15 ms·

Solid-state battery startup claims breakthrough for electric vehicles

164 points by evo_9 8y ago

cowmix 8y ago
Another one to check on in 18 months.
- tim333 8y ago
  Yeah quite a few at it: >Major companies present in All-Solid-State Battery market report: BMW, Hyundai, Dyson, Apple, CATL, BollorÃ©, Toyota, Panasonic, Jiawei, Bosch, Quantum Scape, Ilika, Excellatron Solid State, Cymbet, Solid Power, Mitsui Kinzoku, Samsung, ProLogium ,,
  - ogrisel 8y ago
    And Ionic Materials (http://ionicmaterials.com http://ionicmaterials.com) which also received investment from big industrial companies over the last year.
DenisM 8y ago
I encourage everyone to read the article before dismissing this news as yet another snake-oil press-releases - there is plenty of background there and it appears that that both BMW and Hyundai are investing, among others, giving some credence to the story.
- mdkdog 8y ago
  Good for them... I still want to see the battery...
- IshKebab 8y ago
  BMW and Hyundai investing doesn't mean nothing. But it also doesn't mean a lot. There are a ton of battery startups that have highly speculative investment from respectable companies. They invest because the prize is so big. If they really have done what they claim then it is worth many many billions.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Produce 100 test batteries and send them out to labs round the world with a note saying "look what we made!". Then when those labs post their results (and they will because testing claims like this on a battery is a simple and cheap process), then I'll consider investing.
newnewpdro 8y ago
I'm eagerly looking forward to when I can replace gas tanks with batteries of comparable energy density, and put 400+HP electric motors in unsafe light old driver's cars.
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  Electric Renault 5 Turbo Maxi
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    There are many great cars with mature and comprehensive performance aftermarkets that would make excellent candidates. I'm deliberately refraining from turning this into a masturbatory gearhead thread where we all enumerate our favorite sports cars from the past however.
  - tim333 8y ago
    Had to google that https://rmsothebys.com/en/auctions/LF16/London/lots/r113-1986-renault-5-maxi-turbo/380780 https://rmsothebys.com/en/auctions/LF16/London/lots/r113-198... yeah would be fun
- maxerickson 8y ago
  You gotta be euphemistic, the software running the site is precious about certain topics. (that is, your grandchild comment here done be killed)
- rmah 8y ago
  That will be a long long time coming. Gasoline is about 46 MJ/KG or 34 MJ/L. The best lithium-metal batteries are about 2 MJ/KG or 5 MJ/L. The best lithium-ion batteries, about half that. Gasoline is extremely energy dense. For a comparison, TNT is only 5 MJ/KG and 7 MJ/L.
  - jdhawk 8y ago
    ICE efficiency brings that down a decent amount, no? 35-40% at best. The fuel is much more dense, but converting it is not as efficient.
mdkdog 8y ago
It is getting annoying... Everyone has a breakthrough technology... no one has a real battery.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  The galaxy brain take on Tesla is that it is just marketing wrapped around the progress that was already happening in batteries. They really actually are cheaper and have much increased energy density relative to 10 and 20 years ago.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    > They really actually are cheaper and have much increased energy density relative to 10 and 20 years ago. But have they implemented any of these 'breakthrough' technologies?
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      Does lithium-ion itself count? The first practical chemistry was developed in 1979, the first commercial battery was shipped in 1991 and they went pretty mainstream between 2000 and 2005. That's a long time if you are talking about announcements made today but there's been lots of announcements in between and there is considerably more investment now than 30 years ago.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        If we're looking at breakthroughs since 30 years ago, lithium ion definitely counts. But it's pretty much the only example, and there are very severe flaws with lithium ion leaving the space ripe for improvement. Everything since has pretty much been optimization.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - gameswithgo 8y ago
      Compare the GM EV1 which cost a million dollars to a tesla p100D and I would suppose that many breakthroughs were involved.
mrfusion 8y ago
Does solid state imply it won’t wear out? That alone would be a huge deal.
- hcknwscommenter 8y ago
