The Future of Battery Technology - Nick Kateris, Stanford University

What is the future of battery technology  innovation? That's what we're going to get into today with Nick Kateris, a postdoc researcher  at Stanford University, where his focus is on the cutting edge of battery technology innovation.  Advances in battery technology are essential in order to achieve a global renewable energy  transformation, not only in the area of electric vehicles but also in the area of storage of  renewable energy for the electric grid. This is such an important area of techn

ological innovation,  but very few people really understand the future of battery technology. That's why I found the  right person to explain it to us. Let's get into it. Nick, at a high level what are some of the  most exciting areas of battery technology today? Everyone's using lithium-ion batteries today, but  lithium-ion batteries are a pretty old technology now even though they're constantly improving.  So I think the areas of research in battery technology that are most exciting to me are

areas having to do with new battery types. So, for example, there's a lot of current research  going on about solid state batteries, about lithium-sulfur and lithium-air batteries, and also moving away from lithium-based batteries into sodium and potassium-based batteries as well. Nick, why is new battery technology so important and how could it dramatically reshape our economy? Right now we're  mostly used to batteries in personal devices, right, like our laptops, or phones, etc. And we're  see

ing more and more applications of batteries in transportation. So this is already an area  where our lives are drastically being changed. And I think the transportation sector will  completely transform in the next few decades with a electric vehicles, but the way in which  batteries can impact the economy in the most drastic way, in my opinion, is by  ramping up energy storage using batteries. And as we shift into a more renewable energy future, we need large capacity to store energy when the s

un is not shining and the wind is not blowing, and that's where batteries I think will have the highest impact economically. Later in the interview I want to get into the details of how electric vehicles are going to transform in the years ahead,  and how energy storage for the electric grid is going to evolve, but first can you just tell us what do you think are some of the most exciting battery tech startups today, and why? So I can give you an answer now, but a year from now my answer might b

e completely different. But right now a lot of exciting battery research is actually happening in pretty well-established companies like Tesla or Apple, focusing particularly on lithium-ion batteries, but there are a few  startups, some in the US, some in Europe, some in Australia, working on lithium-sulfur and lithium-air batteries. So some examples are, for example, PolyPlus Batteries, that's a company working on lithium-air and lithium-sulfur batteries, which are still at a pretty early stage

. Also NextTech  in the US, and Lithium-Sulfur Energy in Australia, are also looking into lithium-sulfur batteries. And even though these battery technologies are still at a, as I like to say, 'lab stage' not  really an industry stage yet, I think, we hope to see promising results in the next few years.  What's the kind of step change in usefulness and efficiency and density that we may see in the  coming years if these kinds of new technologies come online? So in terms of energy efficiency  lit

hium-ion batteries are already pretty good, but I think we'll see a really big step change  in cost, and that will be at least a factor of two, I think, if we can really scale up  the production of lithium-sulfur batteries or lithium-air batteries, and if they prove to be long-lasting and safe. And in terms of capacity, we also expect to see hopefully maybe a factor of two increase. If lithium air batteries work, and reach their theoretical capacity, we can even see a  factor of 30 or 40 increa

se in energy density, but of course, reaching the theoretical limit is never exactly possible, but still–. What does that really mean in real terms if you have a 2x increase in efficiency for these kinds of batteries? What does that real really mean in everyday life? Is that a– that doesn't sound necessarily too dramatic, but what kind of dramatic changes could that lead to? Uh, just to clarify 2x, a 2x increase would be in capacity not in efficiency, but yes that would mean we have much lighter

and much more compact batteries, and this is really important particularly in electric vehicles where the weight of battery carried  around is really important. Also it would have implications about getting closer to realizing electric flight, which is something we can discuss later on in more detail. And how about in terms of  electric grid energy storage? In terms of energy storage, cost is the most important factor. We don't really mind if the batteries are too too bulky or too heavy, becau

se they'll be sitting in a big warehouse somewhere, or some big facility somewhere. So for energy storage, what's most important is batteries that last a really long time that have a high efficiency and are cheap, because we need  to manufacture huge quantities of them to be able to store large amounts of energy. Nick, before we dive deeper into the details around new battery technology for these different use cases  of transportation, electric vehicles, electric storage for the grid, etc., let'

s just start with the basics, so that people have a little better understanding of batteries before we go into  more complexity. What is a battery, and what are the different components of a battery, and how  does it work, in simple terms? Yes, so a battery is an electric chemical energy storage device.  What that means is that it's a device that we can use to store energy and we store it through  electrochemical reactions, which means that we put in electricity and then store the energy  as che

mical energy within the materials of the battery. So batteries are a very old technology,  they're older than the internal combustion engine, even though we use internal combustion  engines everywhere and batteries are now being increasingly used for large scale applications. So the first battery was invented by Alessandro Volta in 1799, which is a very long time ago.  So batteries are essentially a sandwich of an electrolyte between two electrodes. So those  two electrodes are just conductive p

lates of a metal or some type of conductive material,  and the electrolyte is typically an organic liquid, so some type of hydrocarbon liquid – even though in solid-state batteries there are solid electrolytes in between the two electrodes, and the two electrodes are called the anode and the cathode. So the anode essentially contains  the fuel of the battery, which in lithium-ion batteries is lithium, and then the cathode is the  material that facilitates the chemical reactions or electrochemica

l reactions that store energy when  we charge the battery or release energy when we discharge the battery. So when we discharge  a battery, for example, a lithium-ion battery, for example, lithium ions leave from the anode,  they migrate through the electrolyte towards the cathode, and then they undergo chemical reactions  with the cathode material and throughout this process electrons have been released through  the circuit from the battery anode to the battery cathode, and those electrons are

the current  that powers our devices. When we charge the battery, the exact opposite process happens.  Chemical electrochemical reactions happen at the cathode, those electrochemical reactions release  lithium ions, the lithium ions migrate back to the anode, and then they're stored there in the  anode, ready to release energy when we want to discharge the battery. What does energy density  and energy efficiency mean in battery technology? I know these are important terms in terms of  understand

