
Solid-state battery startup claims breakthrough for electric vehicles - evo_9
https://electrek.co/2018/09/11/solid-state-battery-startup-bmw-hyundai-samsung-breakthrough-electric-vehicles/
======
hwillis
Precious little detail on the batteries themselves. As with all solid state
batteries, power is the Achilles heel. I'm skeptical this battery can make
provide the 1+ C a car needs to run on the highway, but it's possible it may
in the future.

According to [1], the specific energy is ~300 Wh/kg- the best li ion cells are
~275 Wh/kg, but only barely. When the OP article refers to 2-3x capacity
improvements (2x on the website), it refers to energy density, or Wh per
liter. That's not really considered an important metric except for phones.
Unfortunately, the battery has to be over 150 Celcius for the solid
electrolyte to work, so don't expect better phone batteries any time soon.

The way this would work is that cars would have a small conventional battery
of ~15-30 kWh that could supply acceleration power and preheat the solid state
battery. The larger battery would just back it up on long trips. How
attractive this is depends 100% on how much power they can crank in the
battery, since it isn't _that_ much bigger than a normal battery.

Lots of people think solid state batteries will eventually replace liquid
electrolytes, but it's effectively anyone's guess. We've had a lot of trouble
finding high-power solid electrolytes for a looong time. The main benefits are
safety related right now.

The basic reason is that conventional cathodes are highly oxidizing, so when a
liquid electrolyte gets too hot it steals that oxygen and breaks down, causing
a runaway reaction. Solid electrolytes and metallic cathodes don't have extra
potential energy, so when there's damage to the cell like a short or
overtemperature it simply burns itself out. The solid electrolyte is also far
more stable and isn't very subject to breakdown from overtemperature or
overvoltage.

[1]: [https://qz.com/1383884/a-startup-promising-an-all-solid-
stat...](https://qz.com/1383884/a-startup-promising-an-all-solid-state-
rechargeable-battery-has-raised-20-million/)

~~~
fulafel
I gather "1+ C" is "power capability" as explained at
[https://learn.adafruit.com/all-about-batteries/power-
capacit...](https://learn.adafruit.com/all-about-batteries/power-capacity-and-
power-capability) ?

With current batteries, there are just many tiny 18650 cells connected in
parallel / series to get the desired power and voltage, right? Are you saying
there are some unstated engineering limitations that would hinder getting to
the desired "C" by connecting more battery cells in parallel?

~~~
magnat
> Are you saying there are some unstated engineering limitations that would
> hinder getting to the desired "C" by connecting more battery cells in
> parallel?

When connected in parallel, each cell has to discharge at same rate within a
small margin. That means you have to match cells by capacity and internal
resistance during manufacturing process. The more cells you put in parallel,
the more chance some of them will age differently and cause whole battery to
underperform or fail spectacularly.

~~~
gdy
Could you elaborate why would that affect the battery as a whole?

And why the batteries have to discharge at the same rate in the first place?

~~~
dogma1138
Because the load is spread equally if there is a difference in the capacity /
internal resistance of the battery it can cause a higher load on it than it
can safely discharge at that moment.

That said this is a problem with all batteries which is solved trough
rebalancing:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_balancing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_balancing)

Without this we wouldn’t ba able to make battery packs with 100s not to
mention 1000s of cells and even smaller battery packs would die much much
sooner.

A good analogy would be if you have a boat with multiple people rowing and one
of them can’t hold the same pace if you don’t adjust for it you aren’t going
to hold course and if you don’t let the man catch a break they’ll pass
completely eventually.

------
Animats
Most battery announcements are bogus, but this one might be real. A123
Systems, the developer of lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, is involved. They
put in $20 million as a Series A.[1] If you have a Crunchbase account, you can
see more of the terms for this round.

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/solid-power-
series-...](https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/solid-power-series-a--
9435192)

~~~
NegativeLatency
Investment doesn't mean they have a viable product though.

See also Theranos, Clinkle, Yo.

