I once worked for a guy who literally banned
all his subordinate managers, including me, from ever using the phrase “we’re getting
there” – he was one of those pedantic sticklers who would only accept a specific
completion date for any given task, so that he could hold you fully to account each time
you sailed passed that date without having achieved your goal. I did quite well, I lasted three months in
that job! Anyway, I mention that little anecdote because
today’s video is the second of our twenty-twenty-four green tech PROGRESS reviews, and the green
tech we’re reviewing today is solid state batteries. The developers of this particular technology
have used the phrase “we’re getting there” so often since my first video on the subject
back in twenty-eighteen that you could be forgiven for thinking that we are in fact
not getting there at all. So, is it time to give up on yet another green
technology pipe dream, or are we nearly there yet? Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think,
We’ve investigated solid-state batteries on no fewer than three separate occasions
on this channel over the last five years or so. It’s one of those extremely compelling technologies
that, if it ever does hit mainstream mass production at an affordable price, really
will revolutionise just about every sector of energy consumption for folks like you and
me, most notably of course in the transport sector, where solid state technology promises
significantly higher energy density than current lithium-ion batteries, with ultra-fast charging
times and much longer operational lifetimes. For the benefit of anyone who’s had better
things to do for the last five years or so, here’s a quick recap of how it all works. In a normal lithium-ion battery, like the
one we looked at in last week’s video, you typically find a cathode made of a lithium-based
material like lithium-nickel-manganese oxide for example, which is your NMC battery, and
an anode typically made of graphite. Surrounding all that is a liquid electrolyte,
usually made by adding lithium salts into a fairly nasty flammable solvent. To stop the whole thing short circuiting,
you have a separator membrane in the middle of the electrolyte that will only allow ions
to pass through. When you charge the system up, lithium ions
rush across the liquid electrolyte from the cathode side, energised by the electricity
flowing from the charging device. Those charged particles just happen to be
small enough to be captured within the lattice-like structure of graphite in a process called
intercalation. As the battery discharges, the ions flow back
across to the cathode, and electrons flow back through an external circuit to do their
useful work. And that’s fine. In fact, it works really nicely for myriad
applications from very small stuff like smart watches and phones all the way up to very
large stationary energy storage installations on electricity grids. But then old Elon came along, didn’t he,
and started putting lithium-ion batteries into attractive looking cars that people actually
wanted to buy. The Tesla brand has turned the automotive
industry completely on its head in the space of only a few short years, and now every auto
manufacturer in the world is scrambling to get their ducks in a row before switching
off all their internal combustion engine production lines sometime in the next decade or so. As a result, a concept that was essentially
first proposed by Michael Faraday back in the early nineteenth century, has suddenly
come hurtling back into vogue in the laboratories of battery chemists all over the planet, because
it offers what most tech journalists, including this one, usually refer to as the ‘holy
grail’ of battery cell technology. Rightly or wrongly, one of the biggest perceived
objections among prospective new electric vehicle buyers is the dreaded range anxiety. So, the alleviation of this ‘not really
a real problem’ has become something of an obsession for all the major car makers,
who are either making their batteries absolutely mahoosive, which strikes me as a rather self-defeating
exercise, or who are looking for ways to produce batteries that can receive AND deliver energy
far more efficiently. Which brings us to solid state technology. For the purposes of this video I’m going
to ignore the so-called thin film solid-state cells which only store a very small amount
of energy but which can last for a very, very long time and are already in use in things
like pacemakers and IoT devices, and instead I’ll be focussing on what are known as solid-state
bulk batteries which can store a lot of energy and are what the EV developers are interested
in. There are currently dozens of different types
of solid-state bulk batteries in development all over the world. Far too many to go through individually in
a single video. But the basic theory, at least as far as this
somewhat limited layman can understand, goes like this. The ‘solid’ in ‘solid state’ refers
to the electrolyte as you’ve no doubt already worked out for yourself. So why is that good then? Well, it means that in theory, if you can
find a SOLID material like a ceramic or a glass or a solid polymer that lets ions through
but that also effectively acts as a separator between anode and cathode, then you can get
rid of the liquid electrolyte, reduce the volume of the cell, and effectively increase
its energy density. You also theoretically eradicate the rather
inconvenient problem of dendrite growth that presents a potential fire risk in current
lithium-ion batteries. And because you get rid of the flammable SOLVENTS
