The red-hot stock QuantumScape has investors excited about the next generation of electric-vehicle batteries. Now other battery startups are showing what they can do. Some of their technology looks just as impressive as QuantumScape’s.
QuantumScape (ticker: QS) is up about 41% since Dec. 7, the day before the company released data on its solid-state batteries that experts hailed as a potential breakthrough. Recent gains have pushed Quantum’s valuation to roughly $23 billion.
Quantum is working on batteries that have a solid electrolyte and a lithium metal anode. Today’s batteries have liquid electrolytes—the medium that allows the charge to travel between a cathode and anode—and, typically, graphite electrodes.
The promise of solid-state batteries is faster charging, more energy-storage capacity, and better safety, as well as long life. Batteries that can deliver those benefits would help EVs take more market share, faster, from vehicles with internal combustion engines.
Quantum’s technology is still new and the company doesn’t expect to have significant sales until 2026 or 2027. There is a lot of work remaining, including creating EV-sized batteries and scaling up manufacturing.
The battery start-up Solid Power believes it is ahead of Quantum. The company, spun out of Colorado State University, is partly backed by Ford Motor (F) and BMW (BMW. Germany).
“We’re planning automotive qualification by 2022,” Doug Campbell, CEO of Solid Power, told Barron’s. Campbell said he was impressed by Quantum’s data, but adds the solid-state batteries his company produces are already larger. That means they are closer to being as big as needed to power a car.
“We chose to work in sulfides,” said Campbell. He’s referring to the solid cathode-anode separator critical to any solid-state battery. Quantum’s separator is a flexible ceramic.
Sulfides have higher conductivity—good for a battery—and are easier to manufacture. It’s a different approach to creating solid-state technology, but one being investigated by other established battery makers and car companies, including Toyota Motor (TM).
Solid Powers batteries do need to be under pressure to work. That’s a drawback of many solid-state technologies. “We need a minimum of one megapascal,” of pressure, said Campbell. That is about 10 times the pressure of earth’s atmosphere and is more or less equivalent to the pressure 300 feet underwater.
Solid-state batteries need all that pressure to keep their lithium anodes from developing spikes, or dendrites, that can pierce the separator and cause a short circuit. It is one reason a second battery start-up isn’t focused on solid separators or lithium anodes at all.
Solid-state companies “are lithium anode companies,” with all the complications that implies, said Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies. His company is working on using silicon anodes, rather than lithium ones, in batteries with a liquid electrolyte, or separator, like those in use today.
Silicon offers some of the same benefits offered by solid-state technology including faster charging and higher energy density. But there are big advantages offered by silicon technologies. First, it is inexpensive. Second, it makes use of all the infrastructure and other capital investments already in place in the battery industry.
The silicon switch amounts to swapping out one part of a traditional battery—the graphite—for a better one—the silicon.
Silicon anodes came up for discussion at the Tesla (TSLA) battery technology day in September. CEO Elon Musk said silicon had promise, but becomes brittle and crumbles like a cookie after too few charging and recharging cycles.
That is because the silicon swells when the lithium ions enter the anode. Graphite anodes, such as those in the batteries that power smartphones, swell too, but not as much. “Your iPhone battery breathes,” pointed out Berdichevsky.
As lithium ions go from one side of the battery to the other—during use or during recharging—the battery expands and contracts. With silicon, particles eventually flake off, in the crumbling process that Musk referred to.
Sila’s solution is to put silicon nanoparticles inside of micron-sized silicon particles. The nanoparticles “breathe” inside the micron-sized ones, which protects them from flaking. “It’s like raisins [expanding] inside of raisin bread,” Berdichevsky said. The company tried tens of thousands of iterations, and spent $50 million, before discovering the raisin-bread approach.
Sila plans to have a product in consumer-electronic devices in 2021.
Berdichevsky has an interesting history with lithium ion batteries for consumer devices. He was battery-system architect at Tesla when the company was launching the original roadster. The original battery pack for that car, he said, was essentially a bunch of laptop batteries glued together.
Like Solid Power, Sila has auto partners, including BMW. Daimler (DAI. Germany) is also an investor in the company. Sila also works with existing battery companies like LG Chem (051910. Korea).
Investors will have to wait to buy into Sila and Solid Power. Both CEOs declined to say whether their companies might go public.
They might be tempted by Quantum’s success, though. That stock is up more than 500%, far exceeding the gains in the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, since news emerged in September that Quantum would go public via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
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