  In short. No. Two big issues with current state of the art solid-state batteries are i) the amount of current that the batteries can handle is typically low at least because the conductivity of the solid-state elecrolyte is much less than a typical liquid electrolyte; and ii) cycle life is low at least because small defects in the electrolyte/electrode (cathode and/or anode) interface(s) are not self-healing. In a liquid electrolyte, the liquid can accommodate more changes at the interface because it is liquid.
  - sometimesijust 8y ago
    While i and ii might be "typically" true it is not the case for the "current state of the art". See research by the Sakamoto group at umich.
Animats 8y ago
Most battery announcements are bogus, but this one might be real. A123 Systems, the developer of lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, is involved. They put in $20 million as a Series A.[1] If you have a Crunchbase account, you can see more of the terms for this round. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/solid-power-series-a--9435192 https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/solid-power-series-...
- NegativeLatency 8y ago
  Investment doesn't mean they have a viable product though. See also Theranos, Clinkle, Yo.
  - olliej 8y ago
    Cuil, magic leap, ... (never forget cuil)
    - nielsbot 8y ago
      Color
    - adtac 8y ago
      Ah I remember going on cuil back then. Just read up on why they shut down and this is appalling: (from Wikipedia) >... on the morning of September 17, 2010 "employees were told about Cuil's demise [...] and the servers were taken offline five hours later." Laid-off employees were told they would not be paid.
  - cglace 8y ago
    His point was that domain experts invested in this company. What domain experts invested in Thearanos?
    - ksec 8y ago
      Goof point, But I think this barely means it has potential, or possibly commerciality, it still doesn't mean guarantee of success.
gargalatas 8y ago
In the past years all articles were talking about breakthrough research. Now they also add the manufacturing term. I think that's a step ahead!
choeger 8y ago
Even if completely true, that technology will probably come too late for cars. With the current production (and sales) of Tesla, other carmakers have had to react one or two years ago (and it looks like they did). Expect an increase in the production and sale of EV by a factor of ten in the next five years, barring a global economic crash. That scale should easily drive down the cost of conventional LiIon cells below the cost of gasoline engines (you will probably be paying around 100$/kw/h or even less). In such a scenario there is not much room to develop and scale a brand new technology. It could be interesting for planes though.
- cpmsmith 8y ago
  Is there really that much free economy to get from scale? LiIon cells are hardly a niche good as it is. The whole gold rush around batteries right now seems specifically trying to get out in front of that demand.
- DennisP 8y ago
  Cost isn't the only factor. There's a limit to how much battery you can physically cram into the car. If a new technology can give you 2-3X more range for the same volume of battery, cars made with that will have a competitive advantage. It might be more expensive at first but you do the same thing Tesla did: start with expensive cars and work your way into higher volume.
- threeseed 8y ago
  > that technology will probably come too late for cars Why ? Have I missed something where electric cars are done as a industry and the technologies we have today will be the status quo for future iterations. Because the way I look at it the era of electric cars is just beginning and great that Tesla has helped to validate the market/technology but they aren't what we will all will/want to be driving.
- airstrike 8y ago
  Auto manufacturers release new car platforms every couple years, so I'm not sure what your point is...
amelius 8y ago
> capacity “2-3X higher” than conventional lithium-ion Is this per unit weight? per unit space? per dollar?
- api 8y ago
  If it's per unit space, it's effectively a bomb. Doesn't mean it has to be unsafe. We drive around with big tanks of gasoline. But stored energy is stored energy.
  - hwillis 8y ago
    > If it's per unit space, it's effectively a bomb. No, not particularly- the energy stored in an li ion cell is only a small amount of its potential energy. The cathode (eg cobalt oxide) and the organic electrolyte act as an oxidizer and fuel, >10x more energetic than the energy stored in the lithium. Solid state batteries carry far less energy than a normal battery.
    - api 8y ago
      How could that be the case if they hold more energy or are more dense? It's just physics. I wasn't saying they couldn't work, just that if they did fail they'd have the potential to fail spectacularly. Same is true for a gasoline tank.
      - hwillis 8y ago