that liquid electrolytes are based on, your battery can now withstand far higher temperatures,
which means you can really whack the charge in at a truly terrifying rate without causing
damage to the cell. But that’s not all. Oh no! It turns out that solid state batteries may
also facilitate the use of lithium metal anodes. So why is THAT useful? Well, apparently if you can ditch the graphite
anode and replace it with lithium metal, then you potentially get yourself EVEN MORE energy
density. The folks at BMW recently published this chart
of test data based on twelve different next generation CATHODE materials, shown along
the X-axis at the bottom here, and three different anode materials. You can see that changing the cathode doesn’t
do a whole lot to the energy density when combined with graphite OR graphite / SILICON
anodes. But when you combine them with a lithium metal
anode, the performance jumps right up, almost doubling the best graphite / silicon energy
density. And here’s some more ham-fisted science
by yours truly to try to explain why that is. You’re welcome! Essentially, the clever science bods tell
us that if you’re storing your lithium in a carbon-based material then it takes six
carbon atoms to hold onto one lithium ion. But if you use an anode made of pure metallic
lithium then you effectively do away with all that bulky carbon and get yourself an
even lighter, even more energy dense battery cell. The only slight snag, apart from the obvious
worry about global supplies of lithium, is that lithium metal anodes are really, really
good at building up those pesky dendrites that I mentioned earlier, which means they
just don’t work in lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes. BUT, if you can make a solid electrolyte robust
enough to resist the growth of dendrites, while doing all the other stuff that you want
it to do, then you’ve surely hit the jackpot, haven’t you? Which is why developers have been trying to
find that solid material for the last four decades or so. And that brings us rather neatly to a US start
up called Quantumscape, which is a name that I’m quite sure most of you good folks out
there will already know well. They are arguably one of the most vocal and
most talked about solid state developers in the industry, and I think it’s fair to say
they’ve had a bit of a rollercoaster ride since their inception back in twenty ten. Just to really confuse the issue, they’re
working on something called a semi-solid-state battery. There’s no anode at all in their system. Instead, you get a lithium-based cathode with
an electrical contact below it, and a solid-state ceramic separator with an electrical contact
above it. As the battery charges, lithium moves out
of the cathode, through the atomic lattice of the non-porous ceramic separator, and deposits
between the top of the separator and the upper electrical contact, effectively forming a
new anode layer of pure metallic lithium. So, as this QuantumScape animation suggests,
you get the same energy from a much smaller space compared to the standard lithium-ion
set up on the left-hand side. Now here’s where the ‘semi-solid’ bit
comes in. According to their own website’s FAQ page “QuantumScape couples this solid-state ceramic
separator with an organic liquid electrolyte for the cathode. The [cathode] requires high conductivity,
high voltage stability, and the ability to make good contact with the cathode active
material particle. It is difficult to find materials that meet
both these requirements and attempts to do so often result in a material that meets neither
requirement well”. QuantumScape’s original sales pitch, which
is presumably what pulled in such impressive investment from VW, was that their technology
would result in a fifty to eighty percent increase in the driving range of an electric
vehicle, which translated to an increase from three hundred and fifty miles to as much as
six hundred and THIRTY miles from the same sized battery pack. Despite some encouraging recent feedback from
VW’s subsidiary battery testing company PowerCo, QuantumScape has struggled to achieve
these numbers, or ramp its technology up to real-world production volumes, so it’s had
to do a bit of expectation management in recent months. Its website now quotes a vehicle range improvement
of between fourteen and forty three percent, which takes a three-hundred-and-fifty-mile
range battery up to somewhere between four hundred and five hundred miles. A regulatory filing made by QuantumScape in
October twenty-twenty-three to the US Securities and Exchange Commission clarified that the
company had missed the commercialization milestones outlined in its deal with VW, and that the
German automaker therefore had the right to terminate the joint venture if it chose to
do so. And sure enough, according to this Reuters
report from January twenty-twenty-four, VW has now put out the feelers to find alternative
solid-state battery manufacturers, allegedly focussing on a well-established French outfit
called Blue Solutions, which already produces solid-state batteries for Daimler electric
buses. The challenge THEY bring to the table is that
their batteries currently take four hours to charge up, which is fine if your vehicle
is parked up in a bus depot overnight, but not so good if you’re on your way to your
auntie’s 90th birthday party and you’re already half an hour late. A spokesperson for Blue Solutions told Reuters
it was working on a passenger car battery with a charging time of twenty minutes, and
that it was aiming to construct a "gigafactory" to build those batteries by twenty-twenty-nine. But everyone says that, don’t they? Meanwhile, Japanese behemoth Toyota, fresh
