Battery Revolution Clubhouse Recording - Battery News and Outlook 2022

0:00Transcript

0:00Okay, welcome back, everyone. If you're new, also a big welcome to join. As you can maybe see in the title, if you're on Clubhouse right now or you listen to this as the podcast, the Battery Insiders, this is the 45th session we're running this. So this is essentially a program or like this, like sessions. Catherine and I started last year, so 45 sessions ago, as you can get from the title. So Catherine is unfortunately not able to join today. She's with really bad internet. So yeah, so it doesn't really work. So hopefully she will join again next time. But yeah, for today, she's unfortunately not here. But I'm very happy that already some people like Christopher and Mark already on stage see also Crystal in the audience. So if you want to join Crystal, you're really welcome to do so as well. And if you have been with us for a while, you know, there's some housekeeping you're probably quite familiar with, but essentially just free to raise your hand anytime.

1:00You know, we are happy to put you up on stage. This is really interactive format. You know, we're really kind of thinking and we're talking, you know, we're discussing all kinds of topics related to batteries. I know some quite some really cool people, some executives I was talking to the last weeks. I listened to this as well. So this has quite a bit of reach. That's really nice. And essentially, usually we have a conversation starter for these sessions. That's something we're doing again. I'm already lined some up for the later months in February, et cetera. But today is a bit more like an informal session where it's kind of an opening session for the year. We did something similar also for the closing, what were like our highlights for the last year. Today is a bit more looking into the future, but also looking at all the battery news from December. Because something we do as Battery Associates, we summarize, you know, all the news we find really interesting every month.

1:51And we summarize them as part of a newsletter, which is free to everyone. Battery, if you can download, like you can subscribe to it at battery.associates. And then you get the newsletter into your inbox. But in these sessions, I really like to kind of share a bit more about these news and also like answer any questions people might have, or we can just discuss in more detail. Or we can discuss any news we were missing. Because of course, there's always more news because, you know, we didn't include. So really interested also to hear your thoughts, anything, you know, you found interesting in the past month. And that's something we're going to do in a short bit as well. And also maybe one thing. So we also do this as a paid kind of service as part of our Battery Associates and Company Membership. So you kind of get the insights group here. And of course, you know, we also do a bit more work for some of our clients to give them some more insights, especially in some of these topics to go really much more in depth.

2:41But again, today, we do open to, you know, discuss any of them in the depth you feel comfortable with today. Okay. Let me just quickly open up the newsletter. So I have it on of me. If you want to see the old newsletters, actually, we just put them up on our website. So you can go on Battery.associates and you click on the newsletter tab on there. You actually find the past newsletters as well. So if you want to look at some older news and see maybe how, you know, things have developed over time. Of course, that's quite interesting. And I'm also going to quickly make sure that Barath, who is one of my colleagues, also will join us because he also spent quite a bit of time on this newsletter. So give me just one second. Just to make sure he comes and he can join as well. Okay. Okay. So let's, let's go get started with the first news. Oh, Barath is here. Perfect.

3:39Good timing, Barath. Good to see you. I was just sending you a WhatsApp. You want to quickly say hi as well? Hello, guys. Nice to meet you. Thanks for inviting me to the session. I hope we are looking out this 2022. A lot of exciting news are coming up. I think we will be sharing all the news in the battery newsletter that we are posting every month. And if you have any suggestions or if you have anything else, please let us know. We can also add those things in our newsletter. Thank you, Barath. Thank you so much. And so what I will do now is I will walk through the news we have from the past month. And very happy, you know, if any of you wants to give any feedback, any thoughts, you can also use the chat function. If you can't speak, you know, right now, you can also send us anything in the chat. Or Christopher, Mark, for free to jump in any given time as well.

4:31You, Barath, as well. And Crystal, you know, if you want to come up, for free to do so as well. But I also appreciate it's quite early for you. Okay. Then maybe also, Barath, just for you, I think maybe afterwards, you could maybe share a bit about your blog article, the latest one, top five things you should know before purchasing used batteries for second life applications. So if you want to share anything about this, Barath, after I went through the news, I think this will be really nice as well. Great. So let's get started. So the first news we were looking at was on Hyundai shutting down their combustion engine development team to focus on EVs. And I think, you know, yeah, might not be too surprising for some, but I think it's really exciting now that we can see more and more of these, you know, bigger, larger, some call them legacy automakers and to shut down, you know, these kind of, you know, the future development of the engines.

5:20We had an interesting discussion with some of our clients as well, partners to, you know, what does this mean maybe for other regions, right? Because quite some other automakers, for example, Volkswagen, et cetera, I think they're saying, you know, they're kind of, you know, going to go all a V, but only for the region where it's kind of possible. So they still kind of have this loophole to say, look, there's some other markets and look at the US and others where they don't believe, you know, it can be all electric, at least in the very near future or in the near future. So I think there's some new pools, but as far as I can see here from Hyundai, they've been shutting it down, which is exciting. And they're kind of moving it over to electrification center. Of course, Hyundai also, if anybody has any other thoughts on this, is one of these, you know, automakers also still being quite concerned or like quite looking into hydrogen as well.

