🔋 A personal update
I love battery manufacturing
Hello, Nicholas here.
I’ve been busy with some exciting moves and finally have time to share what I’ve been up to. Let’s get it - the latest in my life, how the battery industry is evolving, and how I’m getting my hands dirty to get us where we need to go.
☀️ A personal update
Hello from California! After five beautiful years in London, I’ve moved state-side hopping between the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento1.
A reflection: I loved my work and the people I met in the UK. I got to join Addionics as the 2nd engineer, spun Gaussion out from UCL, led About:Energy as Chief of Staff, and advised climate investors on battery tech. I also got to build Intercalation with Andrew and the team for all of you!
After observing the last few years in early-stage startups, I’ve become captivated with what’s next in the battery startup scene, i.e. how to manufacture the actual batteries at scale (within spec!) as efficiently as possible.
🦋 Battery evolution in 2024
The battery sector is evolving. The transition from prototype to full-scale manufacturing – the "valley of death" (more like the "ravine with a hundred cliffs") – is THE defining challenge for the majority of companies. Some are graduating from prototype to pilot to full-scale manufacturing, and some aren’t.2
Many companies still struggle to make batteries and there are vast improvements to be made in the manufacturing process. Seemingly simple drop-in technologies are proving to be more resource-intensive than planned. Engineers from adjacent industries saw an opportunity to fix the battery problem, but batteries proved more complex than they expected. Hiccups in production result in layoffs and bankruptcies, and I deeply sympathize with the impact on teams everywhere.
Thanks to the Volta Foundation team for putting together the annual battery report, a gargantuan piece of work with 300 slides on everything you need to know about the battery industry. What resonated with me most was the emphasis on the sheer difficulty of manufacturing.
Here we get an in-depth look at a battery manufacturing plant. There are thousands of points of failure from slurry mixing to final assembly and testing.
The end-to-end process involves calculated choreography between batch and continuous processes, a mixture of chemical, mechanical, thermal, and electrical procedures, with data, controls, and sensors living across multiple systems across various brands.
Up to $127 million is invested and 175 jobs are created per GWh of batteries produced. It's all our responsibility as humans in the battery sector to use resources as efficiently as possible to get these factories up to speed to benefit society3.
Note: Talking about electrode coatings alone, a throwback to my first job as a process engineer at Heliotrope working on electrochromic coatings for color-changing smart windows where I first became interested in quality. While not a battery at all, there were so many parallels. Even a seemingly simple step like a single-layer coating easily had dozens of issues: thickness deviations, edge effects, pinhole defects, surface roughness, viscosity/concentration of the ink changing as a function of time/exposure to air, porosity, variations in input raw materials from suppliers, varying surface energy, agglomerations, lumps, scratches, and loads more.
Rafal Biszcz has some great articles outlining the intricacies of battery manufacturing, rich in first-hand experience with the “30,000 parameters” that need to be controlled.4
“Every manufacturing operation has its margin of error which corresponds to tolerances. However, if this is not controlled... we end up with ridiculous variations of the cells' parameters.”
Rafal also produced analysis of the CATL battery manufacturing video. Every single manufacturing parameter matters.
With all these steps to monitor and control, it’s no surprise there were EV recalls directly linked to batteries in 2023, including Jaguar iPace's cell defects (65,000 EVs), Ford's battery connector issues (35,000 EVs), and Porsche and Audi's insufficient battery sealing (7,000 EVs), and more.
Once the batteries are deployed in the field, it's too late, and dangerous issues arise. They need to be caught early and ironed out in the manufacturing process, as early and upstream as possible.
🔋🏭📊 Joining Voltaiq
I knew with full certainty that my next role would be in manufacturing. This is where I can best support planet Earth with a meaningful emission mitigation mission. Making consistent batteries at scale is one of the toughest problems to solve this decade.
In my brainstorm of companies making batteries (either directly or indirectly), I was impressed when I learned about Voltaiq.
The concept is simple but difficult for individual manufacturers to execute in a true scale-up environment: end-to-end connectivity, visibility, and closed-loop control of the manufacturing process, correlating the downstream electrochemical cell testing from battery cyclers up to the raw material input characterization and process parameters.
Voltaiq is production-proven in over 50 companies all involved in some stage of the battery manufacturing and testing process.
But can’t companies build their own software tools to run manufacturing analytics?
Probably. Typically, however, these battery companies aren’t resourced to build software infrastructure tools like this, and they suck up time, money, and resources better spent elsewhere.
Thomas Redman, Data Quality Solutions wrote an article on ‘hidden data factories’ where he shares that low-value work (hunting for data, finding and correcting errors, searching for confirmatory sources for data they don’t trust, cleaning and organizing data… the list goes on) costs over $3 trillion per year in the US alone. Companies that use their resources wisely, working on battery intelligence with a trusted partner, run much more efficiently with a higher return.
In a recent Voltaiq webinar with Lyten, Celina Mikolajczak (Chief Battery Technical Officer, Lyten) said it’s important that “engineers spend zero time on data management and 100% of their time on development”.
Companies will invest billions into manufacturing tooling (coaters, mixers, assemblers, etc), but ultimately make crucial decisions based on analysis executed in Excel, Python, or similar. Using homemade scripts for this is like watching “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” on your Apple Watch with free airplane earphones.5 If we can watch in IMAX with a better return on our investment, then why aren’t we? In battery manufacturing, hardware and software go hand in hand and cannot succeed without the other. It's critical that we adopt specialized, battery-specific analytical tools to enable seamless communication and integration with equipment. That’s where Voltaiq comes in, and I’m excited to be part of this solution.
✈️ What’s next
I’m traveling more now internationally. I’ll drop my location in certain newsletter issues to see if we can meet in person and chat about batteries.
Excited.
🌞 Thanks for reading!
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If you live in Sacramento let me know!
Or just taking longer
Stakeholder theory and our responsibility to employees, suppliers, partners, local communities, creditors, and anyone else involved directly or indirectly. “Freeman’s theory suggests that a company’s real success lies in satisfying all its stakeholders, not just those who might profit from its stock”.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cell-manufacturing-why-so-many-fail-along-way-rafa%C5%82-biszcz/
Terrible idea