The entire kind of arc of human history has really been defined by how we harness and capture energy. You know, initially starting with us leveraging things like fire and then later coal and
petroleum fuel sources for our energy needs. And really the great opportunity
going forward is this idea that we can capture
renewable energy sources, store that energy in batteries and then use that to power our lives. Advances in battery design
over the past few decades have made modern technology
possible, but it's not enough. We need better, cheaper,
more energy dense batteries if we're going to make
electric cars ubiquitous and save the planet. Now companies are on the
verge of battery breakthroughs that could change the world. The battery industry has been kind of stuck
making batteries one way for like 50 years and we think it's just time for that to change. A battery looks like a black
box quite literally sometimes but inside it is a very
complex mixture of chemicals. There are four components. There are two electrodes,
cathode and anode, there's a separator and then there's a liquid
electrolyte typically. And the electrolyte's job is to be able to shuttle irons between
the two electrodes. And that's what charges the battery and that's what allows the
battery to be then discharged and produce power. Among the everyday technologies, batteries are perhaps one of the oldest because batteries were invented even before electricity was invented which is to say there was no
way to generate electricity until somebody made a battery
and that was back in 1799 by an Italian scientist named Volta. And what he created was
actually called a voltaic pile. It wasn't even called a battery back then. And it was called a pile because it was literally a pile of
two different types of metal in this case, copper and zinc separated by typically a piece of cardboard
that was dipped in vinegar To get a feel for how a battery works, we decided to build our own. I got a copper sheet, I
got a couple zinc sheets. I cut them into one by one squares and I also got a coffee filter that I cut into one inch squares too. Right, just to start off,
keep a simple aluminum foil at the bottom. Okay.
So that you're able to test whether the battery is working or not. On top of you put a copper sheet. And so now you have to
dip the coffee filter into a solution of salt and water. Okay. Then you put your coffee filter. Done.
Then you place the zinc sheet on top. You also have a voltmeter which basically will be able to measure the voltage that this battery will have. Okay so we're getting 0.74 volts. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. Now you can connect a
copper cable on either ends and you could solider that on then you can connect
it to say an LED light and that should light up. The more cells you pile
on the higher the voltage. We piled on 10 layers of zinc and copper to see if we could power up an LED light. So let's test it with an LED light. Okay, it's the moment of truth here. There we go. And that's electricity. Cool. Batteries have come a long
way since the voltaic pile but they're still made up of
the full basic components, anode, cathode, separator,
and electrolyte. The current state of the
art lithium-ion battery is small, light and relatively powerful making everything from mobile devices to electric cars possible. But in order to make
de-carbonization a reality, batteries need to get much better. We are quite far away from the limits of what a battery can do. Among the different things about batteries that still need to be improved is not just the amount
of energy they can store but they also have to do it safely. Batteries also need to
be charged more quickly and finally batteries
still aren't cheap enough. They probably need to be half the price to be able to compete with
the gasoline powered engine. To accomplish all that,
a number of companies are going inside the black box and tinkering with those
four basic components, hoping to jumpstart the next
generation of batteries. Batteries have a long history
of pretty slow improvement on the order of four to 5% a year. Think we're one of the few companies that are actually trying to do something pretty
revolutionary in this space. Harold Rust company, Enovix, based just South of San Francisco is making one seemingly small tweak to the lithium-ion battery. Replacing the anode typically
made of carbon with silicon. So the major advantage of silicon is it has three times the
energy density of carbon which it replaces so that
allows you to pack more stuff in your battery and
drive up energy density. But silicon well, it's a great anode suffers from a bunch of problems and the biggest of which is
the fact that it expands 300%. Easy way to think about it is
when you're charging a cell the silicon tends to expand
and when you discharge it, it compresses or contracts. That's a potentially
battery busting problem. But in Enovix claims to
have found a solution. A complex method of arranging
the batteries components that keeps the silicon under pressure. This 3D architecture allows
