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Solid-State Battery Startup Claims Breakthrough For Electric Vehicles (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Now a startup developing all solid-state batteries (ASSB) secured backing from several high-profile investors, including several automakers, as it claims a breakthrough for the technology that will enable better electric cars. Solid Power is a Colorado-based startup that spun out of a battery research program at the University of Colorado Boulder. The company claims to have achieved a breakthrough by incorporating a high-capacity lithium metal anode in lithium batteries -- creating a solid-state cell with an energy capacity "2-3X higher" than conventional lithium-ion. They have already attracted investments from important companies, like A123 Systems and more recently BMW, which planned to validate their battery technology for the automotive market. Now they are announcing this week the addition Hyundai, Samsung and several others to the list as they close a $20 million series A round of financing. They are now working with two automakers and two battery cell suppliers for the auto industry. Some of the advantages that they claim their technology has over current batteries, as mentioned in their press release, include:
- 2-3x higher energy vs. current lithium-ion
- Substantially improved safety due to the elimination of the volatile, flammable, and corrosive liquid electrolyte as used in lithium-ion
- Low-cost battery-pack designs through: Minimization of safety features and elimination of pack cooling
- Greatly simplified cell, module, and pack designs through the elimination of the need for liquid containment
- High manufacturability due to compatibility with automated, industry-standard, roll-to-roll production
Solid Power plans to use the funds from its Series A investment to "scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in 2019." The battery cells produced at this new facility "will be utilized for preliminary qualification of the company's solid-state cells for multiple markets including automotive, aerospace and defense."
- 2-3x higher energy vs. current lithium-ion
- Substantially improved safety due to the elimination of the volatile, flammable, and corrosive liquid electrolyte as used in lithium-ion
- Low-cost battery-pack designs through: Minimization of safety features and elimination of pack cooling
- Greatly simplified cell, module, and pack designs through the elimination of the need for liquid containment
- High manufacturability due to compatibility with automated, industry-standard, roll-to-roll production
Solid Power plans to use the funds from its Series A investment to "scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in 2019." The battery cells produced at this new facility "will be utilized for preliminary qualification of the company's solid-state cells for multiple markets including automotive, aerospace and defense."
Wish I get a $ every time a breakthrough is announced within these pages.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
"...Now we'll just present that we own the patents to this technology and seize this invention from you." - Big Oil
How do these compare to the Goodenough solid-state batteries?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
At 3x higher mass or volume that would be boring.
Or did they possibly mean energy density?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
How much did taxpayers invest in the research at University of Colorado Boulder? How much can they expect in return? Will they be reimbursed by the IPO or do they have to wait until the profits roll in?
Research is typically paid for by you and I through our taxes. When a great discovery is made, all the profits go to private parties. When do we get reimbursed?
...omphaloskepsis often...
It seems that we hear about these "breakthroughs" pretty often. At least long enough to generate an initial round of investment and then we never hear anything from them again.
Hopefully this will not be the same.
I personally still believe that hydrogen fuel cells are better option. Especially with the recent advances in membrane tech which allows the rapid creation of hydrogen from ammonia. An Australia firm has recently made this more attractive from a cost perspective.
I am looking forward to electrically powered cars. I think electric engines are better in nearly every way. Also, vastly less to go wrong in terms of mechanical bits.
Batteries however are crap. In 10 years, it will be an unusable heap of e-waste that must be replaced. Sure, some of that battery can be recycled, but much will go to a land fill. Not to mention the environmental impact of lithium mining. There is very little that is "green" about current battery tech.
Not to mention the fact that the current power grids of the world cannot support everyone having a plug in car.
Fire back up the coal plants I guess since nuclear is politically not possible in most countries.
That is a big reason hydrogen is a good option. Ammonia can be created in bulk offsite using renewables and transported using current infrastructure then using membrane tech, which is not that power intensive, converted to hydrogen onsite at a filling station.
There's been so many now.
Even if the energy density per size of a lipo cell is already pretty dang high.