~~~
olliej
Cuil, magic leap, ... (never forget cuil)

~~~
adtac
Ah I remember going on cuil back then. Just read up on why they shut down and
this is appalling: (from Wikipedia)

>... on the morning of September 17, 2010 "employees were told about Cuil's
demise [...] and the servers were taken offline five hours later." Laid-off
employees were told they would not be paid.

------
jillesvangurp
For those dismissing this as a yet another lab breakthrough without substance,
the article is about this company getting quite substantial funding for what
looks like a pretty nice series A funding round.

It looks like there are some serious investors involved that clearly believe
that these guys know what they are doing. They presumably did their due
diligence. That generally means this company used some seed funding to do
proof of concepts and prototypes that are showing some promise.

In any case, 20M is nice but clearly nowhere near enough for mass producing
stuff like this. So, what this means is this company just received funding to
do more R&D from a nice consortium of investors that would clearly benefit
from having a stake in a company like that if it had at all any chance of
succeeding. Presumably there are still some hard problems left to work on
otherwise, we'd be reading about some company investing billions to actually
build the factories to mass produce this.

Since there are now several companies working on solid state batteries, the
chances seem pretty good that one of them will eventually come up with viable
products that can be produced at a quality, scale and cost that is
interesting.

IMHO that will likely happen second half of the next decade or so. One
application where this stuff might be applied early might be electric planes.
That's a use case where improved energy density and safety is so valuable that
even a very expensive solid state battery might still be interesting.

~~~
olliej
Funding and/or “serious investors” or even serious people on the board or as
advisors means literally nothing. Theranos checked literally all of those
boxes, and even got a visit from the Vice President and an award.

And they never even had a product that worked, and what devices they did have
were fraudulent.

Having high profile people involved should never have been relevant to the
quality of product coming from a company, but now that we are all aware of
Theranos is should be absolutely clear to everyone that it is meaningless. It
is likewise meaningless to make claims without backing it up with results from
at least an independent third party if not making devices available to
multiple technically competent reporters.

~~~
bksenior
Not accurate. Theranos's investors, board and outside stakeholders where by
design people with no medical or related experience.

~~~
threeseed
Also in the Theranos case there really was only one major customer i.e.
Wallgreens who then failed to do proper due diligence. Here you have multiple
car manufacturers involved who specialise in vetting new technology for mass
production.

~~~
x0x0
We're in a post-Theranos world. Companies are going to be getting a little
extra scrutiny.

Also, as near as I can tell, Theranos got their later investment rounds by
being willing to wildly lie. IIRC, they claimed something like $100e6 of
revenues where the actual number was approx $100e3 [1]. That is probably going
to (slowly) lead to criminal liability for some of the principals.

Here (as parent mentioned) you have battery companies investing in a battery
company.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/14/theranos-president-
exaggerat...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/14/theranos-president-exaggerated-
revenue-by-1000x-says-sec.html)

~~~
GW150914
_We 're in a post-Theranos world._

Which was in turn in a post-Enron world. The one sure way to make sure that
crap can keep happening is to pretend that something has really changed, so it
can’t happen again. It can, stay vigilant.

------
DenisM
I encourage everyone to read the article before dismissing this news as yet
another snake-oil press-releases - there is plenty of background there and it
appears that that both BMW and Hyundai are investing, among others, giving
some credence to the story.

~~~
IshKebab
BMW and Hyundai investing doesn't mean nothing. But it also doesn't mean a
lot. There are a ton of battery startups that have highly speculative
investment from respectable companies. They invest because the prize is so
big. If they really have done what they claim then it is worth many many
billions.

------
sometimesijust
These guys have been around with the same story for the last 5 years.

[https://www.colorado.edu/today/2013/09/18/solid-state-
batter...](https://www.colorado.edu/today/2013/09/18/solid-state-battery-
developed-cu-boulder-could-double-range-electric-cars)

------
amelius
> capacity “2-3X higher” than conventional lithium-ion

Is this per unit weight? per unit space? per dollar?

~~~
api
If it's per unit space, it's effectively a bomb. Doesn't mean it has to be
unsafe. We drive around with big tanks of gasoline. But stored energy is
stored energy.

~~~
hwillis
> If it's per unit space, it's effectively a bomb.

No, not particularly- the energy stored in an li ion cell is only a small
amount of its potential energy. The cathode (eg cobalt oxide) and the organic
electrolyte act as an oxidizer and fuel, >10x more energetic than the energy
stored in the lithium.

Solid state batteries carry far _less_ energy than a normal battery.