ing batteries, but what do those mean and how are they important? Right, so I come from a  thermodynamics perspective, so those are the most important quantities in my opinion, as well as cost,  of course. So energy density is essentially how much energy you can store in the battery per unit weight of the battery, so how many jewels of energy you can store per gram of battery  cells that you have. So the higher the energy density the lighter and more compact batteries  are. Energy efficiency tel

ls you how much energy you get out of the battery when you discharge it  for the amount of energy you put in when you were charging it. So to give you an example, when we do  energy storage, grid energy storage for example, and we produce an excess of energy in terms  of electrical energy from our solar panels or wind turbines, we want to be able to store as much  of that as possible and be able to take it back out of the battery at the maximum possible percentage, right. So for this excess amou

nt of energy that we produce, a high 100% efficient  battery would give us the same amount of energy back when we discharge it. Of course, in the world  nothing is 100% efficient, so if we are at, say, 90 or 95% efficiency it's good enough, but if we  are, for example, below 80% then we waste quite a lot of energy that we have produced that could  have been useful otherwise. So it sounds like in applications like electric vehicles, or cell phones,  like you mentioned earlier, the energy density

is the more important aspect, and in applications like  electric storage for the grid, energy efficiency would be the more important aspect to optimize.  Is that correct? That's right, because when you charge your cell phone, it doesn't matter if  you spend a little more on your electricity bill for the amount of energy that's actually going  inside your cell phone, just because that's an overall small quantity. What are the different  categories of battery technology and how are they different,

and what are the different applications  that they're each best for? Yes, so the highest level categories we categorize batteries in  is into primary batteries and secondary batteries. So primary batteries are non-rechargeable  batteries. They're the AA batteries we put in remote controls or toys, for example. Then secondary  batteries are the rechargeable batteries, which is what we use in our phones, laptops, but also in  electric vehicles, for instance. The most common type of secondary batt

ery is the lithium-ion battery, even though lead-acid batteries that we use for our cars were probably the most common  type of rechargeable battery until pretty recently. Lithium-ion batteries have been very successful  because they have an extremely long lifespan, and they're also very efficient, so the energy you  get out of them when you discharge them is pretty close to the energy you put in, and lithium-ion  batteries have been around since the 1980s. A noble prize was awarded to the two p

ioneers who developed the materials that enabled lithium-ion batteries. But even though we've been  using lithium-ion batteries very successfully so far, there are a lot of newer post-lithium-ion  battery technologies. So I can give you some examples of these. So one example of a battery technology that's getting a lot of attention and a lot of resources for its  development recently is solid-state batteries. So the difference between solid state batteries  and standard liquid electrolyte batter

ies is that the electrolyte (the material that's between the  battery anode and the battery cathode), which is typically a liquid in most batteries, is replaced  with a solid, typically some type of polymer material, and this allows solid-state  batteries to be more energy dense and also safer. But solid state batteries have some disadvantages.  So because the electrolyte is a solid, there's a very high internal resistance between the anode  and the cathode, so we have some price to pay in terms

of energy efficiency. They also, at least so far, don't have a particularly long lifespan. But a lot of people are working towards making  longer lasting solid-state batteries, so hopefully pretty soon we will see  improvements in that aspect. An example of the highest energy density battery that one  could make is the lithium-air battery, which is still at a developing stage. The advantage  of a lithium-air battery is that you don't need to have a heavy cathode material. Lithium-air  batteries

essentially use air, use ambient oxygen, to oxidize the lithium, so it's kind of like a  like a lithium combustion process, but in a very controlled and electrochemical manner instead of  just burning lithium. And these batteries have at least a theoretical capacity that  approaches the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels like fossil fuels. But of course  reaching that theoretical capacity will have a lot of challenges. Another example of a high  energy density and low cost battery is something

I've worked on personally, which is lithium-sulfur batteries. So lithium-sulfur batteries are also at lab stage. They haven't really found scalability  yet, and that's because there hasn't been enough testing to see what their lifespan can be,  or what their lifespan can be pushed towards. But lithium-sulfur batteries have the advantage  of being very energy dense and also extremely cheap, because all of the materials involved can  be obtained relatively easily, and so all the examples I've men

tioned so far include  lithium as the fuel in the battery as the active material in the battery or the anode material  in the battery. However, to remind everyone of their high school chemistry knowledge, if we  look at the alkaline metals in the periodic table, so the the first column in the periodic table  all the way on the left, we have hydrogen on top, which is not a metal, but then  we have lithium as the first alkali metal, and then right under lithium we have sodium, and right  under sod

ium we have potassium. So what this tells us is that lithium, sodium, and potassium have very  similar chemical and electrochemical properties. So if we can make a battery that uses lithium, we can  also probably make a battery that uses sodium or potassium. So a lot of people have actually looked  into replacing lithium with sodium and making sodium-ion batteries, which have to operate quite  differently from lithium-ion batteries because sodium does not bind with graphite in the way  lithium b

inds with graphite, so that complicates both the manufacturing process and the and the  operation of the battery, but the advantage of using sodium instead of lithium is that sodium  is abundant. Sodium exists in seawater, in the sodium chloride in the salt that exists in the  oceans, so it's a lot easier to obtain than lithium, and a lot cheaper as well. Potassium is the element  right below sodium that can also be used in potassium-ion batteries, but also potassium-sulfur  batteries, or potass

ium-air batteries, for instance, and potassium is also found in ocean water,  so it's also a relatively cheap metal, cheaper than lithium. The disadvantage of moving down that  column in the periodic table, however, is that the further down we go, the heavier the elements are, so that translates to heavier battery materials, so lower energy density batteries. For the same  amount of energy, we would like to store in a sodium or potassium-based battery, that battery  would be heavier probably tha