6:05So they're still investing in that. So of course, it's also interesting to see, you know, we will talk more about hydrogen a bit later as well. But yeah, essentially hydrogen, you know, this is somehow to make us a store in hydrogen. Others like Volkswagen, as many know, is kind of very bullish on saying we're all electric and avoiding hydrogen route. So we spoke about this in a previous session as well, especially, I think, I don't even know, but I think like two podcasts in the past, hydrogen versus battery. So if you're interested in this topic, be free to listen to this as well. So then the next news we had was Swedish battery startup Northvolt assembled Europe's first lithium-ion battery. This is a news from the 28th of December. There was this announcement just before end of the year where they said, yeah, they assembled their first lithium-ion cell in the Swedish gigafactory. you know, I think it's, why is this maybe matter? Why is this interesting?

6:58Because, you know, I mean, there's a lot of capacity which is kind of planned for Europe. You know, there were some studies showing that essentially about a thousand gigawatt hours of battery, you know, capacity for production is planned in Europe alone, which is a massive increase and Europe wants to produce about 30% of the batteries worldwide. So that's at least something I've seen, you know, from the European Commission and the Parliament. They were kind of talking about these kinds of numbers, you know, it's going to be really high numbers. But at the moment, also, if you look at this, there's quite a few of the more, you know, established battery companies like CATL, probably the biggest one right now, and others, you know, really moving to the European market like S-Volt and Farazes and all kinds of other ones. So I think that's, you know, that's really interesting that there's all these kind of companies coming, but they're, most of them are Chinese, where there's also most of production right now.

7:49And, you know, they come to Europe and they kind of bring their own equipments to bring their own supply chains, et cetera. And Northward, on the other hand, VJ tries to build like a local, let's say, a fully, you know, European battery in a way and a fully European source battery, which means, you know, you take all the materials and, you know, you get all the mines from Finland, you get, you know, Sweden, like all this war materials essentially from, maybe from Germany or lots of other interesting projects are, you know, in the works. And I think it's really interesting to see that they're really trying to build this local supply chain and they're building a local battery. That's why I think it's really interesting now that they actually have the real battery because, you know, it's quite challenging to actually ramp something up and it's still, I think there's still lots for them to achieve and lots ahead of them. But I think it's exciting to see that they're actually now firstly assembling their first batteries at the Gigafactory.

8:39So I think it's a big, big step. And yeah, so they're planning to ramp it up to 60 gigawatt hours, which is a good size. I think Berlin with Tesla, I think it was another 100 or more. I don't know. So like, it's a good size. So yeah, they also got 30 billion worth of contracts secured with, you know, BMW, Fluence, Scania, Volkswagen, Volvo Cars, and Polestar, which I think, you know, is also a big bet on this, right? They're just going to work out. And yeah, so, you know, what they're saying is they're expecting first commercial delivery in 2022. So this year, which is exciting. And yeah, so I think, you know, this is, yeah, I think it's exciting to see how this is going to develop. You know, there's a few other companies who are really getting, like, you know, probably started now in Europe and Germany also in the coming year, this year. So very interested to see my news on this.

9:30Then another news, which I would love to also have other people's thought on, you know, is on, Volkswagen announcing this update for the ID models, which includes bidirectional charging. And bidirectional charging, I mean, it's one of these topics I love because it's just super interesting. And I think, you know, people have been discussing it for a while. And I think, yeah, there's definitely, like, different camps you can say, right? Like, people have different thoughts about it. Some people are really in favor, and some people think it's going to be a bit more challenging. And so I think, yeah, what's quite interesting about this is that here, you know, this is something I think they announced about three years ago or so. So it has been, you know, in the works for quite some time. But essentially, the idea is that you use all these EVs for the grid, right? So you use them as storage capacity in the grid, which I think is, you know, kind of, you know, makes sense if you think about it.

10:28But then, on the other hand, it's not as, you know, I mean, there's some challenges to it as well. Some car makers didn't want to do it. But for example, if you think about, like, there's an example in the UK, this Nissan, so I lived in the UK before, that's why I came across that, where essentially you can use, you know, Nissan LEAFs for bidirectional charge, like for the grid, bidirectional charging, and there's also some electricity providers, such as, you know, I think they're called Calutza is one of them, and Octopus Energy, two of them, I know, I'm sure there's many more now in the meantime, and so they allow you to do, I think, back then, again, that's probably a bit outdated now. When I was looking at this, it was, like, 7.5 kilowatt hours or something like this. You know, you could use per day or something, so essentially, your car could charge and discharge for you during the night, so it would kind of charge at times where electricity price is very cheap or maybe almost free, and then the electricity would be, you know, the car would trade electricity back to the grid during the day or like at other times, maybe still in the night, but at different times when you don't use the car, and it would trade it back when electricity price is higher, which means your car can actually make money for you.

