There have been numerous efforts to advance battery technology, with lithium-ion
seeing impressive improvements over the years.
But despite the progress, demand for higher performance has not yet been met.
The demand is unlimited for a better battery today.
Their performance was really starting to stagnate.
The chemistry was reaching its theoretical limits.
But there have been breakthroughs that could be the next step in battery technology.
Lithium-ion batteries contain a cathode and an anode and using silicon instead of graphite, the
commonly used material in anodes today, could lead to batteries with 20 to 40% higher
energy density.
Why silicon? Because it has ten times the capacity for lithium compared to
graphite.
EVs will go 50% farther and charge in 5 or 10 minutes.
We'll enable the electrification of aviation.
Silicon batteries will enable the electrification of heavy transportation.
Instead of 300 miles driving range or 400 miles driving range, for same size of battery
pack, you can potentially go to 600 miles or 700 miles driving
range.
There's a lot of interest in the technology, from the US Army to Porsche, Mercedes and
General Motors.
From a demand perspective, we are working with more than 90%
of worldwide battery manufacturers by volume.
In the final quarter of 2022, startups raised nearly half a billion dollars.
The global market size for silicon anodes is expected to grow from $1.2 billion in
2021 to over $208 billion by the end of 2031.
So I think it's now ready for the industry to really take it to the next level in
terms of scale up the production.
It really ups the game and the energy density and the capacity of that battery, not just by
a couple of percentage, but by leaps and bounds.
Silicon batteries were first identified as potentially transformational more than 20 years
ago. But of course, it took a long time for industry to figure
out how to make the material work in a way that was really able to be adopted by the battery
industry.
Replacing graphite with silicon in the anode of the battery enables better energy density.
It actually takes just one atom of silicon to store four atoms of lithium and by
contrast with graphite, with carbon materials, it takes six carbon atoms to store one
lithium atom. So it's 24 x atomically advantaged compared to carbon.
Silicon anode has a ten times higher energy density than graphite.
But silicon presents challenges as well.
The challenge is that silicon is so good at storing lithium that it
expands about three to four x when you charge the battery.
And that swelling, after a few charge and discharge cycles,
causes it to crack.
So the key is to figure out how to keep it from cracking.
Silicon is already used with graphite and anodes, but only in small quantities.
Silicon has been used as an additive in sort of small percentage for a long time.
Actually, the very first Tesla Model S vehicle had sort of 5% silicon mixed into the
graphite. And most companies today are still at that 5 to 10% range.
But recent breakthroughs have enabled anodes to be comprised of higher percentages of silicon.
Back in 2006, my lab tried to solve this problem of expansion
causing breaking.
We utilized nanotechnology, that was the key invention at the time.
In addition to improved energy density, they benefit from faster charging as well.
It has something to do with its crystal structure.
And once lithium coming in during first charging cycle, it becomes amorphous.
That means lithium can come in three-dimensionally, so fast compared to
graphite.
We've demonstrated that we can charge to 80% in under six minutes.
And if you think about the implications of that for not just electric vehicles, but all kinds
of energy storage applications, it's truly a transformational technology.
Several companies are working on developing silicon anode batteries, each with a different method of
managing its stability.
We use a carbon scaffold as the basis for our material, and then we
incorporate nano-silicon into that scaffold to make a material that's about half silicon and
about half carbon.
The carbon providing the infrastructure, if you will, and the silicon really providing the performance
advantages.
Group14 Technologies, started in 2015, is commercializing advanced silicon battery
materials.
Group14 makes anode materials only.
And so essentially we make powder and ship powder to our battery manufacturer customers
and they integrate that anode powder into their battery manufacturing processes.
So today we're really focused on consumer electronics because they move the fastest.
And as a result, we are commercial now in smartphones through ATL.
The company has received investments from major battery industry players.
It recently closed its series C, led by Porsche, bringing total funding to
$614 million.
The head of R&D for Porsche, he said at Porsche, the soul of the vehicle has been the engine and the
transmission. They believe the next soul of the vehicle is going to be the battery cell.
Group14 operates a pilot plant at its Woodinville, Washington, headquarters.
It's also nearing completion of a ten gigawatt plant in South Korea, built in partnership with
Korean battery company, SK Materials.
It's just starting construction of a 20 gigawatt factory in Moses Lake, Washington, as well.
It will be the world's largest manufacturing facility for advanced
silicon battery materials.
Sila, founded in 2011 by a group of ex-Tesla battery engineers, is working on silicon
anode technology first developed at Georgia Tech.
It spent the last decade developing materials called nanocomposite silicon.
We've had to iterate over 70,000 times to really dial in the recipes to make it work,
but ultimately reached a breakthrough performance in 2021 and launched the
product in the market.
The company has raised nearly $1 billion to date.
We've been in the market for over 18 months now.