        If solid state cells had 3x more energy per volume, they'd have slightly less energy to release than a normal li ion cell, and those aren't bombs. Flamethrowers at worst. A bomb requires way more than just energy, it needs to have a mechanism to release quickly. Li ion has a mechanism like that, but solid state batteries don't.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    Not necessarily. Ordinary matter contains about 90,000 terajoules of energy per kg. But that hardly makes everything a bomb. There needs to be a way to explosively release the energy for it to be a bomb, and for some types of energy storage there isn't such a mechanism.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
For those dismissing this as a yet another lab breakthrough without substance, the article is about this company getting quite substantial funding for what looks like a pretty nice series A funding round. It looks like there are some serious investors involved that clearly believe that these guys know what they are doing. They presumably did their due diligence. That generally means this company used some seed funding to do proof of concepts and prototypes that are showing some promise. In any case, 20M is nice but clearly nowhere near enough for mass producing stuff like this. So, what this means is this company just received funding to do more R&D from a nice consortium of investors that would clearly benefit from having a stake in a company like that if it had at all any chance of succeeding. Presumably there are still some hard problems left to work on otherwise, we'd be reading about some company investing billions to actually build the factories to mass produce this. Since there are now several companies working on solid state batteries, the chances seem pretty good that one of them will eventually come up with viable products that can be produced at a quality, scale and cost that is interesting. IMHO that will likely happen second half of the next decade or so. One application where this stuff might be applied early might be electric planes. That's a use case where improved energy density and safety is so valuable that even a very expensive solid state battery might still be interesting.
- eiieirurjdndjd 8y ago
  Could be real, but I’m not sure how much signal investment gives. Even without theranos level fraud, investors throw money at long shots all the time.
  - monk_e_boy 8y ago
    Yeah, they think it's a 1 in 50 chance of working. Or whatever metric they have that results in $20M being invested. Pretty small beans for a technology that would change the world. To me that says it's just interesting enough that they don't want to see it die.
- ferongr 8y ago
  Investors tend to be clueless and funding cannot be proof of actual technology.
coolspot 8y ago
> they close a $20 million series A round of financing > ... > Solid Power said that it plans to use the funds from its Series A investment to “scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in 2019.” Is $20M enough for "multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility" ?
gesman 8y ago
This specific business model is proven to be worth-the-wait until proven innocent vs. early investing for a hope of windfall that highly likely will never materialize. There is an excess of VC that reduces quality of due diligence.
hwillis 8y ago
Precious little detail on the batteries themselves. As with all solid state batteries, power is the Achilles heel. I'm skeptical this battery can make provide the 1+ C a car needs to run on the highway, but it's possible it may in the future. According to [1], the specific energy is ~300 Wh/kg- the best li ion cells are ~275 Wh/kg, but only barely. When the OP article refers to 2-3x capacity improvements (2x on the website), it refers to energy density, or Wh per liter. That's not really considered an important metric except for phones. Unfortunately, the battery has to be over 150 Celcius for the solid electrolyte to work, so don't expect better phone batteries any time soon. The way this would work is that cars would have a small conventional battery of ~15-30 kWh that could supply acceleration power and preheat the solid state battery. The larger battery would just back it up on long trips. How attractive this is depends 100% on how much power they can crank in the battery, since it isn't that much bigger than a normal battery. Lots of people think solid state batteries will eventually replace liquid electrolytes, but it's effectively anyone's guess. We've had a lot of trouble finding high-power solid electrolytes for a looong time. The main benefits are safety related right now. The basic reason is that conventional cathodes are highly oxidizing, so when a liquid electrolyte gets too hot it steals that oxygen and breaks down, causing a runaway reaction. Solid electrolytes and metallic cathodes don't have extra potential energy, so when there's damage to the cell like a short or overtemperature it simply burns itself out. The solid electrolyte is also far more stable and isn't very subject to breakdown from overtemperature or overvoltage. [1]: https://qz.com/1383884/a-startup-promising-an-all-solid-state-rechargeable-battery-has-raised-20-million/ https://qz.com/1383884/a-startup-promising-an-all-solid-stat...