11:46There's some really interesting electricity builds I've seen where essentially electricity has been free at some point. Again, who knows how this is going to develop because it's, you know, the same as what you see with, you know, the Tesla batteries maybe in Australia and others where you have markets where there are people willing to pay lots of money for peaking, you know, for like, you know, grid balancing and things like this, and of course, this only works if there's not much in the system, so suddenly if there's lots of batteries in the system, this becomes, you know, like essentially this service becomes less valuable in some way, which on other means that maybe you can make less money from it or your electricity bill doesn't get reduced as much. But I think it's super interesting because, again, Volkswagen, when I listened to like a podcast three years ago, so they spoke about the speaker to grid, but the planning, and I think they mentioned something in the tarot hour scale, so I think one or two tarot hours or something.

12:38This was in Volkswagen alone, I think, I think also Europe only or maybe even just Germany. And so there's some massive capacity in the grid you're adding on for all of these I guess you could do the math if you want to, depending on how many are sold. And essentially, you know, you have a massive storage capacity coming into the grid very easily because essentially, you know, no utility, et cetera, has to pay for that. It's really the consumer who's going to bring it into the grid and then, you know, people are going to get some, you know, money back or reduce electricity or whatever. Then, you know, it's a very interesting way, you know, that the load, essentially the risk, it's kind of outsourced or sourced to the consumers, right, by buying these evs and then they're trading back electricity rather than the utilities to, you know, buy lots of more battery storage themselves. Of course, they still have to do that, you know, because they need some, you know, some electricity storage they can always rely on.

13:30But, yeah, I think this is just really interesting development. Again, there's a couple of startups also in this area have been active for a while. I mean, talking to them, you know, this has been not easy, you know, to convince people this is going to come. going to come. So, yeah, I think it's interesting to see that folks like, you know, it's really, yeah, want to do it now. And, of course, degradation is always a big concern for people and it's also interesting to see, you know, they have this new battery care mode which caps the battery charge at 80%, which is, you know, we have spoken about this, you know, for degradation, you want to kind of reduce, you know, the extremes of your batteries and zero, 100% or close to that. And, so that's interesting. But yeah, I think a lot of data are going to come there so that's something we're quite passionate about with battery associates and battery death, this little battery developer competition we're going to run in March.

14:16So, very interested to see how this is all going to develop. And personally, just one of these topics I'm very passionate about and I really believe we had a session on this last year on vehicle to grit. I'm not even sure if we did. But yeah, I definitely feel it's something I've been talking about before. Okay, going to another one. Next topic would be Toyota confirms plans for $1.29 billion North Carolina EV battery plant. So, it's from early December. I think that's just really interesting, you know, seeing more investments there, especially from Toyota who is, you know, still one of them talking, you know, like in talking about hydrogen or doing a lot about hydrogen. And yeah, probably one of the few ones and now they're investing quite heavily in batteries which makes sense because the market is going there. So yeah, so this will be a capacity for about 800,000 vehicles. So, not bad. And so then the next thing is here, yeah, so they did a scheduled it to be operational on train 25.

15:15So, not too long in the future but still a bit of time. And yeah, so they received a bit of subsidies. It says about $400 million new US dollars to kind of start this installation and like setting up a factory there. Yeah, and so essentially they want to go to 1.2 million EVs per year. And yeah, so I think there's a couple of other automotors such as General Motors who are also building and there's, I think, I think it looks like there's going to be quite a bit of money from the US administration under President Biden to install more capacity and build more production capacity in the US. So, definitely something we're looking out for. I mean, last year really was a year for Europe and hopefully it still stays like this but I think the coming year could really become a big year for the US so we're interested to see how this develops. But then, of course, you also have this European battery regulation which is quite advanced and if this goes through the way we have seen it that also will mean quite a bit of a lot of changes and I think put some really going to yeah, I think push the entire ecosystem further and we'll see if the US will do something similar coming the years as well.

