Battery Booom

21-08-18 Energy for auto industry

Portuguese word for battery is “bateria” which actually sounds almost the same when pronounced correctly, and has several Portuguese meanings such as energy storage, drum, or beating. So a "battery" boom could go both ways for the portuguese….. the sound of a drum or the market consumption of batteries… you figure.

Some of the latest battery technologies may become obsolete before reaching the market because of the breakneck pace of advances in the industry.
Teams of scientists from San Francisco to Shenzhen are experimenting with new chemical processes to improve the traditional lithium-ion cell and find new ways to bottle up electricity for use at another time. Investors in those projects are starting to worry that they might have picked the wrong technology.
That’s turning the debate about so-called stranded assets on its head. To date, the term has been deployed to refer to fossil-fuel projects that may turn unprofitable as pollution regulations tighten. In the future, upheaval in the way energy storage devices are made mean that investments in batteries may turn unprofitable even though they’re at the heart of transforming the way the energy system works.
Investment into start-ups developing new types of batteries rose to more than $1.5 billion in the first half of the year, almost twice the level in 2017, according to data from Ct Group.

Battery Boom
Demand for lithium-ion batteries is projected to rise 1 676% by 2030
Carmakers have all channeled funds into battery companies. The Japanese industry group New Energy & Industrial Technology Development Organization has announced that it will spend 78 million euro on researching solid-state devices with a group of universities and manufacturers.
“There is a tremendous amount of money being put into battery research right now, and eventually that will lead to evolution of technology,” said a founder and CEO of a company that’s constructing a 4 billion-euro battery manufacturing facility. “We are building a manufacturing platform to have the capability of evolving.”
Not every technology is likely to succeed. There are thousands of different systems being tested across the industry, involving both major manufacturing companies to startups and universities. Even the lithium-ion cells used in most electric cars and mobile phones have varying manufacturing processes.
“There’s different flavors of lithium-ion, different chemistries, and even within those chemistries there’s different variants on how those are made up,” said a principal manager at a U.S.-based energy storage supplier. “We spend a fair amount of time just screening developments.”

Gigafactories
Lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity set to more than double by 2022
The competition is getting fiercer as carmakers electrify more of their models and energy-storage units become more prevalent in homes and businesses. Demand for battery capacity will rise to 1784 gigawatt-hours by 2030 from about 100 gigawatt-hours currently, according to forecasts.
About 14.5 billion euro has already been spent to install conventional battery factories around the world, and another 36,5 billion euro of facilities are expected to be up and running by 2022.
Lithium-ion will remain the dominant power source for electric cars and storage units for the next decade, according to the International Energy Agency. After 2025, new technologies are likely to enter the market, the Paris-based organization said in its latest Electric Vehicle Outlook.
That leaves open the possibility of either current lithium-ion technologies falling out of favor or newer projects not measuring up to the incumbents. Either way, some investors are likely to end up with batteries that aren’t economical.
“There’s an enormous amount of bandwidth being created in the world for manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries,” said a CEO of an investment fund with a focus on next-generation storage. “Many investors that we’ve seen are betting on technology that will require new manufacturing processes. We see this as a flaw because of the current capacity being built on the planet.”

Power Up
Investment into battery startups is on the rise;
Taking a batteries from a laboratory to the marketplace is slow and costly. Scientists are substituting expensive metals such as manganese and nickel for more abundant substances like sulfur and oxygen as they seek to cut costs and weight in battery units.
A startup in New York, recently raised 1.7 million euro to try to make batteries without cobalt, a rare-earth metal that’s a key ingredient for recharging but that’s largely mined in some countries conflicts.
Other technologies “may not be able to scale because of cheap lithium-ion,” said a, managing partner of Capital Advisors. “Lithium-ion is definitely going to create pricing pressure on other technologies to be deployed. There will be several but not dozens of competing technologies because the costs are going to have to be down. It’s going to require scale to achieve those costs.”
Some companies have been screening storage-focused startups for the past three years but haven’t yet made an investment in any one developer.
“Storage is a prioritized thing,” said an investment director venture capital fund. “There are still technology improvements that are necessary for the adoption of clean energy and adoption of electric vehicles. Is there a chance that our future investments in storage technologies could be failures? Absolutely yes.”