Big September Roundup!
☀️ Wrapping up summer 2025! BIL funding, more tensions with China, Northvolt, and a recap at California Battery Manufacturing Conference at Berkeley.
📍🇺🇸 Also! I’m in Detroit at The Battery Show this week with Voltaiq. Schedule a time to chat with me and stop by our booth #5433.
We are excited to partner with TA Instruments as our sponsor - the leader in analytical instrumentation for all your battery characterization.
Powders are the functional building blocks of lithium-ion batteries and the ideal raw materials for their electrodes because they provide a high surface area for charge transfer. Understanding powder properties is pivotal to optimize electrode fabrication.
In their recent white paper, you can learn how powder rheology can help battery scientists and engineers monitor fundamental powder properties for electrode function and identify dry powder processing conditions that lead to better lithium-ion batteries.
Key Takeaways:
The types of powders involved in electrode manufacturing and their key properties
The role of powder rheology in measuring powder properties and characterizing powder behaviors
How powder rheology can help optimize lithium-ion battery electrode manufacturing for both conventional wet techniques and dry electrode processing
💰 BIG BIL ENERGY 💰
The much-anticipated BIL funding news came out last month!
The US DOE is working hard to lockdown a resilient domestic battery supply chain. The latest $3b round funds 25 projects across 14 states to expand advanced battery and materials production and recycling. This is expected to generate over 19,000 jobs nationwide.
Here’s another question… is it enough for a battery factory to get up and running at scale? The cost of building capacity is steep—roughly $100m per GWh. For facilities receiving between $100 million and $200 million in funding, it's a solid start, but far from sufficient.
Awards are great, but they’re not everything. Steve Levine reported that 1 in 4 companies who received grant funding had walked away from the funding / pulled their application… for a variety of reasons.
Meanwhile, in addition to the above battery manufacturing plans, another big one was GM and Samsung are finalizing plans for a $3.5b 36 GWh battery manufacturing plant in 2027 for Ni-rich prismatic batteries.
This reminded me of a quote I heard last week at the conference…
“You have to pay to bring the expertise in-house. If you go to VinFast in Vietnam, you’ll find they are all ex-Samsung SDI engineers”
This same summer, GM laid off 1000 software engineers. Like others in the industry, GM will need to bridge the (even bigger) talent gap if it hopes to keep pace with its ambitious goals.
🇯🇵 Similarly, Japan has just announced ¥350 billion ($2.44 billion) in subsidies to boost its battery manufacturing sector. The fund will be allocated across 12 disgnificant projects, that will benefit domestic automakers such as Toyota, Subaru, Nissan and Mazda.
🇸🇪 Northvolt takes a few punches
The challenges of battery manufacturing are formidable, and it appears Northvolt may have overestimated itself. In its pursuit of excellence to control the entire battery value chain and localize supply chains, the company spread itself too thin. By tackling every aspect of production for the first time, without a clear focus or deep-rooted proven experience, Northvolt runs the risk of becoming more distracted than disruptive.
It began with BMW canceling its $2B order due to quality issues, followed by safety concerns (well covered by our friend Matt Lacey), and even fatalities. This wave of setbacks is coupled with Northvolt’s withdrawal from California, sadly shutting down Cuberg with no clear direction for continuing its lithium-metal anode development. On the other side of the battery, the cathode team has also been disbanded, leaving its future direction increasingly uncertain.
This makes us think… what is the secret sauce for Northvolt?
This month, Northvolt hit the brakes, and had a sad reduction in force with 25% laid off at Ett… roughly 1,600 employees “to ensure that its resources are focused on accelerating production in large-scale cell manufacturing at Northvolt Ett.”
Northvolt is reassessing its capabilities, now shifting its focus to what’s achievable and prioritizing a faster path to profitability. While the strategic refocus may be necessary for the company, it's hardly a positive signal for the broader industry, where we’re all in a pressure cooker and the need to scale and succeed is intensifying.
🌏 The “come to Jesus” moment for Asia
Over the past year, a growing number of companies, have shifted (and/or shifting) their manufacturing operations to Asia. Many are finding it increasingly difficult to raise the necessary matching funds for government subsidies, leading some to return money they had once secured.
Asia, particularly China, presents a complex landscape. Efforts in the US to protect domestic manufacturing have fueled calls from some Republican lawmakers to block Chinese battery giant CATL, citing national security. Given CATL’s technical dominance, restrictions make sense to safeguard US interests from CATL that would otherwise blow out domestic players.
On the other hand, the US is an expensive place to build a factory, and is not cost-competitive with Asia, and lacks technical know-how. Here’s something Robin Zeng (Chairman + founder of CATL) said in an interview:
“Building and equipping an electric-car battery factory in the United States costs six times as much as in China. The work is also slow — three times longer.”
Big shout to Steve Levine who has been covering a lot this summer and rockin’ it. Here are some we noted:
Amprius has contracted 3 manufacturers in China to make their silicon anode powders.
Enovix laid off roughly one-third of the team in California and opened manufacturing at Fab2 site in Penang, Malaysia with 300 people.
SES has a “come to Jesus moment” and bows out of sole manufacturing.
