I don't think government funding battery research makes as much sense now as it used to. Absolutely everything runs on batteries nowadays, to the point where they are the main source of expense and weight for a large swathe of consumer goods. The commercial incentive to build a better battery is just huge. I remember reading some years ago that the prospectus of a large oil company, ExxonMobil maybe, explicitly singled out a sudden leap in battery energy density as something that could torpedo their $250b/yr business. It's hard to see how the government finds a way to build something that the private sector can't, when there's a trillion dollars at stake.
Interesting that you mention ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil does, in fact, cite "technological advances
in energy storage that make wind and solar more competitive for power generation or increased consumer demand for alternative fueled or electric vehicles" [1] as a risk factor on their annual form 10-K.
In a bit of a twist, worth noting that Exxon Research & Engineering was involved in the invention of the rechargeable lithium ion battery [2]. Quoting from [3], "Thus Stanley Whittingham invented the first rechargeable LIB, patented in 1977 and assigned to Exxon."
I don't know how much funding does in batteries that are designed to be stationery. I.e. where weight does not matter, where they can be bulky and potentially run hot.
There are technologies that are irrelevant for cars or phone (which I do think attract most of the battery R&D) that would be a good fit for a battery the size of a building, designed to store the electricity for a whole city during the night/low wind period.
Government can fund the private R&D easily by, for instance, mandate that renewable sources installed on the grid must provide a baseline 24/24.
But public research is nothing to sneeze at. It brought us the lithium-ion battery (Goodenough was working at the U of Texas when inventing it). Private R&D is good at incremental improvements and solving deployment problems. Public research at funding radically new tech. They work well together.
Economics doesn’t matter. So long as CO2 emissions continue to rise, subsidies are not only desirable they are absolutely mandatory in any rational sense of the word. The cost doesn’t matter.