Besides, for cars the density isn't even now so much important. take a look at a tesla battery pack. how much of it is not battery? quite a lot!
the weight and safety and most importantly PRICE is the key for making a better battery technology for a car. there's just so much of these announcements that it's really hard to take any of them seriously - and frankly, we shouldn't even care before they have a production line running. they do these media announcements to boost up their visibility to have something to show to potential investors. the smart money doesn't care two fucks if it's featured on wallstreet times or whatever though - they care if it a) works b) can be produced at a good cost.
this makes it an automatic suspect when they go for high media visibility - because really, in their line of technology it's not needed. for actual breakthrough there's several billions of parked cash waiting to be dumped on it to bring some factory online. without any need to shoot for media visibility to get some investors onboard to keep the company going.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Probably just another con-artist trying to scam venture capitalists. Extraordinary claims like 2-3x better energy density requires extraordinary evidence.
I don't see a whole lot in terms of technical specifications, this seems to be about it: "energy capacity 2-3X higher than conventional lithium-ion.". But according to this it just brings the specific energy into the range of Li-Po and Li-Sulphur. So why is this better?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Of course - here. In this forum. Like scores of times. So far, with the same outcome every single time.
Oh, it's not about a new Metal Gear. I'm not even reading the rest then... it's just the usual new battery hype article.
I'll believe it when I'm flying my quadcopter for an hour
This is not news. Let us know when a startup company tells us they have nothing and close shop. This before they went public or received money in any other way than from the owners of the company itself.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
> for actual breakthrough there's several billions of parked cash waiting to be dumped on it to bring some factory online.
Who had that parked cash waiting for better batteries? Large car companies like BMW? Major electronics manufacturers like Samsung? I'll wait until companies like that put their money into something before I think it's really that promising.
> When a great discovery is made, all the profits go to private parties.
Uhm, no. The company already paid the school to license the technology, and they'll keep paying royalties.
> When do we get reimbursed?
Starting in 2011, in this case, and continuing forever.
In addition to giving the (taxpayer owned) school stock in the company name(profits), the company pays:
Up-front license fees for the technology developed at the school
Minimum annual and/or milestone payments
Royalties on net sales
Sublicense royalties
More information can be found here:
https://www.colorado.edu/techt...
> How much can they expect in return?
Annual reports are available at the above link, showing exactly how much return was received each year from the various spinoffs.
> Will they be reimbursed by the IPO or do they have to wait until the profits roll in?
Founders don't sell their stock at the time of an IPO. That would basically be announcing "we, who know the most about it, don't want this stock" at the same time you're trying to sell it to others. The financial equivalent of "ewww this milk is nasty, smell it". You wait until some time after the IPO. The (tax payer owned) university has founders stock. The up-front cash to the university is a license payment, the stock is one of several ways the taxpayers get ongoing long-term returns.
There are a lot of profitable spun off from universities and the (taxpayer owned) university DOES get money back, someone's a pretty hefty sum. Obviously not every idea is commercially successful, but some are are. The payments back to the university help pay for the school, which reduxes the amount taxpayers pay. In this case we're talking about CU. They get about $5 million / year in royalties from spinoffs.
See also:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
> I'm still waiting for those 1TB optical disks that've been promised for 15+ years.
This link is the 3.3TB version. Near the bottom you'll see buttons for 1.5TB, 600GB, etc.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c...
The are used to replace tape drives, primarily enterprise backup and archiving.
Blu-ray video means millions of those discs are produced, so economic of scale make the Blu-ray format the economical one. Blu-ray is currently available in 25GB, 50GB, and 100GB.
Other companies are not far behind.
When the battery pack costs 100 $/kWh, the battery + motor has the same price as ICE+transmission. Electrics can also do battery+ 2 smaller motors electronically linked AWD. That should be compared to ICE+AWD transmission. At that price ICE car and EV car will cost the same off the factory. EV running cost is 4 times smaller than ICE. The mass adoption would be inevitable.
Charging speed is not a big issue now. For an ICE every joule that turns the wheel comes from a gas station. For an EV 90% to 95% of the energy will come from an outlet in the garage. Only street parking people, condos without decent chargers, people traveling longer than 250 miles a day will need to go to the equivalent of gas stations. So we need two orders of magnitude fewer charging stations compared to gas stations. And the charging speed is tolerable. It will get better, there are charging technologies on the horizon and it is limited by cost, not technical breakthrough.
Grid capacity is not an issue. Grid is at 25% to 30% of the peak capacity at night. So the current grid itself is enough even if all ICEVs switch to EVs overnight today.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The easy way to know is to drop the other person from the sentence and try it. In this example:
Research is typically paid for by you and I through our taxes.