us to constrain that expansion in a very uniform way within the cell that allows us to maintain
a very long cycle life. It allows us to basically
manage that swelling without any macroscopic
growth of the battery. A silicon anode battery could
store about 50% more energy than what's currently on the market. Which could mean we'll be
seeing lighter electronics with longer battery
life in the near future. We've been actively sampling batteries over the last two years to customers. We're sitting in a room
now where we're starting to assemble our first production line. And right now we're
targeting first deliveries towards the end of this year. But we're focused on consumer
electronics to start. With the technology it's
definitely applicable to larger battery applications like EVs potentially grid storage. And so that's on our roadmap. Elsewhere in Silicon
Valley, another company is working on an even more
ambitious battery design. We started with the mission of trying to narrow the gap that we in combustion engine
based vehicles and EVs. And we recognized that the key there was to build a better battery. We could usher in a new
era of transportation. 15 minute charge times,
better life performance and even lower costs. It turns out all those
problems can be addressed if you just switch from a
carbon or carbon silicon anode not to a lithium metal anode. Usually the lithium in
lithium-ion batteries only refers to the molecule was shuttling
between the cathode and anode. Making the anode itself out of lithium could double the energy
density of the battery. A much bigger leap than
a silicon anode battery, like in Enovix's. We didn't invent the idea
of a lithium metal battery. That idea has been around
for a very long time even before lithium-ion
lithium metal batteries. There's just one small problem. Unfortunately, they're not safe. So typically inside a battery,
the electrolyte is liquid but an liquid electrolyte
for a lithium metal battery causes the lithium metal to degrade and sometimes even short and catch fire. QuantumScape's main goal
was to try and replace what is a liquid electrolyte
inside the battery with a solid electrolyte. The problem is that no one
has been able to make one that conducts well enough
to compete with the liquid. It wasn't clear that even the
material existed in nature that could meet these requirements. So we had to explore a
wide range of materials, but luckily nature had a material that meets the requirements and our team was able to find it. It's literally a solid material,
it's a ceramic material, but it's kind of a very special material because lithium-ions can
just zip right through it like they're on a highway. This single powered
cell is all QuantumScape was able to show us of
they're solid state battery. Ultimately they'll stack
100 of these together to make a complete battery pack. The company is still a few years from selling a commercial product, but the performance
improvements they're predicting would be revolutionary. We've shown that we can charge faster. We can get 80% charge at 15 minutes, which is gonna be really important if you're on the road trip or if you don't have a
garage to plug your car in and charge overnight. You can get longer range by improving the energy
density of the battery. What we've said is we're aiming to have cars driving
with these cells in 2024. So the next few years will be about increasing the scale of production. We formed a partnership
with Volkswagen in 2012 and they've announced that
they would partner with us and make a joint venture
to commercialize the cells and go into manufacturing together. We think that with these batteries, you're gonna be able to get EVs that compete more effectively with combustion engine-based vehicles. You get more energy density, you have lower costs and longer life. So our mission right now is to get these batteries on the road, try to really transform
the automotive sector and in the process really
make a dent on CO2 emissions. Companies like QuantumScape and Enovix are imagining a future in
which clean, affordable EVs dominate the roads. But the implications go
much further than that. Better batteries are key
to almost every technology that could slow down climate change. Batteries are what are known
as an enabling technology which is that you can use
a battery to make an impact across different sectors of the economy and across different
types of technologies. So currently our batteries
can go in electric cars but there's still a battery
that needs to go in a truck. Then there needs to be a
battery that goes in a ship and then there needs to be a battery that can go in a plane. There are now bigger and bigger batteries being put on the grid
that help us increase the amount of renewables And all those things get a boost with every little innovation
that happens in batteries. And so the impact that
batteries can have is immense.
Been hearing this for a decade about new breakthroughs in battery technology.
This should have been How The Next Batteries Will CHARGE the World