretically true, we’re still far from quantum computers that can actually run these simulations at scale. The automotive companies Kaku mentions are doing research and writing code. They’re not designing production batteries on quantum hardware yet.
The core argument makes sense though. If you can simulate molecular interactions accurately, you can shortcut decades of trial-and-error chemistry. The energy storage problem is real enough that even small improvements would have massive impact. A battery that approaches gasoline’s energy density would change everything about transportation and renewable energy.
The Edison-Ford bet might finally swing the other way. It’s just taking about 150 years longer than Edison hoped.