from waving bye-bye to long-time chief and arch EV denier, Akio Toyoda in January twenty-twenty-three,
have now enthusiastically joined the race for EV domination. The company claims to have achieved a breakthrough
in solid state battery technology, enabling a driving range of more than seven-hundred
and fifty miles and a charging time of ten minutes, although anything approaching what
you might describe as ‘detail’ has not so far been forthcoming. Anyway, having promised these batteries by
twenty-twenty-one and then by twenty-twenty-three, Toyota now says they’ll be producing the
cells at scale by twenty-twenty-seven or twenty-twenty-eight, which probably means twenty-twenty-nine or
twenty-thirty. South Korean car giant Hyundai are right there
in the mix too, working with US based firm Solid Power on a solid-state battery set up
that they say includes materials that can withstand not just high temperatures, but
also very low temperatures, which I’m sure will be welcome news to those of you living
in colder climes like Canada. They’ve also addressed one of the potential
pitfalls of solid-sate technology, which is the tendency for solid materials to expand
and contract with large temperature changes, which in turn can cause damaging cracks in
the battery’s structure. Hyundai’s system uses a fluid to apply constant
pressure to each cell during charging and discharging to prevent deformation and maintain
good surface contact and conductivity between the electrodes and the solid electrolyte. Sensors within the battery monitor temperature,
pressure and voltage, and an external controller regulates the whole thing and updates the
vehicle or the charging device accordingly. Hyundai’s don’t give specific production
timelines but their press release states that “Hyundai Motor Group accelerates development
of next-generation batteries, including solid-state, aiming to produce 3.64 million EVs by 2030.” Then there’s the CHINESE automaker Nio,
which has been developing its own SEMI-solid-state battery with partner company WeLion for several
years. In November twenty-three, Nio’s Chief Executive,
William Li, live streamed a fourteen hour, six-hundred-and-fifty-mile road trip down
the coast of China from Shanghai to Xiamen, in a Nio ET7 sedan, apparently powered by
a one hundred- and fifty-kilowatt hour version of the new battery. To give a bit of context, a one-hundred- and
fifty-kilowatt hour standard lithium-ion battery in the Rivian R1t pickup truck, gives a range
of four hundred and ten miles. Li was apparently quoted as saying "This battery
is currently the battery pack with the highest energy density in mass production in the world
and has excellent safety performance," Nio reportedly received its first shipment
of the batteries from WeLion in June twenty-twenty-three and will begin true mass production in April
twenty-twenty-four. You may also have heard of a company called
ProLogium Technology, based just across the water from the Chinese mainland, in Taiwan. ProLogium has been focussed on solid-state
battery research, development, and manufacturing since two thousand and six and the company
is arguably closer to market than any of its competitors. It has patented technologies that purportedly
enable full charging in around twelve minutes and a driving range of up to a thousand kilometres,
which again we’ll just have to take on face value until we see the real thing. That might not be all that far away though. ProLogium already has an automated pilot production
line that has produced nearly eight thousand solid-state battery sample cells to global
car manufacturers for testing and module development. In January twenty-twenty-two ProLogium struck
a multi-million Euro deal with Mercedes Benz with a view to getting solid state batteries
into their vehicle range by the second half of this decade. And in twenty-twenty-three the company announced
a five-point-two billion Euro investment in a new purpose-built manufacturing facility
to be built in France, with mass production expected to start there in twenty-twenty-seven. Staying in Europe, a German company called
High Performance Batteries, or HPB was also blowing its own trumpet in October twenty-twenty-three,
unveiling what IT described as the world’s first PRODUCTION-READY solid-state battery. According to the company’s very slick website,
their batteries have been independently evaluated to achieve more than ten thousand charging
cycles with minimal degradation, represent a fifty percent reduction in environmental
impact compared to current lithium-ion technology, and maintain a higher conductivity at minus
forty degrees Celsius than conventional liquid electrolytes can achieve at THEIR optimum
working temperature of plus sixty degrees Celsius. No doubt the good folks just down the road
at Volkswagen will be beating a path to their door very soon, eh? There’s a whole host of other companies
around the globe working tirelessly to come up with their own solutions to the solid-
state battery conundrum, as you can see by all these logos that I’m rather unhelpfully
scattering across your screen. One notable absentee from the frothy world
of solid-state battery development though, ironically enough, is Tesla Motors. I wonder if that tells us something. I’ll leave that open ended question with
you, and as always if you’ve got news and views or actual industry experience of this
particular technology, then why not jump down to the comments section below and share your
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