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The much-vaunted solid-state battery for electric cars is still years away from commercialisation with “a lot of showstoppers” blocking its development, said the head of the Chinese company that dominates the industry.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Robin Zeng, founder and chief executive of CATL, said the much-hyped technology did not work well enough, lacked durability and still had safety problems.
Industry experts believe solid-state batteries, which avoid the liquid electrolyte used in today’s technology, could transform electric cars by enabling greater driving range. Japanese carmaker Toyota has trumpeted its progress, pledging to deliver solid-state batteries as early as 2027.
But China’s “battery king”, a PhD physicist, questioned whether his Japanese rival was really on the path to near-term commercialisation.
“We fully support solid-state, but I have been investing in this for 10 years,” said Zeng. “I watch the development people working on solid-state almost every month, so I know all the progress, and somehow we still have these showstoppers.”
Zeng said solid-state batteries only had big advantages if they used a new type of chemistry, with pure lithium metal used for the anode electrode, adding that there were multiple difficulties with bringing that to market.
Lithium ions diffuse easily within today’s liquid electrolytes, but that is not the case with solid material. Engineers have tried to get around the problem by combining the materials under pressure, said Zeng. “Then they test and [say] oh, very good, the ion transfer is very good. But in reality, how can you put it under [so much] pressure?”
A second problem was the expansion of lithium during charging and discharging. This damages the battery and leads to a short lifespan. “It cannot last many [charging] cycles, maybe 10 cycles,” he said. “So how can you make it commercially viable?”
Finally, said Zeng, there were still safety issues, as lithium would react with moisture in the air if a battery broke open during a car accident.
“So people push on this, but I tell them CATL already spent 10 years,” he said, adding his group was “second to none” in the race to make solid-state viable.
CATL has grown over the past decade to supply 37 per cent of the world’s EV batteries last year and Zeng is an influential voice in the industry. CATL also makes 40 per cent of the batteries used for energy storage, according to SNE Research.
Rather than solid-state, Zeng said his group was targeting sodium-ion batteries and condensed-matter batteries — which use a semi-solid material — with prototypes already in production. The semi-solid material can store about double the energy of conventional lithium-ion batteries, CATL claims.
Zeng, who had just awoken from his customary midday nap, brimmed with enthusiasm as he spoke to the FT about his ambition to push CATL into everything from power transmission to energy generation through the recyclable solar cells the group is developing.
“We don’t want to make only components, we are thinking about how we can make a system, the hardware and software, to help localities get to carbon neutral,” he said. He pledged to invest some of the company’s Rmb264bn ($36.6bn) of cash in such projects.
CATL is also slowly moving forward with a share sale in Hong Kong, mainly to bring in customers as stakeholders, Zeng said. “Many of our customers . . . they want to invest in us,” he said. “If we sell batteries to them, they want to get some [return] from the financial market.”
But rising geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington are threatening Zeng’s aspirations, the most recent flare-up coming in December when CATL customer Duke Energy disconnected the group’s batteries installed at a North Carolina Marine Corps base.
“Batteries are like rocks or bricks, you buy them to build a house. When we were selling the bricks [to Duke] we told them no military use . . . so this actually violates our agreements. But if you think about it, something like a brick actually, how can bricks spy?” Zeng said.
He compared it to Chinese food menus spying on diners. “For me, it’s like a joke,” he said.
Still, the situation has forced the Chinese billionaire to move CATL’s US expansion plans towards licensing its battery technology to others rather than building its own battery plants.
Even this more limited footprint has drawn scrutiny from China hawks in Washington, who are investigating CATL’s landmark licensing deal with Ford to help the carmaker build a new EV battery plant in Michigan.
Zeng declined to elaborate on a similar deal CATL has struck with Tesla to help the EV maker expand battery production in Nevada.
“We don’t say licensing,” he said. “We are helping them to make a good battery in the United States . . . and we get a proper return for CATL. We don’t want to have any name [for it].”
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