Stanford Ovshinsky Speaks Out

Stanford Ovshinsky is one of those rare individuals whose impact on the world will be measured through history. His discoveries have led to inventions that are revolutionizing everything from batteries and hydrogen storage to solar cells and computer memory. He holds hundreds of patents and has been described as being in the league of such noted American icons as Thomas Edison. Ovshinsky was recently honored by The Economist with its 2005 Innovation Award for Energy and the Environment. He shares his thoughts on energy, his work, and the world in his conversation that follows.

GREEN CAR JOURNAL: Your work in amorphous and disordered materials is being applied in diverse ways these days, in no small part because of your vision and your drive. It seems you’re never satisfied sitting still.

STANFORD OVSHINSKY: “I have to be a scientist, inventor, and manufacturer. I love all those things tremendously, and do them with great excitement.”

GCJ: Briefly, could you explain the fundamentals of your work?

OVSHINSKY: “If you’re doing atomic engineering, you want to use elements that give you the kind of flexibility, structure, and electronic configuration that can be used to make new mechanisms that have never been used before. That’s what working with disordered materials does. It gives you the degrees of freedom to design many synthetic materials – thousands of them if you like. Importantly, with new physical electronic and chemical mechanisms that nature had not previously shown itself in prior work, this is how we get the basic patents. The things I do are never incremental to somebody else. We go ahead and do the basic ideas that I’ve developed, and they work.”

GCJ: These basic ideas have turned into fundamentally new types of products. It seems that your interests go far beyond discovering and inventing.

OVSHINSKY: “Our slogan is that we invent the materials, we invent the products, and we invent the production technology. We do all three. I love production as much as I love anything else in technology. I was a machine builder by trade when I was a kid. I have great love for being able to build new industries. The fact is that you can achieve things only, as Bill Ford says, by innovation. Unfortunately, big companies are not that good at it.

“During the 46 years we’ve been in business, we have turned out products involving both information and energy, because we consider those to be the twin pillars of our global economy. We use the principles of disordered and amorphous materials. I developed the science and the technology for this through the years. We have a great group of people who turn all of this into great products. They’re now very much needed, crucial in fact to our country’s continuation as an industrial power. We’re going to have new computers, new semiconductors, new communications. You’re going to have to have a new 21st century vehicle industry, and that’s what hybrids are about.”

GCJ: Your work is largely focused on hydrogen. Why?

OVSHINSKY: “You can get hydrogen from many different sources. The active ingredient in everything that burns – wood, coal, oil, gasoline, natural gas, or whatever – is hydrogen. Hydrogen is in materials. You have to break it out of the material. People forget you have to extract all your energy. There’s no free energy out there if you’re using fossil fuel.

“While we’re not purists, we like to do the kindest thing to the earth, like getting hydrogen from hydro power or wind, renewable energy, and solar. You can take hydrogen from any source, including an electrolyzer, or hydrogen from utilities that work around the clock. Their generators are running at night and just wasting energy, fossil fuel energy, and creating much more pollution. But instead of wasting the energy, if you use it to power an electrolyzer – which is quite a simple machine – you break apart water and you get hydrogen.

“Such extraction is very simple, very safe, and very good for humanity. It’s such a revolutionary development in the energy field, the idea that you need not depend on anything but water, so wherever there’s water you can have hydrogen. Anything that burns can be replaced by hydrogen, now. You really have homeland security. You don’t depend on any other country to provide your fuel.”

GCJ: The most well-known transportation-related product that’s emerged from your work in amorphous and disordered materials is the nickel metal hydride battery. How important is this?

OVSHINSKY: “Nickel-metal-hydride batteries enable not only the hydrogen economy, but they enable the hybrid economy and do it with hydrogen ions, going back and forth to electrodes, both of them quite complex with different elements and different mechanisms. It was considered impossible. Now well over a billion are sold every year as consumer batteries. It’s not only the battery of choice in the automotive industry, but it enables the automotive industry to have hybrid vehicles.”

GCJ: ECD Ovonics’ solid hydrogen storage is another area of increasing interest in the transportation field. Why is this important?

OVSHINSKY: “Having hydrogen in a solid form allows taking hydrogen in and out of a material that’s very safe, with no leakage, and no real danger like gasoline. Once you put it in a solid you can take it around in an ordinary truck, ordinary train, or ordinary barge, anywhere you want to take it.”

GCJ: Your move to demonstrate solid hydrogen storage in hydrogen hybrid vehicles is interesting. Why hydrogen hybrids?

OVSHINSKY: “That’s the theme of our work for the hydrogen we have in automobiles. We use hydrogen in a solid. With the Priuses we have, we proved for the first time that you could take out the gas tank and put in a solid hydrogen chamber, not do anything to the Ovonic battery that’s in them, and use the same internal combustion engine. We put in a turbocharger, but nowadays I don’t think we’ll be using that. We can get mileage the same as the gasoline hybrid, and more importantly you have no gasoline and no pollution. The only CO2 you can measure is from the lubricants in the car. So no war over oil. No pollution. No need to say you can’t do anything about climate change...because that’s what CO2 causes.”

GCJ: From your perspective, how far away are we from a hydrogen economy?

OVSHINSKY: “In order to have a hydrogen economy, you have to have a complete loop starting with the sun generating electricity, storing it in a battery, having hydrogen made from the solar energy, and storing it in stationary or mobile chambers as a solid. That answers the question whether you’re going to have an infrastructure. We can have an infrastructure right away. We’ve made a hydrogen fuel station for the government, a mobile one that could be driven around. It was so easy to use...automatic.

“Suddenly, you can have a complete loop, starting with the sun. With our multi-junction devices, or solar cells, there’s inherently enough voltage to break apart water and get hydrogen, so you can get hydrogen for your hydrogen economy directly by electrolysis.”

GCJ: It’s evident that this isn’t just your work, it’s your passion. What motivates you?

OVSHINSKY: “We’re talking about changing the world, and changing the world so you don’t plug into coal or fossil fuel. You actually plug into the first element made in the universe during the Big Bang, which later condensed into gas, into stars. So, stars – our sun – gives us electricity. It’s kind of neat and cool to think about the fact that you’re plugging into the beginning of the universe with hydrogen.

“Every country must have an industrial base. The only way you can do that is by building new industries of great value that make a difference in the world, and that can provide better jobs. I think that’s a very necessary social resolve for what we’re doing, and that’s why we say we are changing the world for the better.”