~~~
api
How could that be the case if they hold more energy or are more dense? It's
just physics.

I wasn't saying they couldn't work, just that if they did fail they'd have the
potential to fail spectacularly. Same is true for a gasoline tank.

~~~
hwillis
If solid state cells had 3x more energy per volume, they'd have slightly
_less_ energy to release than a normal li ion cell, and those aren't bombs.
Flamethrowers at worst.

A bomb requires way more than just energy, it needs to have a mechanism to
release quickly. Li ion has a mechanism like that, but solid state batteries
don't.

------
apo
The title seems misleading. There doesn't appear to be any new technology
here, just a funding round announcement.

 _In a press release, the company listed a bunch of advantages that they claim
their technology has over current batteries_

The aversion to link to source documents really hurts the credibility of
publications like this. It forces me to try to find the "press release" on my
own. Ok, here it goes.

I went to the Solid Power press release page and found nothing about a
breakthrough - indeed nothing since last June, and then nothing of technical
note:

[https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/press-
releases/](https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/press-releases/)

The blog has one more recent entry, but it's just a trade show event:

[https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/](https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/)

Oddly, neither page mentions the recent funding round.

------
ChuckMcM
I found this comment in the article refreshing: _Solid-state batteries are
thought to be a lot safer than common li-ion cells and could have more
potential for higher energy density, but they also have limitations like
temperature ranges and electrode current density. Not to mention we have yet
to see a company capable of producing them at large-scale and at an attractive
price point competitive with li-ion._

So far all of the solid state batteries that I've read papers on suffer from
an inability to charge quickly because they cannot dissipate heat fast enough.
The whole swap the battery packs thing is a work around for this where you get
a car and 'n' battery packs. Charge the packs slowly (limitation of battery)
but swap packs quickly (mechanical issues, not a problem). To my way of
thinking such a solution is fine for a commuter car but exacerbates the range
issues. Maybe that is ok in this space but so far until Tesla's "300 mile
range" cars hit the market EVs were pretty niche.

------
mangecoeur
Title should be "ANOTHER Solid-state battery startup claims breakthrough for
electric vehicles"

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
...and it's "5-10 years away", just like all the others we've been hearing
about for the past 15 years.

------
cowmix
Another one to check on in 18 months.

~~~
tim333
Yeah quite a few at it:

>Major companies present in All-Solid-State Battery market report: BMW,
Hyundai, Dyson, Apple, CATL, BollorÃ©, Toyota, Panasonic, Jiawei, Bosch,
Quantum Scape, Ilika, Excellatron Solid State, Cymbet, Solid Power, Mitsui
Kinzoku, Samsung, ProLogium ,,

~~~
ogrisel
And Ionic Materials ([http://ionicmaterials.com](http://ionicmaterials.com))
which also received investment from big industrial companies over the last
year.

------
mdkdog
It is getting annoying... Everyone has a breakthrough technology... no one has
a real battery.

~~~
maxerickson
The galaxy brain take on Tesla is that it is just marketing wrapped around the
progress that was already happening in batteries. They really actually are
cheaper and have much increased energy density relative to 10 and 20 years
ago.

~~~
Dylan16807
> They really actually are cheaper and have much increased energy density
> relative to 10 and 20 years ago.

But have they implemented any of these 'breakthrough' technologies?

~~~
maxerickson
Does lithium-ion itself count? The first practical chemistry was developed in
1979, the first commercial battery was shipped in 1991 and they went pretty
mainstream between 2000 and 2005.

That's a long time if you are talking about announcements made today but
there's been lots of announcements in between and there is considerably more
investment now than 30 years ago.

~~~
Dylan16807
If we're looking at breakthroughs since 30 years ago, lithium ion definitely
counts. But it's pretty much the only example, and there are very severe flaws
with lithium ion leaving the space ripe for improvement. Everything since has
pretty much been optimization.

------
zaarn
There is a great video from GreatScott on youtube[0] about LCB (Lithium
Ceramic Batteries) where he got hands on some of them and tests them for
charging, usage and physical resilience (they work even if you cut off large
parts of the battery).

0:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXRyWQgOY4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXRyWQgOY4)

------
skc
Why the focus on electric vehicles? Am I wrong in assuming residential energy
storage would be a bigger market?

