Can batteries solve everything?

Instigators of Change

You want to do what’s right for the planet. So you buy an all-electric car. Right? Well... not always. Jay Whitacre, one of the country’s foremost experts on batteries, tells us why where you live may dictate the answer to that question. Which speaks to the strange moment we're in right now, when it comes to batteries. Whitacre 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. Money is flowing into cutting-edge science, but what's likely to move the needle? Whitacre, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, argues that there’s a real tension between what investors are willing to pay for and how quickly batteries can actually revolutionize our lives.