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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."
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...
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.
I do not think they would be doing this to manufacture vaporware.
It's not being vaporware that killed all the other "breakthroughs" but rather complications/disadvantages that arose during the path towards large-scale manufacturing. For example, how do these batteries respond to damage and/or age? (rapid discharge can be really bad even without caustic/flammable chemicals) How rapidly do they charge? How rapidly does capacity deplete? etc There are many, many ways in which battery technology can fail.
I'll agree that this does perhaps seem further along that path than most "breakthroughs" but there have been so many failures that I'm not going to believe it until I see it.
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.
So ... to paraphrase ....
Problem: electric grids do not produce enough electricity to power all electric cars. This scares me because we will need more coal power plants.
Solution: ditch the relatively efficient battery and switch to a much more inefficient hydrogen fuel cell. Further reduce efficiency by having to create an intermediary gas and membranes which then convert that gas to a different gas. Make sure to waste a bunch of energy moving that liquid all over the place in trucks. It's OK that you're consuming way more energy than by just using batteries; the extra energy will be magically created "off site", which doesn't require any new coal power plants.
Sounds great. You get started on that, I'm sure the money will just pour in.
But according to this it just brings the specific energy into the range of Li-Po and Li-Sulphur. So why is this better?
Li-Po is volatile and LiFePo is expensive. Li-Sulphur batteries are not commercially available and they must be larger than Li-Pos for a given amount of energy storage. And since I can't find anything about their volatility, I assume it's in the same range as Li-Po. A solid electrolyte should be much safer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Actually, Apple alone would likely dump several billion into battery tech if they had a viable way to double the battery capacity of their phones. ... which, of course, they'd use to slim down the phone by another .5mm instead of doubling your battery.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
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.)
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