Why This Battery Breakthrough Could Make EVs Cheaper

Since 2010, the price of lithium-ion batteries has increased 10-fold, leading to a boom in electric vehicle production in the United States and around the world. But as newer car buyers know, electric vehicles remain prohibitively expensive for most Americans: They cost on average at least $15,000 more than a new gasoline-powered car. When looking at the need for electrification of the transportation sector, one of the largest contributors to emissions worldwide, it is really the limitations of

battery

technology that are holding back that electrification movement. Within the electric vehicle industry, lithium-ion is the only type of

battery

that is manufactured at scale.

But there are a number of companies developing new battery technologies that they hope can compete on price and efficiency in the next decade, as analysts estimate the size of the electric vehicle battery industry will grow to around $70 billion. dollars in 2025. There is a feeling that in order for us to take the next big leap when it comes to reducing costs and increasing energy density, lithium-ion will not be the answer in the long term. Cuberg, a Silicon Valley startup that emerged from Stanford in 2015, is pursuing a lithium metal battery that Wang says

could

have twice the energy density of standard lithium-ion.

While lithium metal has been on researchers' radar since the late 1960s, it has only recently begun to show real promise for commercial applications. Cuberg's first customers are in the aviation industry, but electric vehicle battery giant Northvolt, which has contracts with Volkswagen and BMW, just acquired the company, with plans to eventually put Cuberg's batteries in cars as well. . Obviously, we've been looking at what lies beyond the next generation of high-nickel lithium-ion batteries. How to exceed 1000 watt hours per liter? But Richard and the Cuberg team really seem to have a workable way. We are going through an industry transformation as great as when oil came onto the market to fuel vehicles.

It is as big as displacing the entire oil industry for transportation. A battery has three basic components. One end, the anode, is negatively charged. The other, the cathode, is positively charged. The intermediate substance that conducts electric current is the electrolyte. In a lithium-ion battery, the electrolyte is made up of lithium salt and organic solvents and transports positively charged lithium ions from the anode, which is usually made of graphite, to the cathode, often made of cobalt, nickel and manganese . This movement creates free electrons that travel through a separate wire and carry an electrical current through the device being powered.

The more lithium in the battery, the denser its energy will be. And in a lithium metal battery, the anode is made of pure lithium. Pure lithium is the holy grail of anode technologies. There is literally no excess weight or volume contained when storing that lithium, just a pure metal electrode. And that allows us to really take the battery to the next step in terms of how much energy we can store in there. Battery experts have known for decades that if they

could

make

it work, lithium metal would be a superior battery technology. But there have been persistent challenges, such as the formation of dendrites on the anode.

When you charge lithium metal batteries, you have these needle-like formations that form on the surface. These needles can penetrate and short-circuit the cell, and a short-circuit in a battery is never a good thing. So what happened maybe in the early 1990s was that people abandoned research into lithium metal batteries. Lithium is also a very reactive element, meaning that if it comes into contact with water or oxygen, it can overheat and catch fire. However, Cuberg believes he has solved these problems with his patented electrolyte technology. That's why we have developed a new chemically stable electrolyte that creates a wonderful protective layer on lithium metal and protects it from decomposition or reaction with other materials.

It's not the only company in

this

space, but what sets Cuberg apart from other lithium metal startups is that, like lithium-ion batteries, it has a liquid electrolyte, while its competitors, such as QuantumScape and Solid Power, use a solid electrolyte, often ceramic-based. electrolyte. Solid-state batteries have generated much commercial interest and investment as they also promise to prevent reactivity and dendrite formation. QuantumScape, backed by Volkswagen and Bill Gates, went public in 2020. And Solid Power, backed by Ford and BMW, will go public

this

year, both through special purpose acquisition companies. But while solid-state technology looks promising, Wang says Cuberg's liquid electrolyte

make

s its batteries much more compatible with existing lithium-ion production methods.

So, with just some very minor modifications and adaptations, we can use over 95% of all existing lithium-ion manufacturing processes to manufacture our new battery technology. This, Wang says, will allow Cuberg to grow and market much faster than its solid-state competitors. Although many companies, including Northvolt, are interested in investing in a wide range of next-generation battery technologies. You see different types of technologies that have the ambition to really increase energy densities. So I think there's so much going on that just standing on one leg and betting on one leg is a very dangerous proposition going forward. While QuantumScape and Solid Power are partnering with big-name automakers, Cuberg's first customers are in the aviation industry, as the short-haul electric aircraft market heats up.

So far, Cuberg has partnerships with Boeing, as well as aviation startups Beta Technologies, Ampaire and VoltAero. Current lithium-ion batteries are not good enough for aviation, simply because they are too heavy. And that weight ultimately means you can't carry as many passengers, you can't fly as far. That's why we're targeting the aviation industry because they have a much higher value proposition for high-performance technologies and they're willing to pay a premium to really get the best performance for their vehicles. Cuberg acknowledges that its technology will take several years to scale to the point where it is cost-competitive with lithium-ion.

