BATTERY BATTLES
The clean energy revolution hinges on dirty and dangerous batteries. That is the paradox which innovation and industry must overcome as automobile makers are racing to completely shift their production to electric cars. A Maryland startup supported by the U.S. Army is well positioned to meet this critical challenge towards a truly sustainable planet.
The challenge is huge. The Biden administration has set the target of a 50 percent electric vehicle (EV) sales in the U.S. by 2030. The largest American car manufacturer, General Motors, has already announced that it will completely phase out gas-powered cars and trucks by 2035.
Increasingly, batteries play a critical role in modern societies. They power the many devices we use throughout our days. However, the coming electric cars boom will exponentially drive demand. Today, the size of the global battery market is $120 billion (2020). According to the Global Battery Market Report 2020-2027, it is projected to reach $300 billion in the next 5 years. At the same time, battery technology has not changed much in the past fifty years.
Today’s battery industry is dependent on minerals—particularly cobalt and nickel—that are mostly mined in unfriendly countries like Russia or in socially and environmentally unacceptable circumstances in developing countries. Moreover, battery technology is not safe. Batteries contain a flammable liquid electrolyte that conducts a charge between the electrodes. That electrolyte contains the same explosive power as a hand grenade.
Reports about batteries catching fire or exploding regularly make headlines. Statistics are scarce. In 2006, Accident Investigation Quarterly reported that battery explosions globally cause 22,000 injuries a year with associated costs estimated at $2 billion annually. That was 15 years ago. Battery use has exponentially increased since then.
“Better batteries, no compromise.” That is the mission of ION Storage Systems, a startup that has come out of the University of Maryland. Batteries need to be safe, charge faster and provide more energy, longer. A tank full of gas still gets a car much further than a completely charged battery. The ION team compares the challenge with the recent transformation of the music industry. There was a time that a CD contained some 16 songs. Then came the MP3 player and you could put 3,000 songs on one small device. The battery industry needs a similar revolution.
At a new factory between Baltimore and Washington, D.C, ION is working on a ‘solid-state’ battery that does not contain any flammable liquids. The technology is the brainchild of Professor Eric Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute at the University of Maryland and co-founder of ION Storage Systems.
Wachsman grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and remembers long lines at gas stations during the first oil crisis in 1973. “I decided I wanted to work in energy”, he says. At Stanford University, Wachsman got the opportunity to do a PhD in ion-conduction ceramics. Such ceramics play a critical role in the semiconductor industry. “There is more ceramic than silicon in computer chips”, he says.
As he learned more about the conductivity of ceramics, Wachsman started experimenting with fuel cells and batteries. Ultimately, that research led him to the University of Maryland and to his invention of the ceramic material that is at the core of ION’s solid-state battery.
We eat from a ceramic plate, and we know that if we stick that plate in a hot oven it will not catch fire. “You cannot put any conventional batteries in an oven without risking an explosion”, says Wachsman. What we do not see when we hold a plate or cup is that ceramic material has a crystal structure. Wachsman has used that structure to create a porous, three-dimensional plate structure that conducts ions between the two electrodes in a battery.
A battery needs surface to store ions—energy. As Ohm’s law about electricity teaches, more surface means less resistance resulting in higher energy density. A liquid electrolyte provides a three-dimensional environment that can conduct a lot of ions. Solid-state batteries face the challenge to offer a similar energy density as batteries with liquid electrolytes. Wachsman’s porous ceramic 3D-structure solves that problem. It will allow ION’s battery to compete with today’s liquid lithium-ion power packs and sets the company apart from competitors in the U.S.
Silicon Valley-based QuantumScape, backed by German car maker Volkswagen, uses a flat surface ceramic for its solid-state battery. Other competitors use polymers which are easy to manufacture but come with other limitations. They are safer but the ion-conducting material in the battery needs to be compressed or heated to provide energy-density. “A solid-state battery always comes with an apology”, says chief technology officer Greg Hitz, a former student of Wachsman who became his partner and co-founder of ION.
ION batteries do not need heating or compressing. They do not need cooling either. Today’s electric cars have cooling mechanisms to prevent their batteries from overheating and catching fire. General Motors, Tesla, Ford, BMW and other car makers have all recently issued recalls for overheating batteries in their electric vehicles.
Solid-state batteries improve the degradation process in batteries. When you leave your phone for a few days—even if you turn it off—the battery will empty. The liquid electrolyte allows the ions to move a bit even when the power of a device is turned off. The same process does not happen in solid-state batteries. If you come back after a week, you will find your phone at the same level of charge as you left it.
The many benefits of ION’s innovation open an opportunity for a disruption in the battery market like, say, the moment when the introduction of the iPhone turned the mobile phone market on its head. However, a great innovation cannot succeed without leadership. The ION founders, Wachsman and Hitz, realized their company needed exceptional leadership. That is when they found Ricky Hanna, a battery industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience.
Hanna grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He would have never worked in the battery industry if he had not lost a well-paid corporate job in his early twenties. “I needed income and I literally took the first job I could find in the paper”, he says. That job turned out to be at a battery company. “I remember thinking I need to get out of here as soon as possible and get a real job.”