Research is typically paid for by I through my taxes.
You would write:
Research is typically paid for by me through my taxes.
Therefore:
Research is typically paid for by you and me through our taxes.
Doubling battery capacity per unit of mass will allow small electric aeroplanes to be a viable alternative to sitting in traffic. If some rich dude just has to take a short 100 mile hop during peak hours on his tiny private plane, he will do it.
Of course, all transportation will benefit from this increased capacity.
Call me when it actually goes commercial. Until then it's vapourware.
That would be great!
Tesla's exploding batteries are the major issue imo (more than energy density).
Elon Musk: "My top advice really for anyone who says they’ve got some breakthrough battery technology is please send us a sample cell, okay. Don’t send us PowerPoint, okay, just send us one cell that works with all appropriate caveats, that would be great. That sorts out the nonsense and the claims that aren’t actually true.” - 2014
While it is unquestionably true that /. publishes <wild_exaggeration>an average of 2,000 "battery breakthrough" stories per hour</wild_exaggeration>, this one is different from the sludgepipe of ordinary hype in two important ways:
We never see that with any of the other battery-breakthrough hype pieces. They're all either announcements of tabletop-scale demonstrations (at best), or simply theoretical extrapolations of what some newly-discovered phenomenon could, eventually mean for increaing power density and/or rechargeability, making batteries out of less-expensive materials, incorporating unicorn scat, or other examples of wishful thinking in search of investors.
This one, by contrast, is an announcement unveiling a startup that has convinced some solidly-credible major corporate investors who have (at in Samsung's case) undoubtedly heard presentations on gee-whiz battery "breakthroughs" from a raft of wannabes and scam artists in the past - and have obviously passed on all of them. It's real enough that the bean-counters in these multi-billion-dollar enterprises have signed off on those investments. That's a completely different thing than the pure hype that virtually every other story on the subject consists of.
It's certainly still possible that their pilot plant will reveal scalar problems in manufacturing that eventually will relegate Solid Power's claimed breakthrough to "nice try, but no cigar" staus. It appears that we'll have to wait until 2019 to see if that happens (although, if the actual product doesn't live up to the investors' expectations, I kinda doubt we'll see a big, public announcement about it - more likely, it'll just quietly close its doors and disappear into the investor's writeoff disclosures in their annual reports to the SEC). But I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt - at least, until their Series A financing runs out ...
(Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Solid Power. I have no financial interest in any tech or automotive company whatsoever, nor do I advise any such entity. Hell, my wife and I own a grand total of ONE share of stock - and it's a legacy of an employee profitsharing plan from her employment in the retail sector almost 20 years ago. And, fwiw, hype of any kind tends to make me break out in acute scepticism.)
Check out my novel.
might drastically improve EV performance in bends...
We need to stop posting these unless there is an actual product on the market.
There have been so many "battery breakthrough!!!!111oneone" posts that we never hear about again. Shouldn't we be a bit less naive by now?
The company name "Solid Power" reminds me of how my morning bowel movements work. That's now the only mental image I'm thinking of.
I don't know who picked that name for their company, but they should have done a better job of it.
I mean, seriously, I've been in tech for 30 years. There's always a catch when it comes to battery technologies. Always!
The closest I've ever seen to the "perfect battery technology" isn't a battery at all, it's a supercapacitor. And those don't have viable energy capacities (for most applications), so that's the catch with supercapacitors.
So you start getting your hopes up about Swanky Brand X battery chemistry, and then they spring the bad news on you. Like, it requires a liquid electrolyte and yet you cannot safely put the battery into a liquid-tight container. Or it works fantastic. For 10 charge cycles and then requires a total replacement.
Those are made-up exaggerations of course, but it's enough to make the point. Lithium-ion batteries are actually pretty good, considering some of the limitations of battery systems I've had to live with in the past.
And BTW, where are the fuel cell energy packs we were promised 20 years ago?? That's it, I'm outta here. Waiter, bring me my jet pack!
Like: 1) Cost? 2) Number of usable charge cycles, and rate of charge degradation? 3) Charging rates (how fast can it safely/practically be charged)?
Not officially a fan but this interview with Bannon made me reconsider what is actually going down https://youtu.be/p5pvKpFi5vY