- CarVac 8y ago
  From your link: >But the battery only functions properly at temperatures above room temperature and up to 150°C It doesn't have to be over 150 Celsius, it has to be over room temperature.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    ... and it can't be 'cold' like it would be in a car in winter pretty much anywhere?
solarkraft 8y ago
> Battery breakthrough discarded.
apo 8y ago
The title seems misleading. There doesn't appear to be any new technology here, just a funding round announcement. In a press release, the company listed a bunch of advantages that they claim their technology has over current batteries The aversion to link to source documents really hurts the credibility of publications like this. It forces me to try to find the "press release" on my own. Ok, here it goes. I went to the Solid Power press release page and found nothing about a breakthrough - indeed nothing since last June, and then nothing of technical note: https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/press-releases/ https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/press-releases/ The blog has one more recent entry, but it's just a trade show event: https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/ https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/ Oddly, neither page mentions the recent funding round.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I found this comment in the article refreshing: Solid-state batteries are thought to be a lot safer than common li-ion cells and could have more potential for higher energy density, but they also have limitations like temperature ranges and electrode current density. Not to mention we have yet to see a company capable of producing them at large-scale and at an attractive price point competitive with li-ion. So far all of the solid state batteries that I've read papers on suffer from an inability to charge quickly because they cannot dissipate heat fast enough. The whole swap the battery packs thing is a work around for this where you get a car and 'n' battery packs. Charge the packs slowly (limitation of battery) but swap packs quickly (mechanical issues, not a problem). To my way of thinking such a solution is fine for a commuter car but exacerbates the range issues. Maybe that is ok in this space but so far until Tesla's "300 mile range" cars hit the market EVs were pretty niche.
bertil 8y ago
I’m not familiar enough with the technology to read through the explanation: that article doesn’t mention Cobalt, Lithium, Nickel or rarer Earth metal. My understanding of the future of batteries is that, unless we find alternatives to those (or large sources outside of Tibet), we might get into geopolitical troubles.
sometimesijust 8y ago
These guys have been around with the same story for the last 5 years. https://www.colorado.edu/today/2013/09/18/solid-state-battery-developed-cu-boulder-could-double-range-electric-cars https://www.colorado.edu/today/2013/09/18/solid-state-batter...
alantrrs 8y ago
Check out "NOVA: Search for the Super Battery" on Netflix www.netflix.com/title/80991272?source=android It's a great intro into the challenges of current batteries and it shows Ionic materials' battery which is very similar tech to the one described in this article.
snapit 8y ago
A similar product maybe? https://youtu.be/kJXRyWQgOY4 https://youtu.be/kJXRyWQgOY4 Solid state batteries from ProLogium. I contacted them earlier to for pricing.
mangecoeur 8y ago
Title should be "ANOTHER Solid-state battery startup claims breakthrough for electric vehicles"
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  ...and it's "5-10 years away", just like all the others we've been hearing about for the past 15 years.
zaarn 8y ago
There is a great video from GreatScott on youtube[0] about LCB (Lithium Ceramic Batteries) where he got hands on some of them and tests them for charging, usage and physical resilience (they work even if you cut off large parts of the battery). 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXRyWQgOY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXRyWQgOY4
dannylandau 8y ago
The main red flag is the weak engineering backgrounds of the founders and team in general.
juiced 8y ago
This company looks more promising and interesting: https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/02/07/renault-nissan-mitsubishi-contributes-to-65m-round.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/02/07/renault-n...
skc 8y ago
Why the focus on electric vehicles? Am I wrong in assuming residential energy storage would be a bigger market?
- mdahlstrand 8y ago
  In cars having lower weight & volume makes a big difference (your house has more space, and doesn't have to be lugged around). The safety aspect is a big part also - no risk of exploding cars (and already no risk of batteries being pierced when in a house).