Wang predicts that will happen around 2027 or 2028. But in the meantime, when it comes to electric planes, the higher energy efficiency of lithium metal batteries could well be worth the higher cost. The idea here is to start getting away from two-dimensional travel and all the traffic that we have on the roads to try to take off from, say, a building, cross the city where there might be a lot of traffic and, in a way, get away from the traffic and leave someone. Here there are very short routes, you may only fly between half an hour and 45 minutes, you may have few passengers and electrifying them has many advantages.

Ultimately, however, Northvolt plans to incorporate Cuberg's batteries into electric vehicles as soon as possible. Any path into the automotive industry requires a major expansion, but five years is the internal schedule we set for ourselves. If all goes according to Carlsson's plan and Cuberg batteries will be in cars by 2026, Wang predicts that by 2030, electric vehicles with lithium metal batteries will actually be

cheaper

than electric vehicles using lithium ion, as increasing energy density will ideally reduce production costs worldwide. the board. By increasing energy density, the entire vehicle design is simpler, there are fewer production steps per kilowatt hour, fewer material inputs, fewer labor inputs, and fewer energy inputs.

And even then, when you integrate it into a vehicle, because you have a lighter battery, you can achieve a simpler vehicle design, a more elegant vehicle structure, and a more efficient vehicle. And ultimately, all of this applies to cost savings across the board. Srinivasan says current lithium-ion battery packs for electric vehicles cost between $170 and $180 per kilowatt hour. To achieve cost parity with the average gasoline car, the packages we need must be more than twice as cheap. Now the target for electric cars is around $80 per kilowatt hour. And that figure comes from taking a small vehicle, say a Toyota Corolla or equivalent, and converting it from a gasoline car to an electric car.

Cuberg says it expects its battery packs to be 10 to 20%

cheaper

than lithium-ion ones once they are manufactured at scale. While Srinivasan agrees that lithium metal could reduce costs and increase the range of electric vehicles, he cautions that charging time has historically been an issue with these batteries, due to dendrite formation. It turns out that fast charging has actually been the big challenge with lithium metal batteries. . Therefore, as of today it is not clear if fast charging can be enabled. But the hope is that once we start bringing these batteries to market, we can start pushing the limits of things like fast charging;

However, Cuberg believes that fast charging will be possible. In the case of aviation, Wang says his battery cells now take 40 minutes to fully charge, a figure he expects to decrease significantly in the coming years. QuantumScape says its batteries can be charged up to 80% of their full capacity in 15 minutes. And Solid Power says it can reach 50% capacity in the same time period. The key is to combine all these parameters with high energy density, cost, long durations and also very fast charging times. I mean, everyone wants everything at the same time. And this is where we must continue working with technology so that it meets all these requirements.

Scaling up manufacturing will also be critical in the coming years, especially in the United States, which is far behind China and Europe in developing all elements of the EV battery supply chain. Today in the United States we manufacture approximately 40 gigawatt hours of batteries. The amount we will need in the next 10 to 15 years could be in the range of terawatt hours per year. Now, that's a big change. We're talking about creating on the order of 20 gigafactories or 30 gigafactories to get there. But battery experts are encouraged that the Biden administration is taking this expansion seriously. The Department of Energy recently released a 100-day battery supply chain review.

In it, the administration says it will take immediate steps to ensure that battery companies that receive federal funds make their products in the U.S. and promises to provide loans to electric vehicle battery makers to help them expand or establish manufacturing facilities. manufacturing in the U.S. By offering grants and other funding to make it easier for companies to set up shop in the U.S., this ultimately allows us to really develop that advanced supply chain in the U.S. and support to domestic automobile manufacturers. Cuberg itself has received funding from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the California Energy Commission, and hopes to expand its national presence, even though Northvolt is based in Stockholm.

I wouldn't be surprised if you see a factory of ours in the US in the not-too-distant future. But the development of the battery industry, which is expected to grow by tens of billions of dollars in the coming years, will not be achieved overnight. Therefore, there will be more than enough room for multiple technologies in the market. We believe the future of the battery industry will be very supply constrained for the foreseeable future. And this means there won't be enough good batteries for all the different use cases you want them for. And this means, naturally, that more advanced technologies like lithium metal will coexist with lithium-ion technologies.

Experts say now is the time to act when investing in these new technologies. And several innovative battery companies like Cuberg have made big rounds, been acquired or gone public in recent years. There is a global race to capture the battery market, simply because it is increasingly clear that we are likely to transition to an electric future. What this means is that this is thetime to take the ideas we have, the innovations we have and bring them to the market.