Intercalation is 6!
Happy Birthday to us.
Back on 20th April 2020, Intercalation Station posted its first introduction. The first longer post a week later highlighted jobs at OXIS Energy, Johnson Matthey, Cuberg and 24M, none of which are in the battery game any more. We very much still are, thanks to you dear readers.
You love data as much as us, so we did a little number crunching on our end to bring you some pretty graphs:
Our 5 Most Read Pieces of All Time
A Battery Taxonomy
At some point we decided to make the Cube Rule of food apply to batteries and it was unsurprisingly our biggest hitter ever… so far.
Battery production is genuinely difficult
The Northvolt diaspora is now found across the world with their expertise and stories of the Swedish Arctic winters. Now held as a failed attempt to reindustrialise Europe and around £500 million invested by Swedish pension funds written off, we looked a at the technical reasons Northvolt failed, which may well explain why governments are now attracting Chinese subsiduaries to produce batteries in Europe especially with a copy paste manufacturing plan that’s already worked.
Gigaprofits: “batteries not included”
Do battery factories actually make any money? Back in 2023, it looked like manufacturers had a net profit margin in the 2-3% range, while CATL, EVE, and Samsung SDI were a bit higher at 8-10%. It might be time to run these numbers again…
A tale of three press releases part 3 : Porsche and the AC battery
The technical innovation coming out of the luxury end of the car market is saving space, efficiency and getting freaky with AC-DC current inversion. Expect these developments to trickle down towards the mass market, hopefully space, cost and materials.
Na-Ion: A battery worth its salt?
Battery manufacturers have been flirting with sodium ion for a longgg time. Back in 2023, we wrote about sodium ion packs going into cars and their advantages even in a cheap lithium market. The main reflection was that their development was had been largely ignored outside of China, and considerably less invested in relative to technologies still not in production like solid state.
It’s been a few years since we asked… who are our readers?
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