~~~
mdahlstrand
In cars having lower weight & volume makes a big difference (your house has
more space, and doesn't have to be lugged around). The safety aspect is a big
part also - no risk of exploding cars (and already no risk of batteries being
pierced when in a house).

------
choeger
Even if completely true, that technology will probably come too late for cars.
With the current production (and sales) of Tesla, other carmakers have had to
react one or two years ago (and it looks like they did).

Expect an increase in the production and sale of EV by a factor of ten in the
next five years, barring a global economic crash. That scale should easily
drive down the cost of conventional LiIon cells below the cost of gasoline
engines (you will probably be paying around 100$/kw/h or even less).

In such a scenario there is not much room to develop and scale a brand new
technology. It could be interesting for planes though.

~~~
DennisP
Cost isn't the only factor. There's a limit to how much battery you can
physically cram into the car. If a new technology can give you 2-3X more range
for the same volume of battery, cars made with that will have a competitive
advantage. It might be more expensive at first but you do the same thing Tesla
did: start with expensive cars and work your way into higher volume.

------
gargalatas
In the past years all articles were talking about breakthrough research. Now
they also add the manufacturing term. I think that's a step ahead!

------
juiced
This company looks more promising and interesting:

[https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/02/07/renault-n...](https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/02/07/renault-
nissan-mitsubishi-contributes-to-65m-round.html)

------
bertil
I’m not familiar enough with the technology to read through the explanation:
that article doesn’t mention Cobalt, Lithium, Nickel or rarer Earth metal. My
understanding of the future of batteries is that, unless we find alternatives
to those (or large sources outside of Tibet), we might get into geopolitical
troubles.

------
coolspot
> they close a $20 million series A round of financing

> ...

> Solid Power said that it plans to use the funds from its Series A investment
> to “scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be
> fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in
> 2019.”

Is $20M enough for "multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility" ?

------
alantrrs
Check out "NOVA: Search for the Super Battery" on Netflix
www.netflix.com/title/80991272?source=android It's a great intro into the
challenges of current batteries and it shows Ionic materials' battery which is
very similar tech to the one described in this article.

------
snapit
A similar product maybe?
[https://youtu.be/kJXRyWQgOY4](https://youtu.be/kJXRyWQgOY4) Solid state
batteries from ProLogium. I contacted them earlier to for pricing.

------
gesman
This specific business model is proven to be worth-the-wait until proven
innocent vs. early investing for a hope of windfall that highly likely will
never materialize.

There is an excess of VC that reduces quality of due diligence.

------
newnewpdro
I'm eagerly looking forward to when I can replace gas tanks with batteries of
comparable energy density, and put 400+HP electric motors in unsafe light old
driver's cars.

~~~
rmah
That will be a long long time coming. Gasoline is about 46 MJ/KG or 34 MJ/L.
The best lithium-metal batteries are about 2 MJ/KG or 5 MJ/L. The best
lithium-ion batteries, about half that. Gasoline is extremely energy dense.
For a comparison, TNT is only 5 MJ/KG and 7 MJ/L.

~~~
jdhawk
ICE efficiency brings that down a decent amount, no? 35-40% at best. The fuel
is much more dense, but converting it is not as efficient.

~~~
akira2501
> ICE efficiency brings that down a decent amount, no?

In terms of power to the wheels, yes. Some of that latent energy can be
useful, especially after it's converted into heat.

------
dannylandau
The main red flag is the weak engineering backgrounds of the founders and team
in general.

------
mrfusion
Does solid state imply it won’t wear out? That alone would be a huge deal.

~~~
hcknwscommenter
In short. No. Two big issues with current state of the art solid-state
batteries are i) the amount of current that the batteries can handle is
typically low at least because the conductivity of the solid-state elecrolyte
is much less than a typical liquid electrolyte; and ii) cycle life is low at
least because small defects in the electrolyte/electrode (cathode and/or
anode) interface(s) are not self-healing. In a liquid electrolyte, the liquid
can accommodate more changes at the interface because it is liquid.

~~~
sometimesijust
While i and ii might be "typically" true it is not the case for the "current
state of the art". See research by the Sakamoto group at umich.

------
solarkraft
> Battery breakthrough

discarded.