n a corresponding lithium-based battery. Now shifting gears to  a completely different type of electrochemical system, there are also flow batteries. So flow  batteries don't have any solid components. They have a liquid anode, which is called an  anolyte, and a liquid cathode, which is called a catholyte. Those two liquids flow,  are pumped continuously, and then they interact with each other, transferring ions and transferring  electrons. And the advantage of flow batteries is that they're ver

y very easy to scale and they  can last a very long time, but do not have a very high energy efficiency. So as you can see, all of  the different battery technologies that exist, or have been proposed, or are being investigated  right now, they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Lithium batteries happen to be  pretty good for a lot of the applications we care about, like personal devices and electric vehicles,  purely because they can last a really long time, and they're pretty efficie

nt, but if we care  about cost, which is important in energy storage, then moving to sodium, for example, makes a lot of  sense. And making some type of sodium-ion or sodium-sulfur battery. And in electric vehicles, if we can make more energy dense batteries, so they don't have to carry as much weight  for the energy they need to move, making something like a lithium-sulfur battery would be beneficial just because they are a lot more energy dense. However, there's a challenge  in that such types

of batteries have not proven to be as long lasting as lithium-ion batteries are, so one might have to replace the batteries in their electric vehicle every year, or every couple of years, which is non-ideal. So just to review, when  you think about all those different types of new battery technologies that you mentioned, if development on those batteries is very successful, what are the sort of different applications, again, that each one would be most suited for– and are  are some of those rea

sons for developing those technologies just cost-related, and how would also that influence the application of each Battery technology? Just so we have sort of a vision of the future, you know, 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, or maybe you could weigh in  on when you think this kind of change would happen. But how would each of those types of batteries, just to review and simplify, be applied to our everyday life? So starting with lithium-ion batteries, I think lithium-ion batteries will probably

be the main battery technology we use in personal electronic devices, just because we care about them lasting at least say 1,000 or 2,000 charge discharge cycles. If you charge and discharge your phone every day, you want  it to last maybe three years, possibly longer, and none of the other battery technologies have  really demonstrated, in a large scale, this ability that lithium-ion batteries have. However, lithium-ion batteries are expensive. Their materials are expensive, so if we want to re

ally scale  up battery production – and this is particularly important for energy storage – then my prediction  is that we will move away from lithium into probably sodium, which is a lot cheaper, and also  move away from lithium-ion or sodium-ion types of devices, because the cathode material in lithium-ion devices is also very expensive. Lithium-ion batteries require cobalt in their cathodes, which is difficult to get and quite expensive as well. So for storage I would  envision something like

sodium-sulfur batteries becoming particularly important maybe 20 or 30  years down the line, once they prove that they can be scaled up and that they can last a  few thousand charge discharge cycles. Then when it comes to flight, I think the only battery  technology that has potential in maybe one day replacing fossil fuels is lithium-air batteries,  because we really care about batteries that go in airplanes being very light. Because you need to spend quite a lot of energy to take this energy

up to 30,000 ft, or whatever the flight altitude is,  and also keep it there at that altitude. And then for electric vehicles it's some combination  of a long lasting battery technology and also a high energy density battery technology, because,  again, weight is important. You don't want to be transporting so many tons of batteries every  time you get into your car, so I think maybe something like lithium-sulfur batteries, again, if  they prove to be long lasting, could work well in electric ve

hicles, but again that's probably  20 or 30 years down the line, and then the other aspect that we need to pay attention to is also  safety. We need to avoid battery fires, and we've seen some accidents happening with electric vehicles recently, and that's where solid state batteries show really promising safety  results where, you know, we need to avoid having accidents and thermal runaway phenomena  in batteries, and solid state batteries are the way to go from a safety perspective, even thoug

h  they need to show some improvement in terms of energy efficiency. Let's talk a little more about  this category of battery tech in transportation for electric vehicles, electric cars, electric  buses, electric trucks, and and even flight. In terms of electric vehicles, what kind of  battery changes do you think we'll see in the next decades ahead? So right now companies  like Tesla, for example, work or put a lot of resources in battery development, especially  trying to make their batteries

more energy dense, make them both lighter and more compact, and  that's because they want to maximize the range that their vehicles can cover with a single  charge. The problem right now is that a Tesla, for example, has so much weight of batteries being  carried around that if one were to add even more then the range wouldn't really be extended,  just because they would be carrying extra weight and they would need more energy to  to travel from point A to point B. So there are two ways in which

they're trying to make their  batteries more energy dense, and those are mostly lithium-ion batteries that all the work is going  towards. So the first way is the more fundamental investigation of how do we make better battery  materials, how do we replace the anode materials, the cathode materials, the electrolyte inside each  battery cell to have a lighter and more compact battery cell that still stores the same amount  of energy? Then the second way in which they're trying to improve their b

atteries is from a more  engineering point of view, where, for instance, companies like Tesla look into how can they make  larger battery cells so they can save some weight in the casing of each battery cell, and in  some instances they might sacrifice the higher performing energy material into maybe an older  material like, for example, rather than using NMC cathodes, which are a more state-of-the-art cathod  material, they might move you know 10 or 15 years back in the technological developmen

t timeline to  lithium-ion phosphate cathode materials, which are not as – they don't perform as well – but they  have the right material properties to make larger battery cells and save on battery casing. So there are, you know, two approaches, those two approaches, the more fundamental one and the more  engineering one, trying to optimize batteries for electric vehicles. And, yeah, the name of the  game is energy density. It's being able to store more energy in the same volume and in a lighte

r  weight. So will we have electric vehicles in a couple decades that have a much longer range? Hopefully. I think we are already reaching a plateau. Yes, hopefully we'll see some new  developments in the future, but I do think we'll see a lot more vehicle electrification in the  next 20 years. Hopefully all cars and all trucks will be fully electric in 20 or 30 years time.  I also think there's a lot of future in plug-in hybrids. So the difference between plug-in hybrids  and electric vehicles

