See you in 2024!
Another year in the books… a warm thank you to our readers and supporters. We now have 7200 subscribers 🤯 much beyond our initial goal and SO glad we have so many eyeballs reading about the important topic of batteries everyday. We’re grateful and hope to keep providing useful analysis and commentary. Tremendous thank you to the team and our contributors.
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Another thing we’re thankful for… this year we were honoured to partner with TA Instruments - the leader in analytical instrumentation for all your battery characterization.
When it comes to techniques in rheology, isothermal microcalorimetry, differential scanning calorimetry, TA Instruments is the leader in analytical instrumentation and offers resources to help battery developers. Learn more about how particles influence battery slurries, how to predict slurry behavior, choose the best materials, and improve manufacturing, cases of isothermal microcalorimetry, and thermal properties, phase transitions, and decomposition processes.
What happened in 2023?
Below, you'll find our summary of what happened in 2023, with links to posts we’ve authored. Consider this post as a comprehensive summary or an index. As always, there have been plenty of significant events to discuss.
Funding is a big deal
The battery industry witnessed a significant surge in funding deployment. Governments increased their investments, recognizing the critical role of battery technology in achieving carbon neutrality and energy independence. The US is doing big $15.5B+ cheques in the space and we did a fun exploration on some DOE funding and where it was going, massive cheques like Ford x SK’s $9B loan and Redwood’s $2B LPO loan and others, Europe’s slow shift into the US, and why VCs spraying and praying might not work for battery tech.
Manufacturing is hard and expensive
While funding can help with getting projects off the ground and supporting competition, it's really really hard to make batteries (and battery-powered big things). British darling Britishvolt went down as well as a handful of other companies like Proterra, Nikola, Lordstown, Arrival, Volta Trucks. We ran the numbers on public financial statements and it’s a low-margin business. Companies can’t do it themselves so we saw a lot of partnerships and investments.
And people were keeping a close eye on anything tied to a non-FTA country: cases like Microvast being awarded $200m but reversed and China cutting off supply of graphite imports.
At the end of the day, building new things is hard especially in energy storage, and companies slowly pivoted back to something tried and true, especially since the expiration of patents made it fair game for anyone to enter: LFP.
Battery tech reviews
Our why for starting Intercalation Station was to do high quality breakdowns written by engineers on different technologies in the battery space.
We wrote about all sorts of next-generation chemistries including companies working on lithium metal anodes, silicon anodes (interesting things happened with startups like Enovix, Group14, Nexeon, and others), sodium ion batteries, the power of AI, deep sea mining, stationary storage (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 coming soon), fast charging EV infrastructure, wireless charging, rheology, the expiration of LFP patents, and 3D printing.
Demand and supply
Lithium, nickel, and cobalt prices experienced a downward trend due to two key factors: increased production and a shift in demand dynamics. Mining companies expanded their output of battery metals driven by the growth of EVs and renewable energy industries. Now, the ramp-up in production has led to an oversupply in the market, causing prices to fall.
The value of raw materials sets a baseline for the end product. Understanding raw material costs and end product pricing is critical for manufacturers, investors, and consumers so we spent time covering what goes into electrolytes, correlations of other materials prices with lithium carbonate, cost structures of next-generation batteries, and came out with our monthly Battery Component Price Report (BCPR).
Policy
2023 was a big year for batteries in the policy space as governments outside of China are starting to wise up to the sheer material volumes and capital spending this industry will need. The EU now has recycling targets and compulsory carbon footprint declaration for each cell, a game changer in the quest for a circular economy, and you can read about that in our round up from July. In a similar vein, this year has seen conversations about mineral sourcing take centre stage among consumers as well as producers, and Apple declared it will only be using recycled cobalt as soon as 2025. We wrote about putting climate justice into these conversations, as visionary battery companies are not just building batteries but also building a better world in the collateral effects that occur. Finally, not just how the world makes but also how it uses batteries is fundamental to the creation of a better and more equal planet, and we took a deep dive on transport in this piece about mobility. In a nicely rounded whitepaper, our friends at Exawatt and Minviro also linked the need for smaller batteries in EVs to the materials demand and supply limitations. Let’s hope that governments are listening…
We also got to do an in-depth cover of the EV market in India, delving into the complexities of range anxiety and variety of vehicle types required, and also how the government is trying to incentivise this market as a way of alleviating the air pollution issues. We personally hope these come to the European market at some point in the future:
Research coming out of labs
The year started off very strong with this industry-academia paper on the future of lithium ion. It implored researchers to think bigger picture in order to do the most effective applied research, communicate more transparently, and not to over-hype or over-extrapolate. We have seen some of the consequences of over hype this year with several companies pivoting their business models or terminating their existence.
Researchers at Dalhousie University produced a guide to making reproducable lithium ion single layer pouch cells, which makes comparing between academia and industry a lot easier.
It’s been a ‘light’ year with lots of features from optical operando microscopy. This paper about graphitic changes during lithiation caught our eye, as well as several papers leading up to Cambridge spin out illumion that offers this technology in a plug and play way.
Not just what batteries we produce but how we produce them is starting to get attention. We wrote about LCA with our friends at Minviro, who have also published lots of excellent whitepapers this year about minerals and energy consumption. This paper analysed the energy needs of lithium ion batteries and post lithium ion, finding key energy demands in dry rooms, formation processes and coating and drying.
Finally, this year another global stocktake of our situation came out in the form of the updated Planetary Boundary diagram. This paper from climate scientists found that we are beyond 6 of 9 identified planetary ‘boundaries’ or key tipping points not to cross. It makes not only the work we do so important, but how we do it, and that time is of the essence.
Meeting all you beautiful faces
In-person events are so back and whilst zoom is a fantastic tool, we have really enjoyed attending a couple of events this year, in particular the meet in London in May cohosted with Energy Revolution Ventures and MCJ collective and more recently a dinner cohosted with Lowercarbon Capital in San Francisco.
Want to host something? Get in touch and we can intercalate into a city near you.
Other things we worked on
April 2023 saw Intercalation’s 3rd birthday and as a toddler in the world of Substack we took the opportunity to learn a bit more about the cofounders in this birthday podcast. We also started publishing other types of streamlined reports, including our “Battery Industry in 2030” report, Battery Component Price Reports aka BCPR (Gumroad), and as always the Volta Foundation Battery Report to summarize 2022.
We’re also starting to put more boots on the literal ground to hear first-hand what people are saying - we attended and reviewed the Energy Tech Summit in Warsaw, Poland, the Faraday Institution Conference in Birmingham, UK, and the International Society of Electrochemistry in Lyon, France. More to come in 2024.
Onwards
Taking a brief look at our 2022 review, two developments emerged as defining moments. 2023 was characterized by a spike in strategic deployment of government funding. Concurrently, there was a notable continuation of the downward trend in battery pack costs, a reversal from the slight increase observed in 2022. This economic landscape has shifted the industry's focus onto figuring out production processes and getting batteries out the factory doors and into the hands of customers.
It was an eventful year. Stay tuned for another year of Intercalation, and thanks for your support.
🌞 Thanks for reading!
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