164 points by evo_9 8y ago

cowmix 8y ago

Another one to check on in 18 months.

tim333 8y ago
Yeah quite a few at it: >Major companies present in All-Solid-State Battery market report: BMW, Hyundai, Dyson, Apple, CATL, BollorÃ©, Toyota, Panasonic, Jiawei, Bosch, Quantum Scape, Ilika, Excellatron Solid State, Cymbet, Solid Power, Mitsui Kinzoku, Samsung, ProLogium ,,
- ogrisel 8y ago
  And Ionic Materials (http://ionicmaterials.com http://ionicmaterials.com) which also received investment from big industrial companies over the last year.

DenisM 8y ago

I encourage everyone to read the article before dismissing this news as yet another snake-oil press-releases - there is plenty of background there and it appears that that both BMW and Hyundai are investing, among others, giving some credence to the story.

mdkdog 8y ago
Good for them... I still want to see the battery...
IshKebab 8y ago
BMW and Hyundai investing doesn't mean nothing. But it also doesn't mean a lot. There are a ton of battery startups that have highly speculative investment from respectable companies. They invest because the prize is so big. If they really have done what they claim then it is worth many many billions.
londons_explore 8y ago
Produce 100 test batteries and send them out to labs round the world with a note saying "look what we made!". Then when those labs post their results (and they will because testing claims like this on a battery is a simple and cheap process), then I'll consider investing.

newnewpdro 8y ago

I'm eagerly looking forward to when I can replace gas tanks with batteries of comparable energy density, and put 400+HP electric motors in unsafe light old driver's cars.

semi-extrinsic 8y ago
Electric Renault 5 Turbo Maxi
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  There are many great cars with mature and comprehensive performance aftermarkets that would make excellent candidates. I'm deliberately refraining from turning this into a masturbatory gearhead thread where we all enumerate our favorite sports cars from the past however.
- tim333 8y ago
  Had to google that https://rmsothebys.com/en/auctions/LF16/London/lots/r113-1986-renault-5-maxi-turbo/380780 https://rmsothebys.com/en/auctions/LF16/London/lots/r113-198... yeah would be fun
maxerickson 8y ago
You gotta be euphemistic, the software running the site is precious about certain topics. (that is, your grandchild comment here done be killed)
rmah 8y ago
That will be a long long time coming. Gasoline is about 46 MJ/KG or 34 MJ/L. The best lithium-metal batteries are about 2 MJ/KG or 5 MJ/L. The best lithium-ion batteries, about half that. Gasoline is extremely energy dense. For a comparison, TNT is only 5 MJ/KG and 7 MJ/L.
- jdhawk 8y ago
  ICE efficiency brings that down a decent amount, no? 35-40% at best. The fuel is much more dense, but converting it is not as efficient.

mdkdog 8y ago

It is getting annoying... Everyone has a breakthrough technology... no one has a real battery.

maxerickson 8y ago
The galaxy brain take on Tesla is that it is just marketing wrapped around the progress that was already happening in batteries. They really actually are cheaper and have much increased energy density relative to 10 and 20 years ago.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  > They really actually are cheaper and have much increased energy density relative to 10 and 20 years ago. But have they implemented any of these 'breakthrough' technologies?
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    Does lithium-ion itself count? The first practical chemistry was developed in 1979, the first commercial battery was shipped in 1991 and they went pretty mainstream between 2000 and 2005. That's a long time if you are talking about announcements made today but there's been lots of announcements in between and there is considerably more investment now than 30 years ago.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      If we're looking at breakthroughs since 30 years ago, lithium ion definitely counts. But it's pretty much the only example, and there are very severe flaws with lithium ion leaving the space ripe for improvement. Everything since has pretty much been optimization.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    Compare the GM EV1 which cost a million dollars to a tesla p100D and I would suppose that many breakthroughs were involved.

mrfusion 8y ago

Does solid state imply it won’t wear out? That alone would be a huge deal.

hcknwscommenter 8y ago
In short. No. Two big issues with current state of the art solid-state batteries are i) the amount of current that the batteries can handle is typically low at least because the conductivity of the solid-state elecrolyte is much less than a typical liquid electrolyte; and ii) cycle life is low at least because small defects in the electrolyte/electrode (cathode and/or anode) interface(s) are not self-healing. In a liquid electrolyte, the liquid can accommodate more changes at the interface because it is liquid.
- sometimesijust 8y ago
  While i and ii might be "typically" true it is not the case for the "current state of the art". See research by the Sakamoto group at umich.