is that an electric vehicle carries around a large weight of battery to be  able to cover 400 or 450 miles. A plug-in hybrid has a much shorter range, maybe 70 or 80 miles, so it has  to carry much less weight in batteries to cover that range, and then it also has an internal  combustion engine which burns gasoline, and the driver only uses that when they want to travel a  distance longer than 70 miles, but for most people, for people like me, that's totally fine, because  very rarely do I drive

longer than 70 miles in one day, and if I burn gasoline 5, 10 times a year it's not the end of the world. Will airplanes become electric? A lot of people hope so. I hope so too, but I'm not particularly confident as things are right now. The problem is in energy  density. So lithium as a material has an inherent thermodynamic property that's called the heat of  reaction with oxygen. The best way you can extract energy out of lithium is – or the the highest  energy density way you could extract

energy out of lithium – is if you just burn it. Or if you  have it react with oxygen in the way that lithium-air batteries operate, where rather  than just burning the lithium, you oxidize it in an electrochemical process. So that will give you  the maximum theoretical energy density of what any lithium-based system can achieve, and this is  still a bit lower than fossil fuels. So nature did us a big favor by giving us fossil fuels because  there there are very few alternatives, or there is no o

ther alternative, maybe other than nuclear  energy, with a higher energy density that we know how to use. Then, if you don't think in terms of  lithium and say 'oh, maybe a potassium or a sodium battery can have a higher energy density,' that also won't be possible, just because sodium and potassium are inherently heavier elements. So if  we are to see electric flight, I think lithium-air batteries are the only battery technology that can  compete with fossil fuels, but more realistically I thin

k flight will be the last part of our economy  that will be electrified. Maybe there's hope with hydrogen or other green propellants, but I think  still combustion or combustion-based propulsion systems will perform better than batteries for flight. One of your other areas of research is detonation engines. What are detonation  engines, and how would they be useful, and in what applications? So detonation is a type of  combustion. So combustion, which is the reaction of or the exothermic reactio

n of a fuel with an  oxidizer, typically a fuel with air, the oxygen in air, can happen in two regimes, two ways. The first  one is called deflagration and it's the type of combustion we're all used to. It's flames. It's  the flames of a gas stove, or of a lighter, or the flames that – very turbulent violent flames – in  our gasoline engines or diesel engines that our cars run with. However, there's another regime  combustion happens in, and this one is detonation. So detonation is a more rapid

heat release  mechanism. It's essentially an explosion where the heat release does not manifest itself in the form  of a flame but it manifests itself in the form of a detonation wave, which is a shock wave coupled  with exothermic chemical reactions that power that shock wave. It's an explosion. So the advantage  of replacing flames in an engine with explosions in an engine is an efficiency argument. So if  one is to do the thermodynamic analysis of how flame-based engines work, and if one were

to do  the theoretical analysis of how explosion-based or detonation engines work, at least theoretically  detonation engines are a lot more efficient, and this is because the detonation wave couples  compressing the reactants and then having very exothermic chemical reactions happening with  those reactants, giving us the heat release that our engines use to produce work, so detonation  engines are theoretically a lot more efficient and their other advantage is they have fewer moving  parts. D

etonation engines are essentially a pair of concentric tubes with a detonation wave  going in a circle in that space between those two tubes. And detonation engines are still at  a very early stage. They're only demonstrated experimentally in labs at universities or  government research facilities, and they're very difficult to control. Right now we  don't really know what the best way is to inject fuel, what the best way is to control all the  parameters to make those engines work hopefully clo

se to their theoretical operating point, but  I've seen a lot of progress happening in the past 10 years or so. So hopefully I hope to  see the areas of energy production and propulsion that cannot be electrified, or do not make sense  to be electrified, will shift away from internal combustion engines to detonation engines, and  then we can hopefully use fossil fuels or hydrogen in more efficient ways for  energy production and for aviation as well. Let's move on and talk about electric energy

storage  for the grid. Why are batteries so important for electric storage for the grid? So right now most  of our electricity actually comes from gas. In many countries it comes from burning coal and this contributes to global warming and the greenhouse effect by the CO2 that's released into  our atmosphere. And we all know that it's really important to move towards a greener renewable  energy production world where hopefully we ramp up solar and wind energy generation for our  needs, for our h

omes, for industry, for the whole world to operate. The problem with ramping up renewable energy resources like solar and wind is that solar power and wind are intermittent. As, you know, the sun is not always shining, the wind is not always blowing the same way, so  they're not really reliable for society to run throughout a whole year and 24/7. So if we were able  to to run completely on renewable energy resources, we really need to figure out a way to save the  excess electricity that we pro

duce when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing, and  then use that at night, or in during days when there's no wind, no sun. And there are many ways  people are trying to to tackle this problem. There are many energy storage proposals, some  mechanical, some electrochemical. I really think batteries are the way to go for energy storage.  The reason for this is that, you know, the laws of thermodynamics tell us that every time we convert  energy from one type to another, we pay a price

. The conversion process is not 100% efficient.  And batteries allow us to save electricity in a battery form and then use that  battery to release electrical energy again. So it has the minimum number of energy  conversion steps that one can take. So if we are serious about moving towards a more renewable  economy, then we need to make big energy storage facilities, large warehouses filled with batteries  that can charge up during sunny days and then release the stored energy for society to run

  at night, or when we don't have access to renewable resources. Do you think those battery installations  would likely be sort of mega installations away from people, or do you think they would be sort  of distributed throughout the grid in smaller neighborhood installations? I think we need a  combination of both. I think for homes that have their own solar panels, for instance, it makes a  lot of sense for those same homes to have, you know, a refrigerator-sized battery in the basement, charg

e that up and then use that energy at night, but having a completely distributed energy  production model is also has its challenges. The grid works because the demand in different areas  changes. Also, we can't forget about industry and factories needing huge amounts of energy. Also  agriculture as well. So I think a lot of industrial and agricultural sectors would  benefit from large centralized energy storage facilities. So yeah, I think there's a lot of  optimization to be done on what the b

est model is, but my bet is a combination of large  facilities and distributed storage devices in people's homes. So it sounds like we need to get  battery technology that is very cost effective and also very energy efficient in that we can that  we get close to 100% of the energy that we put into it retained in the battery for  later use. How close to that theoretical maximum is the new battery technology for electric energy  for grid storage? Lithium-ion batteries are pretty good already. They