16:25Okay, then talking about another automotive, BMW to create 6,000 new jobs next year which is interesting for me because I'm based in Munich right now so BMW is based as well so interesting to see all the new people coming here and of course I'm quite surprised about this in some way because I was thinking they would try to get more of that, let's say, existing people from the engine development etc. to transition to electric but maybe it's not that easy but yeah, so I'm quite curious to see how the 6,000 new jobs can work out and especially for electric vehicles you know the plan to sell 2 million of purely electric vehicles by 2025 having sold 1 million to a date so that's interesting I mean they have been an early adopter and early mover of electric vehicles with I think yeah I was there kind of I forgot the name is it I3 I3 I think yeah I3 and but yeah so they have been slowing down a bit and looks like they really want to get at this you know again and yeah so they're also still talking about hydrogen and they're still talking about hydrogen going to be very important coming up so it's interesting to see how this is going to turn out and develop but yeah I think good news means more people more importance into this topic so I'm just looking forward to see how this develops okay so we're getting closer to the end another news is Unicorn and Volkswagen announced battery raw material joint venture so this is planned in Germany with a capacity of 20 gigawatt hours for the Volkswagen plant this plans to scale up its production capacity to 160 gigawatt hours in a decade to meet the demand for battery materials so yeah also interesting especially in light of you know the announcement from John Simbethi last year in November something being reported in the new November newsletter to exit a battery materials business so you know we can see you may come Volkswagen doubling down this on the production and yeah so I think you know somewhere the materials have to come from it will be interesting to see where the raw materials are coming from are they trying to build like a local European supply chain something you know aligned with what Northworld is trying to do or not so yeah curious to see how this can develop if they're going to go even further down maybe if anybody has news on that I'd be curious to see if they actually want to you know buy some raw materials let's say you know I mean they have to do it anyways but it will be interesting to see if they get more heavily if they do like full vertical integration to say now they have an OEM they have a you know a cathode maker and they would also get some mining companies involved as well curious to see how this can happen especially with some of these newer kind of mines coming up in Europe then South Korea's H2 launching flow battery project in California this might be of interest to some you know we don't talk about this too much flow batteries it's one of these technologies which yeah it's interesting the idea is you can decouple power and capacity so you have like essentially big tanks instead of the electrodes on each side and here the issue is you know some of the chemistries they're trying to go organic for a while but again it's probably great more than you want to and here they're talking about benadium video-x4 batteries which are the typical chemistries people still tend to try to use and yeah so they're planning to do 20 megawatt hours capacity plant in California maybe just to put it into perspective in California the biggest I think actually one of the world's biggest at the point at this moment of time energy storage systems is installed in California as well there's the 3-mine batteries and that's 1,600 megawatt hours so you know 20 megawatt hours is still quite sizable it's still not small but it's interesting to see also if they can you know scale further there's a couple of challenges with these vehicle batteries it's something I also looked at during my PhD so I have some personal anecdotes of these systems but wherever you have mechanics involved there's also some challenges to it so many moving more like more moving parts of things pumps and yeah it's not all that trivial to make it work forever because these systems are supposed to work for like 20 years or something so the idea should last longer and you can fully discharge them and charge them rather than the battery can be more challenging now as NFP gets better but anyways the problem is pumps can also break and I've seen quite a bit of these challenges in my own time okay China's cobalt mining company to acquire 100% of Zimbabwean lithium mine you know it's more kind of consolidation of these supply chains so not so surprising but it's still you know it's showing this you know it's happening more of this that we see these kind of yeah that China is trying to really make sure they have the control over their supply chains especially now we're interesting to see if there's more European initiatives coming but yeah it's something interesting to look at then something maybe you know them Viridian the company in the UK working on sodium-ion I think we wrote about them before when we were talking about CRTL sodium day they got acquired by Reliant Industries one of the biggest companies in India which I was can mention talk much more about this than me essentially they got acquired for about 100 million pounds with a further investment of 25 million pounds for commercial rollout I think it's very interesting there's more of these acquisitions happening right now also from around the world and sodium-ion it's still something to be seen how successful it's going to be I mean I actually found an anecdote story of this I started working on sodium-ion batteries this was my first battery research I did in California Berkeley it really got me started on my battery track in some way so I have some personal attachment maybe to this topic but at the same time I'm also quite aware of quite a few of the challenges I've been seeing myself and I've observed in the industry as well so excited to see how this is going to turn out it's also good to see because these companies are very challenging to commercialize the chemistry last time we saw another announcement for UK chemistry related company which was Oxys Energy we went bankrupt unfortunately or they got administration had to be acquired by Johnson Matthew but they only looked at their hydrogen IP etc so that's interesting or at least that's what they announced and we also tried to solve for batteries another interesting chemistry but also very challenging to make it work so yeah it will be interesting to see if this really helps these guys to commercialize it properly or if it's going to go or it's not going to go somewhere so we're interested to see how this goes they have some interesting claims and seem to do some interesting work so yeah curious to see if we have more to announce about these guys in this coming year then Viotinto acquires Winko mining project for US 850 million dollars so it was in December a leading mining company Viotinto acquired Winko lithium project in Argentina for 850 million dollars so yeah another one of these consolidations essentially try to secure but now a different region this time in Argentina and then just one more here from Vietnam also interesting there's the SPRIN group which is quite a bit recently so do quite a few investments and things like this the first other mobile manufacturer side to workers own cell factory so they want to produce 100,000 battery packs per year and it's interesting to see there's some more development happening in Vietnam again people have been on these sessions before I'm quite bullish about this idea that there will be a battery industry in every single country in this world coming in the future so I think it's just a matter of time but it's interesting to see some countries to move faster than other ones so that's the battery newsletter what I'm just going to do now is I'm not sure if you already put up this one on the website if not for free to subscribe to it just go on the website but also if you're interested in any of the past newsletters you do once a month you know they're for free as Barbara said you're free to go on our website I'm actually going to some of the ones on there and also the one I just went through this one also either it's in the inbox already if you're subscribed or you can read it on the website in the future and also Milo it's very good to see you it has been a while so if you want to jump in or Tim very good to see you as well !