Animats 8y ago

Most battery announcements are bogus, but this one might be real. A123 Systems, the developer of lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, is involved. They put in $20 million as a Series A.[1] If you have a Crunchbase account, you can see more of the terms for this round. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/solid-power-series-a--9435192 https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/solid-power-series-...

NegativeLatency 8y ago
Investment doesn't mean they have a viable product though. See also Theranos, Clinkle, Yo.
- olliej 8y ago
  Cuil, magic leap, ... (never forget cuil)
  - nielsbot 8y ago
    Color
  - adtac 8y ago
    Ah I remember going on cuil back then. Just read up on why they shut down and this is appalling: (from Wikipedia) >... on the morning of September 17, 2010 "employees were told about Cuil's demise [...] and the servers were taken offline five hours later." Laid-off employees were told they would not be paid.
- cglace 8y ago
  His point was that domain experts invested in this company. What domain experts invested in Thearanos?
  - ksec 8y ago
    Goof point, But I think this barely means it has potential, or possibly commerciality, it still doesn't mean guarantee of success.

gargalatas 8y ago

In the past years all articles were talking about breakthrough research. Now they also add the manufacturing term. I think that's a step ahead!

choeger 8y ago

Even if completely true, that technology will probably come too late for cars. With the current production (and sales) of Tesla, other carmakers have had to react one or two years ago (and it looks like they did). Expect an increase in the production and sale of EV by a factor of ten in the next five years, barring a global economic crash. That scale should easily drive down the cost of conventional LiIon cells below the cost of gasoline engines (you will probably be paying around 100$/kw/h or even less). In such a scenario there is not much room to develop and scale a brand new technology. It could be interesting for planes though.

cpmsmith 8y ago
Is there really that much free economy to get from scale? LiIon cells are hardly a niche good as it is. The whole gold rush around batteries right now seems specifically trying to get out in front of that demand.
DennisP 8y ago
Cost isn't the only factor. There's a limit to how much battery you can physically cram into the car. If a new technology can give you 2-3X more range for the same volume of battery, cars made with that will have a competitive advantage. It might be more expensive at first but you do the same thing Tesla did: start with expensive cars and work your way into higher volume.
threeseed 8y ago
> that technology will probably come too late for cars Why ? Have I missed something where electric cars are done as a industry and the technologies we have today will be the status quo for future iterations. Because the way I look at it the era of electric cars is just beginning and great that Tesla has helped to validate the market/technology but they aren't what we will all will/want to be driving.
airstrike 8y ago
Auto manufacturers release new car platforms every couple years, so I'm not sure what your point is...

amelius 8y ago

> capacity “2-3X higher” than conventional lithium-ion Is this per unit weight? per unit space? per dollar?

api 8y ago
If it's per unit space, it's effectively a bomb. Doesn't mean it has to be unsafe. We drive around with big tanks of gasoline. But stored energy is stored energy.
- hwillis 8y ago
  > If it's per unit space, it's effectively a bomb. No, not particularly- the energy stored in an li ion cell is only a small amount of its potential energy. The cathode (eg cobalt oxide) and the organic electrolyte act as an oxidizer and fuel, >10x more energetic than the energy stored in the lithium. Solid state batteries carry far less energy than a normal battery.
  - api 8y ago
    How could that be the case if they hold more energy or are more dense? It's just physics. I wasn't saying they couldn't work, just that if they did fail they'd have the potential to fail spectacularly. Same is true for a gasoline tank.
    - hwillis 8y ago
      If solid state cells had 3x more energy per volume, they'd have slightly less energy to release than a normal li ion cell, and those aren't bombs. Flamethrowers at worst. A bomb requires way more than just energy, it needs to have a mechanism to release quickly. Li ion has a mechanism like that, but solid state batteries don't.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Not necessarily. Ordinary matter contains about 90,000 terajoules of energy per kg. But that hardly makes everything a bomb. There needs to be a way to explosively release the energy for it to be a bomb, and for some types of energy storage there isn't such a mechanism.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