're around 95% efficient in terms of energy efficiency. Newer, cheaper, and at the developmental stage battery technologies have not been as efficient, generally speaking. I know lithium-sulfur batteries, for instance, are at  around 80% energy efficiency, which is a bit too low right now, but a lot of progress is being  made in making newer battery technologies more efficient, so hopefully cheaper alternatives  to lithium-ion batteries will approach the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries, and

then once  we're, you know, at an over 90% energy efficiency, we're already way way way better than any of the  mechanical solutions or hydrogen storage for instance. Is that kind of 90% the threshold that  you're looking for in terms of actually building these installations in the in the world? Or what's  the kind of threshold that you would need to see in the technology in order to start seeing  battery large battery installations in the world that are cost effective at scale? That's  the ball

park number I have in my mind mind, but to make that decision and to make this cost  effective, it would have to be a combination of the cost associated with efficiency and those  losses, but also manufacturing, maintenance costs, how often those batteries need to be replaced,  so there are quite a lot of variables in the equation to make those decisions. And we're  trying to push each of those up individually, but I think we need to think a bit more in a  more multi-dimensional way and how all

those fit together to make a complete solution that makes  sense to create. Do we currently have technology available to build these kind of large electrical  energy storage battery installations for the grid? I thought I heard about like Tesla doing that  in Australia few years ago. Yeah, so we do if we are to use lithium-ion batteries. The problem is cost. It doesn't make sense cost-wise to do this at a large scale yet. The problem with lithium-ion  batteries, even though they perform so well,

is that the cathode materials used in lithium-ion  batteries contain cobalt, cobalt and nickel. Cobalt especially is not very easily  accessible. Most of it is mined in in Africa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, so there are both  financial and also political obstacles to really scale up lithium battery production  to the extent necessary for energy storage. We also don't have enough solar and wind power yet  to really, for it to make sense to really ramp up storage, huge storage facilities

. So we  need a development of, or a ramping up of renewables and renewable energy power generation  with energy storage happening in tandem for it to make sense financially. But that's interesting  because a lot of the sort of renewable energy naysayers would say 'oh, no this wouldn't work  to have a huge amount of renewable energy as part of our mix because when the sun doesn't shine  and the wind doesn't blow...' but it sounds like what you're saying as a battery expert is that  we actually d

on't even have enough renewable energy capacity yet to be near even hitting that  problem of needing battery installations. Is that right? Yeah, because we still rely on on gas  pretty heavily. I know California has quite a lot of renewable electricity, but most other  states do not, and most countries in the world do not. So if we currently were producing  an excess of renewable electricity, then we might as well send it somewhere else where it can be  used directly, and so that coal doesn't ha

ve to be burned, with lines that go from state to state,  or country to country, or just region to region within smaller areas. And we wouldn't need  to think about storing it. Do you have any idea like what what percentage of the energy mix  solar and wind and other renewables can be before you need to start thinking about battery  storage? It would need to be the majority. It would need to be definitely more  than half. Wow, so even half or more can be absorbed into the grid easily without bat

tery  storage installations? I believe so, yes. I'm not a grid expert, but maybe that's a  good idea for a future episode. Let's talk more about the political and environmental aspects of  batteries. You mentioned that lithium-ion batteries have rare earths, and that those come specifically  from the Congo. What types of rare earths are used in different types of batteries, and what is sort  of their toxicity level, and scarcity level, and is there even enough of those types of rare earths  in e

xistence to make batteries at the scale that we would need to? Yes, that's an important topic.  So lithium-ion batteries, which are the most common ones we use now have three materials that  are kind of difficult to obtain. So the first one is the lithium, which is the fuel in lithium-ion batteries. Lithium it looks like we have quite a lot of it. A lot of it is mined in  the US, some in South America, some in Canada, a lot in China. Most of it is processed in  China, and then distributed around

the world for battery production. And lithium it looks  like we have quite a lot of it at least for the next couple of centuries or so, even ramping up  battery development and application, and it's also fairly safe. So lithium reacts with water,  and it reacts with air to form lithium oxide, which is non-reactive. It's essentially lithium rust. It's safe. It forms very fast and it doesn't really harm the environment that much.  However, cathode materials, especially Cobalt, which has been used

in lithium-ion batteries since  their inception in the 1980s, and nickel, which is used in a lot of newer state-of-the-art   cathode materials, are both expensive and scarce. And they're also quite toxic for humans, so we need to be very careful not to release them in the environment. And that's where recycling  plays a very important role if we are to move into different battery technologies like lithium-sulfur, or sodium-sulfur, or lithium-air, then that need for Cobalt and nickel is no longe

r there, so this drives down cost significantly. And also the scarcity of the materials in  lithium-sulfur batteries or lithium-air batteries is not nearly as bad as that for lithium-ion  battery cathod materials. So it sounds like there's both political and environmental  reasons for moving away from lithium-ion batteries as well as to get away from a very scarce and expensive resource. Yes, I think there is yeah both political and environmental  motivation to do so – and cost – and cost but as

things are right now lithium-ion batteries are still the  best performing battery technology, so we're not that close to getting access to to  additional competitive battery technologies yet. Hopefully in the next few decades though we will. Let's talk a little bit more about the environmental cost of the rare earths that  are used in these batteries. Is there a lot of toxic fallout from the mining operations,  as well as potentially the disposal of batteries after they're used by consumers? Ye

