March Round Up
1/4 of 2024 has passed - what’s been your highlight so far? Here’s some of this month’s happenings.
🇳🇴 Issy is on the Battery Coast! Are you based in southern Norway? Our managing editor Issy is in Norway for the next 3 months doing an internship and would love to hear from you for coffee, hot takes or battery tours. She will be at the Nordic EV Summit in Oslo on Friday, get in touch! Intercalation Scandinavia!
⭕ The quest for Circularity
Indian company Lohum has raised $14M to ramp up production and strengthen its recycling operations. It’s good to see investment catering for both ‘now’ and ‘future’ problems.
US recycling giant Li-Cycle just closed on a $75M strategic investment from Glencore to improve their liquidity. This also comes with a plan to cut 17% of their staff in order to save cash and focus on building a processing facility in New York. Echoing this sentiment we saw on LinkedIn, we’ll keep putting together our ‘New Homes’ series until the form runs dry:
🚔 Keep it Hush
Two men have been arrested for trying to sell Tesla’s manufacturing trade secrets, previously owned by Hibar Systems. If convicted, they face up to 10 years in prison each. A nasty reminder in the industry that know how is everything…
🔋 Stationary Storage NIMBYism?
The economic future of our energy grid is solar and storage. However, in Kent, UK, a local council has just rejected a planning application for a 150MWh battery facility to accompany a solar farm.
This is a wider trend of not enough engagement with local people around both the risks and advantages to them of sustainable technology, allowing misinformation or misplaced information to proliferate. Talk to your relatives about batteries: you never know what knock on effects you might have.
🚗 Electrifying Mobility
Toyota have said they’ll be producing solid state batteries for EVs for by 2027, and now Samsung SDI have also announced a similar target following the success of their pilot line near Seoul. CATL chief Robin Zeng recently spoke to the Financial Times about how he believes that solid state commercialisation being many years away. We particularly liked this summary of the news from Jennifer Channell:
Range Energy focus on making electric trailers, which can hook up to a diesel truck and improve the overall efficiency by 36%. The start up just raised $23.5 million, a step towards decarbonising road freight.
BYD has finally launched the much awaited cheaper Seagull, an EV under $10,000. This is a serious disruptor to the market, since previously the price point has been one of the major advantages to ICE vehicles. That argument now no longer stands and with EVs being much cheaper to run than ICE vehicles; let’s watch what both buyers and other OEMs do in response to this.
🏭 UK Capacity
Allegedly, EVE energy has announced a £1.2billion investment into a site near Coventry airport in the UK. Dubbed the ‘West Midlands Gigafactory,’ the site has planning permission and a token £35mil promised from the UK government to ready the site for investment. The factory will start at 20GWh with plans to expand to up to 60GWh, making it the largest planned in the UK. The article details that they believe the cells to be for automotive, but we are unsure of the customer. This may be another example of Chinese companies investing in assets outside of China as a fallback, but as of yet these seem to be rumours not confirmed by the politicians or EVE themselves.
What we’re particularly interested in here is the interaction with the already announced Agratas plant in Somerset. EVE energy is a ‘safe’ pair of hands, with established commissioned and operating gigafactories. In contrast, we’re not sure if Tata/Agratas has made any of their own cells yet.
As much as we would love to see two more battery plants in the UK, the deep pockets required has already broken several sets of dreams. Some good question here from Colin Herron, a key advocate for the now failed Britishvolt, commenting on this LinkedIn post:
The dynamic between capacity for storage and EVs is evolving fast. From a recent piece by energy storage news:
“A couple of years ago… battery manufacturers prioritised their supply towards EV customers. If they had more, they gave them to the storage industry.” However as battery makers see the stationary storage industry grow, the supply chain for it has become more independent. Manufacturers may previously have “separated a few production lines dedicated to ESS customers,” Kevin Shang said. “Now, we have seen a growing trend for dedicated plants for ESS customers. Coupled with these overcapacity issues, I think it’s quite likely we would have enough supply for the ESS demand [in Europe].”
💰 Other Investments
Breathe Battery Technologies have attracted investment from Volvo Cars for next generation fast charging using their BMS technology. We recently spoke to Ian from Breathe about BMS in this three-part article.
Norwegian Synthetic Graphite manufacturer Vianode has been awarded a 30M euro grant from innovation Norway to scale up their industrial pilot just outside of Oslo.
UK based company Anaphite has secured £1.6M to accelerate the development of its dry coating process. We recently wrote about dry batteries in conversation with AM Batteries.
🎧 What else we're reading/listening to
Best listen for this month comes from the Big Switch on Battery Manufacturing.
Whitepaper from ReJoule and the Automotive Recycler’s Association on why Battery Testing is Critical to Electric Vehicles. Download it here.
Shirley Meng spoke to the Limiting Factor about Sodium Ion batteries on YouTube.
A nice video from Jill Pestana on BMS systems with Texas Instruments.
Eatron on the Functional Safety Week Automotive IQ podcast about where safety standards should be headed.
Volta Foundation’s 2024 report is out and you can download it here.
New Nature paper on supply chain disruption vulnerability relationship with battery chemistry.
🌞 Thanks for reading!
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