We shipped in a consumer device called the WHOOP, which I'm wearing.
It's a fitness and performance tracker.
They're able to get five day battery life thanks to our technology.
Our first automotive customer is going to be Mercedes.
They announced a supply agreement with us to put us in their electric vehicles and they're going to start that
with the iconic G-wagon.
It's been manufacturing at its Alameda, California headquarters since 2017, where it runs a
24/7 operation.
This here is our manufacturing facility at Sila.
This facility here has been running for three to four years, and we're now producing material
that's going to commercial customers and going to automotive customers for validation purposes.
To scale to automotive volume, the company is planning to build a 20 gigawatt plant in Moses
Lake, Washington.
We have confidence that we can scale another 100X up to the factory scale at Moses
Lake.
Amprius Technologies, started in 2008, in Fremont, California, was born out of
technology developed at Stanford University.
We designed our first silicon anode structure in 2014.
We built the first manufacturing equipment in 2016, we received
the first commercial order from Airbus in 2018.
The company has raised around $170 million to date, and in 2022 it
went public through a SPAC.
It says it's developed a pure silicon anode.
We've brought to market a critical solution that is perhaps the holy grail of
solutions with 100% silicon.
Amprius developed technology to stabilize the silicon so it's less prone to swelling.
This is our centrotherm tool, it's used to grow the actual anode
material. So the nanowires will nucleate in certain spots on the
metal foil and then they'll grow upward.
The reason those nanowires are so important is they create much more surface area than a typical
battery.
Since 2018, the company's been in limited commercial production with customers such as the US
Army, Airbus, AeroVironment and BAE Systems.
As it works to scale up manufacturing, it's focusing on the aviation industry first.
It allows us to showcase our performance.
They're also less price sensitive since they're high performance
applications, and we're able to therefore get into the market very quickly
with an advanced application.
We selected aviation because we have limited capacity today.
Now once we scale up, we can get into other market applications such as
electric vehicles.
At its Fremont facility, it's built a pilot plant capable of producing a few hundred kilowatt hours per
year, with plans to expand that.
We're expanding locally our pilot production so that by around
this time next year we should have ten times that capacity.
Amprius recently announced plans for a gigawatt hour scale factory in Brighton, Colorado, that it aims
to open in 2025.
All three companies received grants from the US Department of Energy, totaling
$250 million as part of President Biden's infrastructure bill.
Silicon anode manufacturing is just starting to ramp up, but getting there will be a
challenge.
When you're going from lab scale or pilot scale, which is where we are today, pilot scale,
to mass production, that's a very heavy lift.
I think the time to build and building the right team is probably the
most challenging part for us.
There's a lot of work to do in America to get us to lead in the next generation
of energy technologies.
We haven't produced batteries.
We haven't produced battery materials here in the US historically.
So we're learning how to do that.
But that's a challenge worth undertaking.
The costs are expected to be reasonable, improving over time.
This could have big impacts for devices heavily dependent on large battery packs, such as EVs.
The battery pack is the dominant cost of an electric vehicle today.
The key is to get it to below $100 per kilowatt hour, and
already there's movement that is showing that it's doable in some are doing it.
You can use a smaller battery pack to get to the same 300
miles if you use silicon batteries.
That will help with reducing the cost for the long term and it will be lighter
weight. So it can have multiple benefits depending on how you use it.
For all cars to go electric, we need enough of this product for about a hundred million electric cars every
year, and the scale of that is going to be several hundred billion dollars of anode material required.
If every car made last year had been an electric vehicle, that would translate
to a trillion dollar battery market.
Now, the question isn't whether we're going to reach a trillion dollar battery market size.
The only question is when.
And graphite is in short supply.
So switching to silicon could help ease supply constraints.
Silicon is the second most abundant material on the planet, so there's
no sort of scarcity issue.
There's also environmental benefits to switching from graphite, which is mined out of the earth and then
refined. We're able to actually derive and synthesize our material in much cleaner
ways.
China produces the world's largest supply of silicon with an estimated 4.5 million metric tons
in 2019. Behind them is Russia, which produces 600,000.
The US only produced about half of that at 320,000.
This can be easily ramped up.
There's no geopolitical sensitivity using silicon.
While the technology is young, there's a lot of competition in the space.
There are dozens of companies trying to solve silicon battery problems because the
opportunity is so immense and we encourage those companies.
This is going to be a global industry and we can't do it all by ourselves.
We believe in silicon and we're glad to see many other companies enter the silicon space,
because that validates it and it demystifies whether or not it's a
scalable technology with a real solution in the market.
We've only really had a handful of commercially viable rechargeable battery
chemistries in the history of mankind.
The graphite anode that was invented and won the Nobel Prize, and launched in 1991, is the
same anode that powers your phone, powers these cameras and powers your electric car.
And this technology is really the first that can replace that entirely and is
commercially ready to go.