s, so  mining of Cobalt and also of nickel is dangerous. It's difficult to do in a safe  manner, both for the environment and also for the workers involved. It's not just the mining.  It's also the processing, the purification, and the overall processing of those materials  so that they're ready to be used in battery manufacturing that is also damaging to both  the people working in those facilities and also the environment in general. Then when it comes to battery disposal, of course, we need t

o be extra careful not to just dump batteries  that contain those rare earth materials in the environment. So battery recycling is very  important in order to uh make sure that those harmful elements don't end up in the soil  somewhere or in the water supply somewhere, and also so that we can capture them and use  them in new battery manufacturing. Can we recycle all types of batteries, and is it easy to  recycle for example lithium-ion batteries, and is it profitable to do so? Is that a good bu

siness  opportunity for companies, considering there's so many rare earths that are very valuable in  lithium-ion batteries? It's still a fairly involved and fairly costly process. You need to  go through a lot of steps to do battery recycling safely and and efficiently. So first you  need to obtain the disposed batteries and make sure they're completely discharged because if  those batteries are still charged and then you put them through a shredder, they can explode and  cause a lot of damage.

Then those batteries are typically smashed or shredded, and the materials  are separated by physical and chemical processes. The plastic in the casing is reused. That's  pretty easy to remove. Their rare earths are captured and they're  reused. My understanding is that most of the lithium is just disposed as lithium  oxide. It is possible to to take back that lithium as well, but currently obtaining new newly-mined lithium is more profitable. So overall battery recycling is a fairly involved an

d costly  process, so the profit margin as a business is not as enticing as it would hopefully  otherwise be. So that's why I think there's a lot of political incentive that's necessary  to ramp up battery recycling. And to some extent there already is because environmental laws  prohibit the disposal of of those rare earth materials into the en environment. So what's the  clean and green vision of the future of battery technology? I hope to see a lot of different  battery systems being develope

d and finding applications in different areas. So I hope  to see keep seeing improvements in lithium-ion batteries, seeing them being applied to a lot  of the current applications that they have. I also hope to see a full ground transportation  electrification in the next 20 years. I hope every car and every truck and hopefully a lot of  shipping as well becomes electrified pretty soon. And then I think the biggest, most  drastic change I hope to see in a slightly longer time frame is energy sto

rage with with  new, much cheaper battery systems. So I hope to see a lot of distributed storage facilities  and also large centralized storage facilities being able to store a lot of excess renewable  electricity that's produced and then distributing that to the grid for for use when the sun is not  shining. It sounds like some of the categories of new battery technology that you were talking about  earlier would just just require things like air, or sea salt to function instead of these rare e

arths?  Is that a real reality moving forward that we could transition away from these kind of lithium-ion batteries that require more toxic substances that are harder to obtain, and expensive, towards  these types of batteries that have much cleaner ingredients without toxicity that can  be obtained almost anywhere in the world? Yes, I think there is a future where those batteries  find pretty extended application, but first we need to do some work to improve their  performance, make sure they

can last thousands of charge discharge cycles, and they can be  efficient. So yeah I do believe there is a future in such bad battery technologies. It's just  a matter of some scientific development and some engineering development to get those up  to speed to the performance of lithium-ion batteries right now. And again what types of batteries are  we talking about that would just require air, or sea salt, or these kind of very basic non-toxic  ingredients? So lithium-air batteries promise to u

se lithium and just air. We can also think about  sodium-air batteries, which use sodium and just air. And the sodium is what we can obtain  from sea salt directly and is a lot cheaper than lithium. But even lithium-sulfur and sodium-sulfur batteries will consist of materials that are very easily accessible.  Because sodium, for instance, can be, again, taken directly from sea salt. And sulfur exists pretty  much everywhere in the world, can be mined very easily, very cheaply, and is an abundant

material.  How close do you think we are to changing over to those cleaner, more cost-efficient battery  technologies? I think a lot of the scientific development is already there. There is just  a disconnect in testing that happens in lab research settings, and then industrial settings.  So typically in a lab, for example my lab, we would test a new type of battery chemistry to 200 charge  discharge cycles, just because the turnover process of how quickly research happens and  how students ent

er and leave labs doesn't allow for a battery to just sit there in a corner and  charge and discharge for a couple of years. So I think there needs to be more talking between  research institutions and then industrial institutions to really bridge that gap in  battery cyclability to test the life cycle of new battery technologies, and I think that's what's  necessary to allow those new post lithium-ion battery technologies to find application in industry. So one of your research interests is com

puter modeling of battery efficiency to help speed up  innovation. Can you tell us more about that and how that works, why that's important? Yes, so battery  research is still unfortunately at a relatively trial and error stage in its scientific journey. Most battery materials that we use currently, and most new battery technologies that are being  developed, come from just trying things out until something works well. So I think there is a lot of  potential in really developing some theoretical

understanding for the physical and chemical  processes that happen within battery cells, and then use that theoretical understanding and  theoretical models to come up with new battery technologies. So my work in batteries combines  both computer modeling and experiment, but a lot of the modeling I do is looking at the chemistry  and the quantum mechanics of individual reactions that happen inside battery cells between the different electrodes and the electrolyte. And what this allows us to do

is to look at the  thermodynamics and the kinetics, which means the energy release of each of those reactions and  the rate at which those reactions happen, and from that understand which materials we expect to  work well, and which materials we don't expect to work well, and also come up with new molecules, new  structures, new battery materials, and then predict their properties before we can manufacture  them and test them in the lab. But to do that, to bridge this theoretical understanding 

with the development of new battery materials, we need to develop a lot of theory  to understand exactly how the atoms and the electrons and the molecular structures interact  inside those battery materials, and this is not a very easy task. There's also a lot of modeling  happening investigating how quickly molecules transport themselves inside a battery cell, as for  example ions move from the anode to the cathode during battery discharge. And there are also a  lot of people doing statistical

modeling and things like machine learning to combine a lot  of theoretical and experimental results that come from different studies and try to come up  with new battery technologies that might perform well. And I think there is a lot of collaboration  to be done between more fundamental theoretical research like my own and more statistical machine  learning research in coming up with new battery materials. Like, for instance, people who do  machine learning for battery materials can look at all

