New Battery Tech Could Disrupt Tesla's Li-ion Industrial Complex

Tesla isn't the only car company that's dreaming about building a mass-market electric car that can travel 300 miles without recharging. But the technological limitations of traditonal Li-ion batteries have remained an obstacle for the whole industry.

Finally last August, after emerging out of semi-stealth-mode as one of Michigan's best kept secrets, a startup called Sakti3 announced that its solid-state Li-ion battery had double the energy density at one-fifth the cost of current technology. It's safe to say that this jolted the technological landscape - and could help deliver the first $25,000 EV, while eliminating the range anxiety that keeps millions of drivers in their Ford F150's.

Losing the liquid electrolyte

Ann Marie Sastry, the founder of Sakti3, has dedicated her career to building a better battery. About six years ago, Sastry, who started as a technology agnostic, began doing mathematical optimizations with her colleagues to see which battery components could be altered or completely discarded.

After the results fingered the liquid electrolyte, along with its expensive insulation and cooling, Sastry said she "threw away the script and instead of making traditional chemical Li-ion batteries, decided to make them just like computer chips." Replacing the traditional liquid electrolyte with a solid wall eliminated problems like degraded battery performance or, worse, meltdowns and fires. (Sastry described her research to Stanford engineers.)

Sakti3's vacuum deposition process is a step change from traditional battery manufacturing. Instead of blending chemicals into a slurry, which is coated onto sheets of metallic film, chopped into electrodes, and finally placed in pouches with liquid electrolyte, Sakti3 sequencially deposits the layers of the battery - first the cathode, then the current collector, the interlayer, anode, and so on. The process is clean, repeatable and much cheaper, which might bring battery costs down to $100 a kWh - holy grail country - and far lower than Elon Musk has predicted for Tesla's Gigafactory.

Starting in consumer electronics

When Sastry was still a professor at the University of Michigan, she planned to start small, producing batteries for consumer electronics to win industry cred before moving into EVs. Looking farther into the future, she also thought that her battery would play a pivotal role in utility-scale storage. Frost & Sullivan, a consulting company focusing on emerging technology, predicts that if Sakti3's batteries gain acceptance they'll find a market growing robustly from $17 billlion in 2013 to $76.4 billion in 2020.

Sastry reached her first goal in March after British inventor James Dyson said he was investing $15 million in Sakti3 while beginning a collaboration that will put the new battery in the Dyson product line. “Solid-state batteries are a holy grail,” Mark Taylor, Dyson’s R&D chief, told Wired. He called Sakti3’s technology “world-beating," but admited that the battery is “a few years” away from actually powering Dyson products. 

Ironically, long before Dyson, General Motors was an early investor, when it bet $3.2 million on synergy between Sakti3’s technology and GM's future EV models. “The technology that Sakti3 is working on is very innovative,” Jon Lauckner, president of GM Ventures, told the New York Times in 2010. “This investment will help lead us to the next plateau in batteries." 

At the time, an analyst with Kelley Blue Book said that GM's investment in Sakti3 was part of an effort to “regain the technological leadership the company had in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s."

According to insiders, General Motors is planning a 200 mile all-electric Sonic for 2017. And the core technology will be a battery with more energy-density. Of course, the obvious choice is LG Chem, which now provides cells for the Chevy Volt, but Sakti3's batteries will be considered if they can meet GM's tight production deadline.

Tesla's vulnerable business model

It was no coincidence when Tesla Motors announced that it would begin building a gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, where the company wants to double the current global Li-ion battery production to meet demand for its electric cars. The new plant should drive down costs while producing 50 GWh of battery packs for the 200-mile, $35,000 Tesla Model 3, which will be in production by 2018.

Although the factory will be state-of-the-art, the battery cell isn't. The battery packs will contain thousands of commodity cells similar to those developed for laptops and currently used in the $100,000 Model S. Tesla's aim is to simply drive down costs by 30 percent with huge economies of scale and improved production efficiency - not bleeding-edge technology.

Analysts at Lux Research have a pessimistic take on the Gigafactory, saying, "It will reduce the Tesla Model 3’s cost by $2,800, but not enough to sway the success of the planned lower-cost EV." It seems that Musk passed on solid-state becasuse it's not mature enough to be plugged into the new factory. This is a decision that could haunt the brash entrepreneur.

GM, one of Tesla's competitors, had sponsored Dr. Sastry’s early university lab work long before investing $3.2 million in the company in 2010. At the time, GM's Jon Lauckner told the New York Times, “It has the potential of being a real game changer going forward.”

Li-ion batteries could be at a technology tipping point. Toyota also has a robust solid-state battery program. Although Toyota's also making bets on hydrogen fuel cells, they're still busy researching lithium. And while Toyota sees lithium-air batteries as a long term solution to EV range anxiety, solid-state Li-ion batteries would be a bridge to those longer-range batteries. Toyota already has a prototype with an energy density of 400 Wh/L installed in an electric scooter, but says that it could eventually power a 300-mile-range EV in five years.

More steady-state adopters

Bloomberg has reported that Volkswagen, the world's second largest carmaker, is also considering solid-state, and will soon decide whether to use batteries from QuantumScape, a US-based, early-stage startup that is commercializing technology from Stanford University. It is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Khosla Ventures.

Last year, enthusiastic VW executives took a 5% stake in the company, saying they saw “great potential” in its batteries to deliver a real-world 400 miles. Although VW already has plans to have a 300 mile EV ready for the road in 2017, a solid-state battery traveling 100 miles further would offer five-times the range of the current Volkswagen e-Golf, rated at a "range-anxious" 83 miles. 

So ultimately, during the next five years, the whole Li-ion battery industry could switch to a new technology platform, and Tesla's dreams of EV domination could be sideswiped by a small startup in Michigan.

Is the Li-ion battery one of the primary enablers of the 21st century?

Comments

John Vasko's picture

I'm sure they use different types of batteries but it would be great if they could develop a battery that makes our smart phones hold a charge longer.