25:13Hey Milo good to see you! Nice to see you! How are you? Very good! Happy New Year! Happy New Year guys! Yeah! And yeah we just went through some of the news of the battery newsletter we sent out this week to summarize some of the battery news in December so now maybe if there's anything else people want to talk about any news and then maybe Barath can go to the blog if you want to batteries I need to think about that right now nothing can obviously a lot of news but right now nothing specific comes to my mind give me a few minutes because I just joined you Sure no problem at all Crystal from Mark do you have anything you found interesting of what I just read through of any other news you found interesting in the past month Yeah I really like we're going to start with the North Wolf News obviously they're building capacity and as you mentioned with a lot of these companies they're trying to expand their battery metals supply chain and they've actually had a partnership with a lithium mine in Portugal so now that's very early stage because but and they've also committed to having a 50% recycled battery metal charging material by 2030 which is very bold based on the availability of recycled material other news are that battery resources are recycling to the United States they are building facility in Georgia and Redwood Materials is building a hydromat facility here in Reno Nevada where I am so those are pretty big news and to add the point which you discussed Simon is that these companies are really fighting to find any recycled battery materials for their starting products and it's really a challenge also of course building a integrated European supply chain as the battery directive rules are sort of encouraging or forcing at some point so I don't know if the technology is exactly there or even the in the case of the say cobalt mines is even possible at this point but I'm curious to see the moves that happen within the different companies whether it's North Force or or Volkswagen trying to find that supply to meet those battery directives because right now there's not really any large commercial battery recycling operations that can offer battery grade cobalt nickel and lithium for any of these operations so I'm curious and watching that's where I am thank you very much for sharing Mark super interesting I'm actually going to ask you a bit more about something recycling plants that we just mentioned but Christopher I saw you also say something yeah so obviously I'd already seen the newsletter you know and it's interesting to see that the start of the year that the EV side of it seems to have came out just as strong as it was ending the year again like Mark says I think Northfold first battery produced that's European design as well that's great news for not only Northfold but all the other gigas that are following in the footsteps and trying to get through to that point still a long way to go obviously I would imagine the honing in the processes and making them more efficient but that's pure speculation when you went through the newsletter there I think there was about six or seven points that are all automotive it was interesting the Volkswagen and the bi-directional charging obviously the Nissan Leaf has been sort of able to do that for some time but the other interesting side is if you think back five maybe six years ago there was concerns that bi-directional charging would sort of void any warranties that you got with the batteries so it's good to see that actually moving towards vehicle to grid I think it's you know what is it I think something around most cars spend 95% of the time either in car parks or outside the house and obviously if you can have a further use for it and you know if you're doing vehicle to grid maybe even sort of the car may even be earning you some money at that point Toyota I mean for so long it was will they or won't they you know will they jump into EV will they not jump into EV you know lots of sort of pushing around the hydrogen so to see them invest in that sort of money into battery plant North Carolina you know that's significant so you know 800,000 vehicles a year by 2025 let's see how that develops I think some of the interesting parts on the newsletter as the integration that you're starting to see you know VW and UMACOR you know there's lots more integration being occurring you know Volkswagen invested in sort of 24M the back end of last year and that was obviously that's semi-solid state so it's different again to the conventional I think the most interesting news I've seen in the last week was the announcement by Mercedes and the EQXX and 621 miles or 1000 kilometres of a single charge without increasing the size of the battery I think we'll see more of that coming from other manufacturers over the course of this year or at least I'd like to see that and sort of different ways on achieving that so I think 2022 will be I think it'll be just a strong year for announcements as what we had last year but also I think in 2022 we'll start and have to see some movements on maybe promises that were made last year thank you so much for sharing Christopher very interesting thoughts Maldis do you have any other thoughts in the meantime yes I don't know if you were talking about recycling about Redwood materials did you already talk about this news Redwood materials announced that they will recycle the batteries from Panasonic and they will ship back the copper foil which they will produce to Panasonic so they will recycle but they are recycling batteries between other batteries also from Panasonic Tesla Nevada facility and they will ship back copper foil to supply to Panasonic production in Nevada so just to go on your point Milos they've been taking Panasonic batteries for a while now the copper foil recovery is not some sort of huge task but it means that they've changed their processing method to actually recover the copper they're not using straight pyro