the evidence, all the data, that exists  in literature, come up with new materials that might perform better than what's already there, and then people who have similar background to me can study what the chemical reactions  would be of those newly proposed materials and see if they are going to indeed be better  performing than what we have already. So if I understand it correctly, it sounds like using  computer models can kind of simulate the trial and error tests that you would normally do 

in the lab and predict the highest likelihood of success so that you can sort of jump ahead to  just testing those high likelihood combinations, or what have you, and thus speed up, dramatically  speed up, your progression of finding the right method of of creating new battery technology  that has the energy density or energy efficiency, etc., that you're looking for. Is that right? That's right, that's right, yes. Considering that researchers like yourself are starting to use this kind of compu

ter modeling for battery technology – similar to I think what people are  using in the biotechnology space, I guess. Yes. How much faster do you think battery technology  innovation is going to start happening due to this kind of use of computer modeling?  I expect to see a significant acceleration in battery research. To give you an example,   you can think of battery research now to where internal combustion engine research was in the 80s,  for example. You know, we we knew combustion, up to t

he 1960s and 70s, we knew combustion mostly  empirically. There were some physical laws developed, but a lot more happened from the 80s  onwards, understanding both the chemical reactions that happen in internal combustion engines, both  car engines and jet engines for planes, the the mechanisms by which pollutants and emissions  are generated, or the optimization of fuels for engines. So in the same way that we saw a  a fairly rapid acceleration in the performance of internal combustion engines

in the past 40 years, I  think that's where we are now at the beginning of in the in the battery world. Wow, well that sounds  very hopeful. I hope so too. We'll see. You mentioned though that political will is really important.  Why is political will very important in battery technology and its applications, rather than  simply the progression of the technology? It's both for funding the right research programs  that will allow the development of new battery technologies, but it's also an ince

ntive to ramp  up production and to ramp up production of less costly battery technologies than lithium-ion for  energy storage. So political incentive I think is necessary to encourage a lot of people to work  towards making cheap and efficient batteries that can be used in large scales. So that's in  terms of research funding and initial subsidies to encourage this kind of change over to  new battery technologies that are cleaner, cheaper, and more scalable? Yes, that's right. But if if they'

re already cleaner, and cheaper, and more scalable, why would subsidies be necessary? Well, we still need to do some work to improve their performance of those cleaner  and cheaper battery technologies, and that's where a lot of research funding can be useful for.  But we also need political incentive to encourage this transition to a greener energy  future, both by increasing renewable energy resource power generation, and incentives,  subsidies, to build large energy storage facilities, once w

e can see that we can produce enough  renewable energy that storage is useful and necessary. So is that because even  as renewable and battery storage of renewable electric energy becomes more and more efficient  and competitive with dirtier sources, that new installation cost is still higher than competing  with an existing legacy installation that doesn't doesn't need to be newly constructed? Is  that the difference? Yes, that's right that's important as well. There's a lot of there are  so ma

ny coal and gas plants right now and it's a lot cheaper to keep those running than to to  install a lot of solar panels and wind turbines. So where there's no cost benefit, political  incentive is necessary in my opinion. I guess when we're talking about energy installation,  we're talking about like installation cost, and then annual production cost, right, and that  varies widely depending on different types of energy? Yeah. And from what I understand  solar and wind are already very competiti

ve with traditional dirty energy production,  maybe even cheaper to run. I guess we're talking in terms of like the cost of adding new battery facilities as an added cost to store more  renewables beyond that kind of 50% plus threshold in the energy mix, as like an additional  cost to renewables. If you're going to like 90% renewable energy production  for a country, then you're starting to talk about battery installations and the added cost of the  battery facilities added on to the wind and so

lar installation cost, right? That's right, but also, as you said, solar, the installation of solar panels or wind tubines, might be competitive  with respect to setting up a new gas power plant but they're definitely more expensive than  keeping the current gas plants running, right. That infrastructure is already there to a great  extent, and just stopping it and having those power plants go to waste also has a a big cost,  so yeah it's a combination of cost for the installation of renewable e

nergy production  and also storage. And there's also a significant cost in the maintenance of solar panels in  particular, which is it's a lot more than the maintenance of traditional combustion-based  power plants. What is the maintenance of solar panels? What kind of maintenance has to happen? So  solar panels first of all don't last forever. They need to be replaced at some point. But the other big problem with solar panels is that as dust or debris accumulate on the solar panel  surface, th

en the sunlight cannot penetrate as efficiently, so there is maintenance  necessary to keep them running at their maximum capacity. So I understand that Denmark produced  75% of its electricity in 2022 from renewable electric production and hopes to produce, or plans  to produce, 100% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030. How is that possible if  they're not using large-scale battery storage? Does that just mean that they're using the not  so clean energy from their neighbori

ng countries when they need more energy to fill the gap? Or  how is that possible? So a lot of that energy might actually come from non-intermittent forms of  renewable resources, like geothermal or tidal energy production, or maybe hydroelectric. So I'm  not entirely sure what the grid model is in Denmark right now, but in most parts  of the world, solar and wind are the two resources that make the most sense. And for those cases in  particular, energy storage is really necessary. Okay, before

we get to some personal questions,  while I was preparing for this interview, I may have gone a little too far down a YouTube rabbit hole  on the future battery technology, but I have to ask you what is a quantum battery? So a quantum  battery is a very new far-fetched idea of using quantum entanglement to charge batteries  extremely fast. Those batteries would would work with photons. That's what I understand. And they  would take advantage of quantum entanglement to really change the whole sta

te of the battery from  discharged to charged extremely fast. However, I think the physical limitations of those batteries  is that they can only work at extremely, extremely low temperatures. So they need to be cooled  down to, say, single-digit Kelvin temperatures. So I don't see how they can find large scale  application, but who knows. I'm excited to see what happens in that area. Oh, okay. One more question. What  is a super battery? So this is another very new term. So my understanding is

