Talking Up Batteries

An Iowa farmboy with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering may seem an unlikely person to talk about the latest – and perhaps most innovative - GE battery technology. But Glen Merfeld has a calling.

He just loves batteries and his expertise extends to battery chemistry, battery physics, battery research, battery factories, battery governing boards. Oh, and battery types too: lead acid, lithium ion, nickel metal hydride . . . but his favorite?

Sodium metal halide.

This new type of battery is what he has been spending the past several years developing as manager of the Chemical Energy Systems Laboratory at GE. It promises to store energy in a much denser fashion—perhaps three times more energy than a lead acid battery with five times the length of performance. And while the GE battery may have potential use in passenger vehicles down the road, it is currently being developed for the GE hybrid locomotive, which Merfeld calls a “200 ton Prius.”

Originally hired as a “plastics guy” specializing in polymer research, Merfeld got involved on the front end of GE’s interest in energy storage about five years ago. Lately, he’s been puzzling over the amount of kinetic energy that is wasted when the hybrid locomotive brakes. “We’re trying to put a battery in there to capture some of that braking energy, to change that kinetic energy into electricity to be used later,” he explains.

Merfeld thinks it’s all very “cool,” which may be why GE chose him to talk it up.

“I guess my enthusiasm comes across,” he says. “As a scientist, I don’t want to become a marketer, but at the same time, it’s very important that we take advantage of what we know and of our ability to take the intricate details and communicate them.”

Despite the global energy crisis that confronts us every time we stop for gas, the issue of energy storage technology is not on most people’s radar screens, Merfeld says. But as battery technology improves, and hybrid cars go longer distances between charges, the consumer landscape will soon look different.

“The world’s changing very quickly,” Merfeld says. “If you look at this trend toward electrification, and you look at expansion of digitization, increasingly the amount of money that people are going to be spending on energy storage is going to go up.”

Replacing a lead acid battery in a car is relatively inexpensive, but as batteries get bigger and more sophisticated, the investment in them will rise accordingly. With replacement costs of several thousand dollars, batteries will become a more central consideration in the purchase of a vehicle.

How soon that revolution will happen is uncertain, Merfeld says. But in anticipation of future reliance on high-performance batteries, he is helping GE to build connections to the local community around GE Global Research Headquarters in Niskayuna, New York, by forging bonds with academic researchers, government leaders and business people. The goal is to create an environment conducive to the energy storage research he conducts when he is back in the lab. He calls it “inspiring collaboration” and “translating technology out of our research lab to the factory.” It is an emerging business model that will demand dogged perseverance to bring to fruition.

Again, Merfeld is the perfect candidate to spearhead the project. Along with his gusto for batteries in general, he loves hard work.

Growing up on a 2,000-acre grain farm in Independence, Iowa, Merfeld sometimes spent days at a time just picking up rocks out of the fields so that they wouldn’t break the equipment during harvest. On a farm, he says, you have to do “whatever needs to be done,” no matter how monotonous.

When he went to college, he selected a chemical engineering major because he wanted to study something that would make him a little uncomfortable—and teach him something new in the process.

“You have to work hard, perhaps when other people aren’t willing to,” he says. “It allows you to get to an advanced plane of capability. I’d like to think some of that value was instilled in me when I was growing up on a farm. You’ve got to learn how to enjoy that process of a hard day’s work, be willing to pay that price.”

The Iowa work ethic comes in handy in research, Merfeld says, especially when he’s looking for things that are not obvious—like rocks in a cornfield. “You might think that you are failing at first, but those things that you don’t understand are the things that you keep digging on.”