anymore they're using a shredding process a physical separation process they don't talk about the other materials such as cobalt nickel lithium because they don't have a way of recovering those in battery grade but it's interesting but not as exciting as I would have hoped I understand I understand that they are recovering it also lithium and other metals I was talking to JB Stroud several months ago and he even showed me lithium which they are recovering from those batteries and things like that so I know that they are recycling batteries from Nevada for long time but the news is that they are going to supply this copper they are recovering they will process it to battery grade copper oils and they will supply it back to the same factory I mean it's kind of news PR a little bit more maybe but it is valid news I would say thank you my listen mark for for for these other news which you are talking about what also now Christopher was talking about I kind of divided the battery companies to three parts the battery companies which they are real and part of the supply value chain means that they are already producing or they are already building the construction building and they will produce in near future then the second group of the companies which they are commercializing new technologies or they are raising money to build so basically future is very uncertain because to commercialize the technologies not all of them will be commercialized but they are already close to commercialization and the third group of the companies which I want to be or maybe they are part of the hype and some of them are on the border so hype is big the commercialization is a relatively big group and also the real companies basically is big group thank you for sharing my list and obviously it's very difficult to figure it out between hype and real commercialization the companies which they are trying to commercialize something or raising money to build something from established technology I think that's a very good point I think that's tricky for many right it's very challenging even for suppliers I've been talking to quite a few suppliers recently and they also try and understand what's real and what's not and it's challenging for many people but I think it's good there's movement and I think the right thing is going to be supported Barberth is there maybe something you want to share with some of your work on the blog before sharing the blog I would want to add some views about this Faradayyan acquisition by Reliance Industries Usually we used to see a lot of legendary automakers and a lot of legendary battery makers making investments acquiring companies and things like that but this is the first time in India where a very different company Reliance Industries is more into retail which doesn't B2B and B2C models not very close to this technical business let's say this kind of very high technological business in the previous year they pledged 75,000 crores which is around 50 million USD to be invested in the energy ecosystem so they are starting partnership with very big organization and also they are looking for many people to do this kind of strategic partnership but even I found this acquisition as a very successful thing for them because they are a very big company and when we are talking to the startup fellows or startup people in Indian ecosystem we face a very tough thing in the country because of the raw material because we have the capacity we have people who are capable to manufacture this kind of batteries but availability of the raw material and supply chain is not possible because they are going to manufacture cells in a very minimum quantity whereas this kind of reliance company they are huge they promised that they are going to establish a very big manufacturing center in Gujarat it's one of the part in India so I think the raw material availability is going to be high in Indian market because they are going to import a lot of raw materials which will also trigger many other startups to come and work on this particular thing so I think this is a very nice step for the Indian economy especially the Indian government rolling out a lot of plans like incentives for the battery manufacturing facilities so I think it's very interesting news for the complete Indian battery manufacturing ecosystem so this will create a potential change in the landscape in South Asia I hope so but we want to thank you for sharing about an interesting perspective do you now want to maybe talk a bit about your blog yeah sure so if possible Simon can you please share the link over there so the people can view so this is a blog which we wrote recently we talked to many people in this sector like what are the major things they want to look before purchasing a battery for second life application very tough task because the right sorting and analyzing the cells and identifying the right perfect batch of cells for the application is quite tricky but finding a good quality cell for the second life application is even much more tougher when comparing to the application and things like that so we have written this block with the top five parameters that which we want to think about while purchasing this batteries for various battery chemistry and the second thing is the state of health and the third thing will be the form factor and the fourth parameter is battery history and the fifth parameter is battery data so you guys can please go and if possible can have a take please have a read and please give your suggestions because we are improving the articles because we got very good feedback from many people and also we we can take a different perspective or not so this is a block and we have a lot of ideas on it so we are just looking for people to give much more insight so that we can improve the blog improve the idea in the blog thank you thank you thank you for doing the work you've written we also Marcus with one we really excited to move !