24M seems to be standing up its own production after their collaboration with Freyr is faltering, and setting up shop in Thailand. Four years after going public, FREYR Battery has halted its effort to scale up 24M Technologies's next-gen battery and laid off dozens of workers. Given China's cutthroat merchandising, it's not clear that Freyr has any credible moves left.
6K builds its own cathode factory despite skeptical clientele.
How Cuberg’s death ripples across the battery industry.
Sodium-ion startups vie to power new AI chatbots.
🧂 Fluorok raises $9m Series A
Today, the production of lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6), a necessary component for lithium-ion batteries, is highly concentrated in China, which accounts for close to 80% of global output. Major LiPF6 producers, such as Jiangsu Jiujiujiu, Tinci Materials, and Morita Chemical, dominate the supply chain.
Fluorok, an Oxford spinout, is building a Western supply of LiPF6, bypassing hazardous HF acid processes. Backed by BGF, Green Generation Fund, and Volta Energy Technologies, Fluorok’s innovations could help decouple the supply chain from China.
Comments from Volta’s Kara Rodby:
Volta is excited to add FluoRok to our portfolio. FluoRok has developed a clever and unique solution for fluorinating chemicals without handling caustic, dangerous, and all around difficult-to-handle HF. The avoidance of HF can enable new opportunities for Western production of LiPF6, whose supply chain is currently dominated by China. I look forward to seeing what they do.
☀️ What’s happening in California?
I checked out the California Battery Manufacturing Summit in Berkeley. There were plenty of discussions, and three key takeaways stood out for me. I’ve pulled together highlights from my phone notes and cleaned them into a readable format.
🔋 California’s Battery Pilot: Why It’s a Big Deal
A streamlined fast-track for pilot facilities where companies can “start showing that they are real” is critical. There was a lot of discussion around a “California Battery Pilot Manufacturing Line” which will be key for many of the battery companies in California, but they face hurdles in flexibility. Programs like this will also be important for students and workforce development. I was a little blown away when Zheng Chen of UCSD said “In China, every lab professor has a dry room… 20 MWh”.
Personally, “R&D pilot line” feels like an oxymoron… but I think there is a sweet spot between R&D and full-scale manufacturing that could work for a combination of users and I’m all in for an R&D battery manufacturing line program in California to support the local ecosystem here.
🏃 Speed and Standardization Could Save Us All Time
Speakers stressed the importance of workforce development and the urgent need for quicker, shorter programs to train individuals in battery manufacturing. GJ from Tyfast emphasized the need for standardization across pilot lines, sharing a story about having to use three different pilot lines to test their materials, but not being allowed to even touch the equipment. Fabio from NantG also mentioned the frustrating years it took just to get permitting approval in LA. I spoke to city council members and heard PG&E can take 3-5 years to set up a facility with the right electrical requirements in the East Bay.
With rapid changes in technology, flexible pilot programs are essential for training and scaling, though these can be difficult to implement effectively (and quickly). Standardization can really help speed things up, and there were parallels made to Sematech, which played a key role in standardizing and sharing processes in the silicon wafer industry back in the 90s.
📊 Data: The Secret Sauce of Manufacturing Success
Data analytics was a major focus, with experts like Daniel Brathwaite from Quantumscape and Gerbrand Ceder from LBNL emphasizing its critical role in understanding and improving manufacturing yield.
Ceder shared an example from Samsung, where ignoring key manufacturing signals led to issues that could have been prevented. Daniel highlighted the need to track even the unexpected, like "power consumption of the coater" (which was a pretty interesting example) which may seem small but could cause problems down the line. It’s clear that companies MUST use data to monitor for yield deviations before they become larger issues.
Voltaiq CEO, Tal, drove the point home: companies can’t do it all, and those that aren’t leveraging best data practices are starting to feel the consequences. It’s more important than ever to work together and share expertise across the battery industry. Data isn’t just a tool — it’s a necessity for staying ahead.
Also in California news… San Diego County experienced a record-breaking heat wave.
Escondido hit 109°F (43°C), destroying an 80-year-old record of 104°F (40°C) set in 1944. Back in 2017, the area gained global attention with the installation of San Diego Gas & Electric’s 30 MW/120 MWh Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), at the time the largest of its kind, designed to power 20,000 homes for up to four hours. This month, one of the facility’s 24 battery containers suffered a catastrophic failure, erupting in flames. Investigators are probing the cause of the incident.
Local residents called for a moratorium on BESS systems, driven by concerns around safety, reliability, and variability. While the county ultimately rejected the moratorium, the push represents a significant step toward scrutinizing battery projects, reflecting ballooning anxieties surrounding the energy storage industry’s growth.
🎧 What else we're reading and listening to
In Good Company: Robin Zeng - Founder and CEO of CATL
Redefining Energy: Ep148: Batteries: the Great Consolidation
Volts: Mitra Chem - Developing a supply chain for American-made batteries
Take Charge: From Battery Brunch to Global Battery Community, with Volta Foundation Founder Yen Yeh
Take Charge: Voltaiq - How Data & AI will Accelerate Battery Manufacturing
🌞 Thanks for reading!
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