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Thursday, January 23, 2025

OPINION: “Regardless of small market share, new battery applied sciences entice nice consideration”


There are some fascinating new cell applied sciences which have come to market in the previous couple of years, and some extra on their method, which can be value reviewing. Regardless of their vanishingly small market share proper now, they typically entice extra consideration. Might they be the subsequent large factor, or will they only be a distinct segment product or doomed to be a historic curiosity?

Within the phosphate world, swap somewhat iron for manganese and also you get LMFP with a barely increased power density (primarily resulting from a considerably increased voltage) and largely comparable different properties to LFP. The reasonably increased projected price of the LMFP is meant to be offset by the rise in power, offering a web profit general. It’s subsequently offered because the ‘splendid’ improve, however there are nonetheless some challenges to be overcome. Firstly, you’ll be able to’t simply drop in LMFP the place you had LFP earlier than. The upper voltage means that you must change your BMS and/or energy electronics or have fewer cells in collection which adjustments your module design. So, engineering prices to swap usually are not zero. The extent of information about how LMFP behaves, can also be decrease. Growing the manganese content material is critical to forestall a double plateau and achieve the upper voltage, however there are issues this can result in shorter lifetimes resulting from manganese dissolution.

Sodium-ion batteries are one other. A product has simply been launched by CATL, stealing a march on a bunch of others creating the sort of cell. Sodium has a number of claimed benefits, with the argument most frequently based mostly on price and security, with the principle competitors being LFP. The issue for sodium is that the economics seem like on a knife edge, if lithium costs are excessive, sodium is value it, and vice versa if not. They’re additionally predicated on the idea that somebody will sink the billions wanted to scale it as much as the volumes obligatory for the assumptions to be true. Nonetheless, from a geo-politics and diversifying provide chains standpoint, possibly an alternate provide chain for an alternate battery expertise does have worth and will justify the funding.

Stable-state is a bit additional away, with no increased power density model being commercialised but, regardless of that being its most vital USP. There are some large names backing and creating the expertise, comparable to Toyota and Quantumscape, and a brand new consortium CASIP in China together with CATL and BYD which is projected to spend virtually a billion {dollars}. Competing with LFP or Sodium on price is unlikely, and there are some basic scientific explanation why energy goes to be exhausting, and security hazards are going to be totally different at finest or difficult at worst, leaving power density the one smart justification for investing on this new tech. As LFP has taught us, power density is simply the principle driver for a portion of the battery market. Due to this fact, if any of those new applied sciences does make it and attain quantity manufacturing, I predict they gained’t displace the present contenders for a very long time and can merely improve the number of choices on provide.

Affecting all these applied sciences, practically each time I hear not less than somebody declare it is going to be safer. This demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of security as an idea. There isn’t a such factor as a ‘protected’ or ‘safer’ cell kind. It’s the job of the engineer to find out how a lot it would price to make the product protected sufficient. For some new cells this can be cheaper to attain, however the engineers gained’t know the way to do that with out data, and that requires prototypes, testing, and finally discipline information from years of scaling up. It’s this information that provides us the training charges for a brand new expertise, and sadly there is no such thing as a option to velocity this up with out shed a great deal of money. Due to this fact, early adopters should usually be in a distinct segment the place the USP of the brand new expertise is value sufficient to offset the disadvantages of being the guinea pig contributing in direction of these studying charges.

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