For those dismissing this as a yet another lab breakthrough without substance, the article is about this company getting quite substantial funding for what looks like a pretty nice series A funding round. It looks like there are some serious investors involved that clearly believe that these guys know what they are doing. They presumably did their due diligence. That generally means this company used some seed funding to do proof of concepts and prototypes that are showing some promise. In any case, 20M is nice but clearly nowhere near enough for mass producing stuff like this. So, what this means is this company just received funding to do more R&D from a nice consortium of investors that would clearly benefit from having a stake in a company like that if it had at all any chance of succeeding. Presumably there are still some hard problems left to work on otherwise, we'd be reading about some company investing billions to actually build the factories to mass produce this. Since there are now several companies working on solid state batteries, the chances seem pretty good that one of them will eventually come up with viable products that can be produced at a quality, scale and cost that is interesting. IMHO that will likely happen second half of the next decade or so. One application where this stuff might be applied early might be electric planes. That's a use case where improved energy density and safety is so valuable that even a very expensive solid state battery might still be interesting.

eiieirurjdndjd 8y ago
Could be real, but I’m not sure how much signal investment gives. Even without theranos level fraud, investors throw money at long shots all the time.
- monk_e_boy 8y ago
  Yeah, they think it's a 1 in 50 chance of working. Or whatever metric they have that results in $20M being invested. Pretty small beans for a technology that would change the world. To me that says it's just interesting enough that they don't want to see it die.
ferongr 8y ago
Investors tend to be clueless and funding cannot be proof of actual technology.

coolspot 8y ago

> they close a $20 million series A round of financing > ... > Solid Power said that it plans to use the funds from its Series A investment to “scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in 2019.” Is $20M enough for "multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility" ?

gesman 8y ago

This specific business model is proven to be worth-the-wait until proven innocent vs. early investing for a hope of windfall that highly likely will never materialize. There is an excess of VC that reduces quality of due diligence.

hwillis 8y ago

Precious little detail on the batteries themselves. As with all solid state batteries, power is the Achilles heel. I'm skeptical this battery can make provide the 1+ C a car needs to run on the highway, but it's possible it may in the future. According to [1], the specific energy is ~300 Wh/kg- the best li ion cells are ~275 Wh/kg, but only barely. When the OP article refers to 2-3x capacity improvements (2x on the website), it refers to energy density, or Wh per liter. That's not really considered an important metric except for phones. Unfortunately, the battery has to be over 150 Celcius for the solid electrolyte to work, so don't expect better phone batteries any time soon. The way this would work is that cars would have a small conventional battery of ~15-30 kWh that could supply acceleration power and preheat the solid state battery. The larger battery would just back it up on long trips. How attractive this is depends 100% on how much power they can crank in the battery, since it isn't that much bigger than a normal battery. Lots of people think solid state batteries will eventually replace liquid electrolytes, but it's effectively anyone's guess. We've had a lot of trouble finding high-power solid electrolytes for a looong time. The main benefits are safety related right now. The basic reason is that conventional cathodes are highly oxidizing, so when a liquid electrolyte gets too hot it steals that oxygen and breaks down, causing a runaway reaction. Solid electrolytes and metallic cathodes don't have extra potential energy, so when there's damage to the cell like a short or overtemperature it simply burns itself out. The solid electrolyte is also far more stable and isn't very subject to breakdown from overtemperature or overvoltage. [1]: https://qz.com/1383884/a-startup-promising-an-all-solid-state-rechargeable-battery-has-raised-20-million/ https://qz.com/1383884/a-startup-promising-an-all-solid-stat...