41:19with this one actually it's a bit delayed on this one but we still processing it yeah so also invitation anybody else who wants to write a blog you're interested to have more perspectives on our blog so everyone is welcome here to to suggest a topic and to start writing on something cool so maybe looking back is there anything you think about maybe for what you expect for the next months look like for various industries specific to various industries because you know each and every industry has an individual standard to be followed especially with lithium-ion batteries many people are importing lithium-ion batteries but they're actually not considering the standards let's say the people in South Africa or the people in Africa the people in India or people from developing and underdeveloping countries or importing batteries for the application but the standardization of lithium-ion batteries is quite tricky for them to find so we would like to help those people from those countries as well so we are going to write a blog segregating the three major industries one is the automobile industry one is energy storage industry and also we are planning to help those people who are using this battery for health tech industry but I think we are going to at least add some more industries as well so if you have any ideas if you have any list of the standards we can look into please send us this maybe send a mail to us or contact us form or something else that will be helpful for us to write the next blog it will be helping many people in the ecosystem as well thank you if you want to read about Barrett work I pinned now you can see before so feel free to look at them as well and again Mark has one in the pipeline just have to get it up and then also quite a few people from the BatteryMBA which is a program also Christopher and Mark we have quite a few people who write some interesting blogs coming up because the next court starts on Monday and we got a bunch of interesting people there as well first time people from Tesla and a bunch of interesting mining companies and all kinds of interesting organizations can be part of that so hopefully some of them will join us in some of the future podcasts because I today so that's why maybe keep it a bit shorter but yes any other topics you want to talk about any thoughts you want to share anything you're wondering about if this year going to show this Mark yeah hi I wanted to talk about the money the administration has allocated toward both battery manufacturing scale up and battery recycling there's a lot of sort of money available for companies and not just the batteries but the cathodes cells battery pack so I think that will push forward some of the limitations we've had with that obviously companies like Redwood will take advance some of that money that's that's sort of the way of moving things forward the European way is more with regulations they move things forward so I'm just curious how that type of money is going to move things quicker in the United States in terms of developing a complete closed loop process for in the United States for both the battery metals the mining battery metals cathode cell battery pack manufacturing and of course car manufacturing obviously we don't have a lot of cobalt so that's one of the limitations but other than that I'm curious how that's going to work itself out and of course the same challenge is in Europe they don't have a lot of cobalt and the lithium availability is pretty limited this is a great question a really interesting one I'm actually curious do you know because I mean I saw quite a few interviews over the holidays from Elon Musk he was an interview spree and he was sharing about did he think there shouldn't be any subsidies for anything that includes of course fossil fuels as well but I was just curious do you know some of these subsidies are they more targeted for more legacy makers let's say the GMs and things like this or are they also is Tesla also qualifying for them is it like yeah because I think I also saw that some of them more targeted maybe for other companies with unions and things so I'm just curious to see if you have any insights on that are there some industries some regions more on my list go ahead yes all those subsidies here in the United States all those bills build back better bill or whatever they are corrupted bills promoted by the union and by the legacy automakers and they don't have they shouldn't be passed I hope they will not be passed because nothing good is coming out of that so my opinion is that the people you know the legacy automakers may try to take advantage of it but they really don't have the know-how or capacity or technology to really do it so they have a partnership a part of someone else who actually can do that so it's questionable you know a council is more able to do that they have to make partnerships with a company they can actually do the things because again they're not GM is not a accounting manufacturing a value manufacturing it's not manufacturing companies so it will move things quicker because of subsidies but again the United States doesn't have the know-how and necessarily the IP even to move things forward smaller companies are more able to do that but again I don't know if it's a stage that can actually take advantage of money to actually manufacture the capital into the batteries etc yes all those bills are promoted like I said by the union and all those subsidies and by the US administration so it's very politicized like the President Biden is saying that the GM is the leader in the electrical vehicle automakers GM Mary Barra she's saying that we are the leader we are number one but they produced last year last quarter the GM produced one hammer and 25 bolts in the meantime Tesla produced 308 thousand electrical vehicles in the last quarter and 940 thousand in the year and they are saying that GM is leader Tesla they are not even mentioning Tesla Tesla and those all those bills are against Tesla and to promote the legacy automakers and to bail them out out of the bankruptcy I think it's an interesting perspective right I think the other perspective would be we need all of them we want to have the full transition we want to help everyone and not have one winner which would be Tesla and all the other ones would go down I guess there's two sides to right maybe yeah so it's but I agree I think it's interesting to see you know I mean I think who always benefits from these different builds I mean I'm also pretty certain Tesla also has the own people who are also trying to make advantage out of it I mean they're also smart people right I mean they also have policy teams and things like this so I think they also want to get their parts on it but I think on the one hand it also kind of shows which is really interesting you know I mean looking at this how the table has turned if you think back a few years back where maybe 10 years 15 wasn't clear at all that at some point other companies need to help to be competitive with Tesla I think that's essentially what Tesla wanted to move the entire field and I don't think their plan is to be the only automotive company I think you want to be the best but I don't think the only one right yeah you are absolutely right and I am not bashing other electrical vehicle companies you asked me the question or asked us the question about the subsidies and the bills I am saying that there are I hope there will be many other automotive companies which they will produce electrical vehicles in volume and there are some good promising one I divide them for three groups the established automakers new entrants and then Chinese so many of them they will I hope they will be successful but right now all of them they have the three huge problems with the batteries which I guess is the reason why we're here we brought them very well together by those I think the batteries is really the crucial factor for all of them to be successful so excited to see how this is going to develop and I think this year there will be lots of momentum in this year a lot of announcements and developments and discussions about this in the US I started also seeing it a bit more to my work so I really interested to see how this is going to develop and what are some of the resume maybe we can kind of like our thoughts or reflection is any year's time when we come together again in December 2022 and be like okay so what did actually happen and what did this actually mean great just curious any last thoughts from anybody for today otherwise also happy to keep wondering if anybody has any thoughts for the coming year or anything else yeah maybe I can expand on these three huge problems which electrical vehicles they have for the batteries if you want me yes please so but electrical vehicles they have three huge problems that the they have the problem of the cost they have the problem with the volume of the batteries and they have the problem with the quality performance of the batteries because Tesla is sucking out or they made agreements with the three major battery producers and they are trying to make agreement with everybody else year one producers which there are seven of them now !