However, Hanna ended up working for the Irish battery company for 15 years. He started building batteries with his own hands and moved up through the ranks. He led three factories in China for his company before he got recruited by Apple as executive director of batteries. “My job was to make millions of batteries every day for all these devices,” he says.
In 2016, Apple’s competitor Samsung had to recall a new smart phone after multiple devices caught fire. The Korean company last some 20 billion of its value overnight. Hanna knew that Apple was using similar batteries. He thought about his counterpart at Samsung: “I do not want to ever be that guy.”
The experience made Hanna reflect on his career: “There has to be a better way, I thought.” He knew that manufacturers like Apple and Samsung always prioritize runtime of their devices above safety. He began to research safer, solid-state batteries. Ultimately, he decided to leave Apple and began visiting various solid-state battery startups. In 2020, that search ended at ION. “I have worked on really cool technologies at Apple but ION’s innovation keeps me up at night. Our batteries are safe, they perform better and they are sustainable. That is very exciting.”
Ricky Hanna
Under his leadership, ION has set out a 4-phase strategy to bring their battery innovation to the market. Hanna, who used to serve in the British army, identified an ideal first customer: the army. Modern warfare is much dependent on technology requiring soldiers to carry batteries wherever they go.
In addition, statistics show that most American casualties during the war in Afghanistan happened during refueling. Soldiers will be safer if they carry more and better batteries that they can power with solar cells. Soldiers are also notoriously rough on their gear. So, the military needs their batteries to be safe and as energy dense as possible.
The U.S. army jumped on ION’s technology and has provided the company with a first contract at a premium price. The army contract offers ION a critical opportunity to test the manufacturing of the batteries at an initial low volume in a semi-automated facility. Most competitors are completely focused on the gigantic battery market for electric vehicles (EV’s). They are raising billions of dollars and are taking their technologies straight from the lab to build gigawatt factories. “You will only know whether it works when these factories become operational”, says Wachsman.
Asked about the biggest challenge that ION faces, his partner Hitz summarizes the joint opinion of the ION team and responds like a realtor: “Manufacturing, manufacturing, manufacturing”. Most new battery technologies come from lab experiments. They have not been proven at scale. “There are many news articles, no products”, says Hitz.
ION’s Vice President of Research and Development, Elizabeth Santori, is in charge of developing the manufacturing process. She says: “It is very, very challenging to scale a new technology, hit the cost points, and produce millions of batteries to put them in every electric car. So far, no company has been able to do that (see sidebar).
The army contract allows ION to begin manufacturing later this year, generate the first revenue while testing and improving the process along the way. In 2023, ION aims to produce some 1.5 million cell phone size batteries for the consumer electronics industry. The designed growth path allows for continuous learning maximizing the ultimate change of success. The ION team is very aware that since 2000, dozens of battery startups have failed. One major reason is that due to failing manufacturing they cannot support their warranties. “We need to show that we can manufacture a product”, says Hitz.
Only after ION has succeeded in satisfying the needs of the army and subsequently has successfully delivered to the consumer electronics industry, will the company take on the—big and lucrative—car battery challenge. In 2026, ION expects to open a first gigawatt-size factory to produce batteries for electric cars. That is a few years away but nonetheless car makers are knocking on the ION door on a daily basis.
In a fourth stage, the company plans to address the energy storage market for power backup of the electric grid. For this application, the company plans to develop another technology out of the lab of Wachsman at the University of Maryland. In tests, researchers have been able to replace lithium with sodium in a solid-state battery.
Sodium is less energy dense but that is not a problem for large backup batteries. The advantage of sodium is that it is cheap and widely available and does not require dirty mining. Sodium may very well be the ultimate destination for clean solid-state batteries but the technology requires a lot more development.
ION’s current solid-state battery does not need cobalt or nickel, but it still uses lithium albeit 50 percent less than the conventional lithium-ion batteries. Lithium is mined in the U.S. but it is a polluting process. Moreover, the price of lithium has increased 500 percent in the past year.
Recycling does not offer much relief as recovering the materials in lithium-ion batteries is very difficult. ION is designing a sustainable lifecycle for their batteries. At the end of their use, the materials in the batteries can be removed and reused.
The good news is that clean and sustainable solid-state batteries—without cobalt, nickel, and lithium—will be cheaper. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts a shortage of cobalt by 2030. Bloomberg research recently projected solid-state batteries will be 40 percent cheaper than today’s batteries. ION’s batteries may be even more competitive as they do not need heating or compressing.
The battery battle is full on. The ION team seems to take on the challenge with a well-planned strategy. They are driven by entrepreneurial creativity and innovation as well as by some healthy chauvinism. Hitz: “The U.S. tends to develop technologies and then loses them to low-wage production countries. We want to be a world-leading American company that is profitably and reliably making a safe and better solid-state battery.”
Inventor Eric Wachsman has his own definition of success. As he leaves the ION factory, he steps in his Tesla and says: “I want to drive in a car powered by my own battery.” [JK]