CarVac 8y ago
From your link: >But the battery only functions properly at temperatures above room temperature and up to 150°C It doesn't have to be over 150 Celsius, it has to be over room temperature.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  ... and it can't be 'cold' like it would be in a car in winter pretty much anywhere?

solarkraft 8y ago

> Battery breakthrough discarded.

apo 8y ago

The title seems misleading. There doesn't appear to be any new technology here, just a funding round announcement. In a press release, the company listed a bunch of advantages that they claim their technology has over current batteries The aversion to link to source documents really hurts the credibility of publications like this. It forces me to try to find the "press release" on my own. Ok, here it goes. I went to the Solid Power press release page and found nothing about a breakthrough - indeed nothing since last June, and then nothing of technical note: https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/press-releases/ https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/press-releases/ The blog has one more recent entry, but it's just a trade show event: https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/ https://www.solidpower.com/en/news/ Oddly, neither page mentions the recent funding round.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I found this comment in the article refreshing: Solid-state batteries are thought to be a lot safer than common li-ion cells and could have more potential for higher energy density, but they also have limitations like temperature ranges and electrode current density. Not to mention we have yet to see a company capable of producing them at large-scale and at an attractive price point competitive with li-ion. So far all of the solid state batteries that I've read papers on suffer from an inability to charge quickly because they cannot dissipate heat fast enough. The whole swap the battery packs thing is a work around for this where you get a car and 'n' battery packs. Charge the packs slowly (limitation of battery) but swap packs quickly (mechanical issues, not a problem). To my way of thinking such a solution is fine for a commuter car but exacerbates the range issues. Maybe that is ok in this space but so far until Tesla's "300 mile range" cars hit the market EVs were pretty niche.

bertil 8y ago

I’m not familiar enough with the technology to read through the explanation: that article doesn’t mention Cobalt, Lithium, Nickel or rarer Earth metal. My understanding of the future of batteries is that, unless we find alternatives to those (or large sources outside of Tibet), we might get into geopolitical troubles.

sometimesijust 8y ago

These guys have been around with the same story for the last 5 years. https://www.colorado.edu/today/2013/09/18/solid-state-battery-developed-cu-boulder-could-double-range-electric-cars https://www.colorado.edu/today/2013/09/18/solid-state-batter...

alantrrs 8y ago

Check out "NOVA: Search for the Super Battery" on Netflix www.netflix.com/title/80991272?source=android It's a great intro into the challenges of current batteries and it shows Ionic materials' battery which is very similar tech to the one described in this article.

snapit 8y ago

A similar product maybe? https://youtu.be/kJXRyWQgOY4 https://youtu.be/kJXRyWQgOY4 Solid state batteries from ProLogium. I contacted them earlier to for pricing.

mangecoeur 8y ago

Title should be "ANOTHER Solid-state battery startup claims breakthrough for electric vehicles"

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
...and it's "5-10 years away", just like all the others we've been hearing about for the past 15 years.

zaarn 8y ago

There is a great video from GreatScott on youtube[0] about LCB (Lithium Ceramic Batteries) where he got hands on some of them and tests them for charging, usage and physical resilience (they work even if you cut off large parts of the battery). 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXRyWQgOY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXRyWQgOY4

dannylandau 8y ago

The main red flag is the weak engineering backgrounds of the founders and team in general.

juiced 8y ago

This company looks more promising and interesting: https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/02/07/renault-nissan-mitsubishi-contributes-to-65m-round.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/02/07/renault-n...

skc 8y ago

Why the focus on electric vehicles? Am I wrong in assuming residential energy storage would be a bigger market?

mdahlstrand 8y ago
In cars having lower weight & volume makes a big difference (your house has more space, and doesn't have to be lugged around). The safety aspect is a big part also - no risk of exploding cars (and already no risk of batteries being pierced when in a house).