Battery Insiders Reflection - Deep Dive into Solid State Batteries

0:00Transcript

0:00Welcome to Battery Insiders, your podcast providing you insights in the fascinating world of batteries. Hosted by Bhavya Jha and Simon Engelke. Welcome back, everybody. We just had a really great session on solid-state batteries with our team over on Battery Revolution at Clubhouse. And Simon and I are going to be talking about that a little bit right now. And I'm really excited. This is like, I think, our first white paper that we've put out. Simon, why don't you tell us a little bit about this process? I feel like our listeners have probably heard much about solid-state on the earlier podcast. But what was the process like bringing this together and why did we pick solid-state batteries? I'm sure happy to. Yeah, maybe just really quick on the solid-state white paper, as you have heard also in the previous session. It has been written by Pooja, Mariano, and Srinath. And you can find it on our website for free if you just search or go on the battery.associates website.

1:08And yeah, so this was a white paper written by these three amazing people. Funny enough, actually, this kind of stems from the idea to do white papers. There's multiple angles to it, but also part of the idea was to do it as part of the BatteryMBA, which is one of these programs we're running three times a year. And essentially, Srinath has been one of the lecturers of the BatteryMBA. And Mariano, as well as Pooja, have been participants and took the BatteryMBA, both of them. And this was kind of the thing where this really started. By now, all of the three also are ambassadors of Battery Associates, but just a bit of the original story. And yeah, solid-state has been, I think, the topic which was chosen because it's just one of these things which a lot of people ask us about. A lot of people wonder, especially I think the original question we went into this was, will solid-state influence how big gigafactories should be built?

2:02So essentially, as you know from our previous sessions as well, there's so much interest in batteries, and there's so many announcements for gigafactories. So in Europe alone, by 2030, there's announcements for about 1,000 gigawatt hours in Europe. And then the question is, will this be affected when there will be new chemistry, so like a new platform such as solid-state? And this was kind of the original thought. We went into this white paper. Of course, it's hard to answer. I think there were some approaches in there, but then it kind of became this nice summary and I think a nice market overview among solid-state batteries. And the idea was really to bridge a bit the gap, which I know is one of your favorite topics as well, break the silos and really bridge the gap from academia and industry. Because there's a lot of research out there and there's a lot of announcements. But really, we wanted to put it kind of into terms of people interested in business who might not be the biggest battery experts, try and understand what this does mean.

2:57And you can see some highlights in the beginning if you just look at the synopsis of it from 77% third state battery market share predicted by 2030. And some of the pros and challenges of the pros and challenges of sulfites and oxides and all the energy densities you can get. But there's some of the challenges out there. And yeah, I think it's really great work and there's more planned. What do you think, Bavia? Well, I love to hear that we're bridging gaps. So I'm always offended that. Congrats. But I guess my question is like solid-state. Here's something. Maybe we can break it down a little bit for our listeners. We have solid-state and then you hear about all kinds of lithium-ion batteries, like where, which goes where and how is performance affected? Can you share a bit on that with our listeners? Yeah, I mean, one thing I should definitely say, probably the best way is to read the white paper. I guess so.

3:56I know. But I can give a bit of an overview. So maybe also just a quick reference. So in our battery day, which we spoke about in the previous session, actually Pooja and Srinath, two of the co-authors, actually were speaking on the panel on solid-state. And they always presented some work there next to speakers from Storedort as well as Polestar. But so this was, I think, a quite nice session, which was about the different perspectives from academia as well as industry, startups, OEMs, et cetera, and consulting. But I think just to give you a bit of an idea, solid-state won't replace everything we know so far. At least that's not what we expect. We think there will be maybe like a nice niche for it, at least to begin with. So solid-state is expected to be more expensive than the lithium-ion batteries we know today, which are liquid acolytes. So it'll be more like a premium segment, maybe. Another big challenge which also came up in the battery day was the challenge of fast charging with solid-state.

4:56You can imagine solids, it's harder to get movement done in solid than in a liquid. So actually getting high, fast rating can be a challenge. It's one of the big dreams that you can do it more safely because you don't have flammable liquids. But actually getting the super fast, high rate solid-state done in reality is quite a challenge. So that's definitely something where we need improvement. As you probably know, there's no real commercial, sort of say, batteries you can buy right now. There's some intermediate steps. And of course, there's companies out there who do lots of announcements, et cetera, and it's exciting. But it's still a bit of a journey. I think we have every product roadmap, maybe. I think when we talk some 2025, 28, something plus. So it's still quite a bit of a journey and quite a few hoops to jump through. But yeah, it's super exciting. And I think it's one of these platform technologies. Maybe just one last thing where solid-state doesn't immediately mean a new chemistry.

5:58But of course, you could use the same we're using today in theory. But of course, people trying to use things like a lot more silicon as well as lithium metal. Which then has some benefits for energy density and things. But yeah, maybe read the solid-state. Listen to the white paper. Listen to the recession with Mariana where it goes into the depth as well as of our brilliant retrovolution participants and listeners. All right. I think you've given our readers their charge and maybe me too as well. We're looking forward to reading it. And I'm excited to see how we do next week with battery safety. That's definitely an area I've worked in. And I decided to join that conversation. Sounds great. See you then. Bye bye. Bye. Bye. So, let's take a look.