An easy-to-understand and engaging exploration of the battery’s development across history that reveals current technological advances, celebrates the innovators who have led the charge forward, and shows how the electric battery represents the path to a low-carbon future.

Now more than ever, consumers want to understand not only the basic facts behind the electric battery and the challenges of battery storage in everyday devices, including vehicles, but also whether increased, widespread application of battery technology has real environmental benefits that could change the future of our planet. Is 21st-century battery technology the foundation on which our low-carbon future will be built? The Electric Battery: Charging Forward to a Low-Carbon Future documents the long history of the battery and identifies the reasons it is now a key to achieving a low-carbon world.

The book provides an unprecedented and easy-to-understand explanation of both the policy issues and technological challenges facing the battery in the quest to significantly reduce humanity’s collective carbon footprint on the earth. Readers will be able to intelligently evaluate the chances of electric storage batteries ultimately becoming as mainstream as petroleum-product-fueled infrastructure and vehicles. The chapters in the book break down the complexity of the technology and elucidate the historic confluence of events that makes battery technology economically viable to any reader looking to understand the technological and policy breakthroughs that could enable a low-carbon future-for this generation as well as for subsequent ones.

Demystifies the electric battery, explains how modern technology has overcome its historic limitations, and presents how this seemingly ordinary technology will enable a new era of sustainability for future generations

Addresses a topic of growing interest among general readers as electric cars designed to be affordable to the middle class from major manufacturers such as Chevrolet and Nissan are joined by new options from upstart electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla

Written by an Institute for Energy and the Environment research team with the requisite knowledge of energy policy and of science, as well as communication skills, to research and present a compelling narrative on electric batteries past, present, and future