that super  batteries stand in between electrochemical batteries – so normal batteries that we've been  talking about – and super capacitors. Capacitors are just devices that store electrostatic energy. So  they consist typically of two plates. One plate is charged positively with a very very high positive  charge. The other one is charged negatively with a very large negative charge. And the advantage of  of capacitors, or super capacitors, is that they can discharge very fast. So I think a sup

er battery,  it's unclear exactly how they work, but they're either a combination of those two technologies,  where you, for instance, charge a capacitor or super capacitor very fast and then use that to  more slowly charge a battery, or some type of hybrid system is made where electrostatic energy  is converted into chemical energy through some electrochemical process, or some electrochemical  process keeps separated charge between a positive plate and a negative plate so they aim to be  in tha

t gray zone between batteries and super capacitors where they're expected to charge really  really fast, but also be able to be storable and hold that energy for a while. Again, we  have to wait and see what developments come up in that field. Nick, before we move on to the bonus  round, I just want to ask you some personal and career questions. Tell us a little about your  personal and career background, and how did you get to where you are today? I studied mechanical and  aerospace engineering

in the UK, in Cambridge. So that's where I fell in love with engineering,  and with thermodynamics, which is what I've been doing ever since, and then I came to California,  to Stanford University, for my PhD, where I did my PhD in mechanical engineering, and now I recently  started working as a post-doctoral researcher, also at Stanford. So I've been splitting my time kind of  between battery research and propulsion research. I enjoy both. I think there's great developments  in both, and I'm e

xcited to see what the future holds for both of those fields. Do you want to  tell us just a little bit more about what you work on? What you've worked on in your PhD, and now  what you work on in your lab as a postdoc? Yes, so throughout my PhD I did some work for   carbon nanomaterials and carbon emissions from combustion. So I was looking at the properties  of very small carbon nanoparticles through mostly computational means but the majority of my  research for my PhD and the topic of my the

sis was doing quantum chemistry, a quantum chemistry  study, for alkali-sulfur batteries, and, with some experimental collaborators from Dartmouth, we  managed to develop a new type of lithium-sulfur battery that performs a lot better than  lithium-sulfur batteries developed previously. Now, as part of my postdoc work, I am doing  some more computational work for detonation engines. So looking at the interaction of detonation  waves with fuel within those detonation engines. And I am starting wi

th some colleagues of mine  some experiments for new battery systems. So looking at potassium-sulfur batteries, but also  looking at some battery-propellant hybrid systems to hopefully improve the future of  batteries for storage and for transportation, and propulsion as well. Was there anything unexpected  about your career path? Well, doing battery research was unexpected. So during my masters in the UK,  I did research on carbon nanomaterials. When I came to Stanford, I started my PhD doing m

ostly research  for carbon nanomaterials for combustion, and combustion synthesized materials. But there  was a small battery program within my lab, and then I took over it in kind of the second half  of my PhD, and that became the main area of interest for me. So after my PhD, this battery  work in our lab has expanded quite a lot. So that was something definitely unexpected in my  career path. Did that happen because you had an interest in battery technology, or was that sort of  like a random

occurrence in your lab that then had the effect of opening up a whole new career  pathway for you? There was, there was some fairly limited, but important, battery research  in my lab, and I was interested in that area. I was interested in battery research. So after  me putting, you know, most of my research focus on this, we managed to answer a lot of questions,  and also ask a whole new set of questions that need answering. So that's how that area in my lab  expanded. Do you feel like battery

research is what you're excited to spend the rest of your career  working on? Yes, definitely. I always, in the way that I'm combining battery and propulsion research  right now, I hope to do that in the future as well. Because I think there's a lot of interesting  physics to be learned, and a lot of interesting engineering to be done in both, and also in  how those two work together. So, yeah I hope to continue doing battery research, and also  continue my propulsion and combustion research as

 well. Let's get into the bonus round. Are you ready?  Okay, I'm ready. What drives and motivates you? Learning something new, that's something  that motivates me. And what excites and inspires you? New scientific developments excite me,  but I'm also excited by, I'm mostly excited about using science to solve real problems.  What's something about you that most people wouldn't expect? I really like to cook.  That's something that people maybe don't expect when when I mention it. And  I love to

bake. And I try to limit how many desserts I make, just so I can limit  how many desserts I eat. But, yeah, I really enjoy doing that. What's  some advice you would give your younger self? I would tell my younger self to  just work on whatever I'm interested in. I think every scientific pursuit has merit, and  a lot of interesting applications, and rather than trying to think about,  you know, what can be most useful, what can be most beneficial to me, I would tell myself to just  go for it and

work on whatever I find interesting, and I'm bound to find some interesting  application for it, and something in it that I enjoy. What's the sort of reason or thinking behind  that advice? I think, well, at least being in an academic environment for a few years, I see a lot  of trends coming and going, and very often the things with the most hype at the moment also have  the shortest lifespan. So I think for someone interested in academia like me, I think working  on something with a long-term

goal, or a long-term, you know, vision, and something that has a lot  of interesting scientific developments to offer, is what's going to be most beneficial in the long  run, both for me and my own career, but also for the scientific community and society overall. All  right, last question. Okay. When, you're gone from this earth what would you like to be remembered  for? Well, of course I hope to have some scientific contribution that I will remembered for,  but I hope that my work scientifical

ly, but also as a mentor, as an educator, will enable the  next generation of engineers and scientists to do, you know, much more impressive and interesting  and important things than what I will do in my career. So yeah I hope to be remembered as a good educator, as a good teacher, and as someone who allowed people  to do what they want, and what they think is important. I guess that all science, and much of  our human cultural progress, is on the shoulders of the people who came before. Right,

exactly, yeah.  All right, well, it's been really great to have you on the show. Thank you so much. Thank you  so much Sasha. I had a great time talking with you.