53:02so they are telling them and they are buying all the batteries what they can from those three largest one in the world and they are forcing this year they want to buy at least double from the last year from 2021 the so the rest of the automakers they have only leftovers basically whatever is left from those seven tier one producers and in the same time they are forcing those tier one producers to produce more battery bigger volume the cheaper battery and also better performance battery because only Tesla has now second generation battery what I call second generation it means that the second generation is much cheaper they can produce it in much bigger volume and much better quality of the battery so the rest of the automakers they have the problem with the cost of the battery then they cannot produce competitive vehicles all the vehicles today but Tesla they are losing money on each electrical vehicle which they are selling the second volume they don't have enough batteries for those 600 models in the pipeline to produce enough vehicles electrical vehicles in the volume like the millions and the third one their battery whatever they not good performance of the batteries because they are first generation battery so they have the problem with the range they have problem with the fast charging and so on so how they are trying to solve the problem that's also wrong way what they are doing today they are doing classic way means that they are as soon as they discover that they have problem all of !

55:11they know it they call the battery producers their potential partners help us to solve the problem they are saying no problem just give us money create joint ventures with us we will build the factory together and we will solve your problem but as soon as they hang up the phone they go to anode producer can you produce us better anode than other components cathode producers and they just give us money as soon as they hang up the phone they go to their material suppliers can you supply us materials for those batteries and they are saying no problem we will do it just give us money and this way nothing is done so then lithium goes last year to like right now it's I think $43 per kilogram and the materials there is not enough materials for those batteries and there is not enough but there is volume cost and the performance thank you very much for sharing Milo so maybe one question to kind of finish it up you know it's a tough one it is something hard to know but I'm just curious if any of you has any thoughts or all of you you know who going to be the biggest battery producer one which company potentially and second which country by the end of the year which might not be you know that interesting because it's quite obvious and then maybe also which one has the highest growth which will be the one which increases the most over this year in the production volume just curious any thoughts yeah it's very clear question it's not difficult to answer the largest producer this year because it's short you're asking short time short time short term questions so this year the largest producer will be for sure cattle and largest country will be for sure the China by far and the fastest growing the production means that gigawatt hours from zero to whatever gigawatt hours it will be Tesla any additional thoughts on this yeah I mean I agree with Milos on there you know cattle has such a huge market share already just to try and catch up with them as a challenge in itself so you know they will I think they'll continue through 2022 you know we've all seen the graphs on Tesla for fastest producing you know they've made such huge gains in 2021 will they continue in 2022 or will we see additional catch up I don't think anyone my own personal view is I don't see people sort of catching up the sales that Tesla is making but percentage wise jumps you know I think there will be others that will make huge percentage jumps maybe even V-dub but Tesla will still be sort of up there at the top yeah I mean I answered the question because the question was clear about batteries so Tesla going from zero to let's say even 50 gigawatt hours production this year it would be infinite growth because they produced zero to the market last year so largest gain will be definitely Tesla from this point of view but maybe if the question would be defined slightly differently I would answer differently what about the region maybe just quick one like do you think US or Europe will have a higher growth volume over the next year over this year you you mean from the countries let me see not yet this year because this year all those other battery giga plants 25 in United States and 35 in Europe that's about like the pipeline of the new giga plants in those 60 new giga plants plus three because I take Tesla differently because Tesla is second generation so Tesla has three and all those giga plants are going very slowly comparing to Tesla you know even North how many years it took them to start to produce the batteries so and it's the question also how fast they will ramp up because to ramp up production when you start to produce battery which right now the North world will be in this ramping up production in this year because they just started to produce batteries a few days ago so it will be they are going slowly they are not going quickly only Tesla goes quickly so basically I don't expect European or American this year to grow faster because they don't have battery giga plants to produce them thanks for sharing sorry I was busy putting this clip on Twitter brilliant okay let's see how this is going to develop in the year I think maybe I have to think of it some more challenging questions for you my listen for everyone but you know time and then we should have at least scheduled for now we have actually no friend of mine but he's the director of Hagen Energy here in Germany and he's working he has a lot of interesting stories about also the home storage kind of space but also he's done some really exciting work in his academic career before that and we're excited to have him with us and so it's going to be really nice session with another conversation starter so that's something we have coming up then and yeah any other thoughts I think Milo's is unmuting but I think he's now busy but Martin Boise is the person we look forward to hopefully see on the 5th I believe this is February or whatever Saturday it is in one month time just checking it is actually it is the 5th of February so then I'm going to be back but we might have some more sessions before that and again also with some additional moderators as well and again if anybody's interested to be moderator and hasn't let us know yet please get in touch and we invite you to have a call and discuss things further great with this thank you so much everyone for joining it was really nice to see you again see how this all going to hope you see you very soon again and speak soon have a good day bye bye bye you