Solid State Energy Storage: Game-Changing Technology for the 21st Century

Critical, imminent changes in the world energy portfolio have amplified pressure on development of advanced energy storage technology, for the grid, automotive and consumer electronics sectors. Technology advances are not only required to enable the largest entry of people to the middle classes in human history, but also to avert disastrous consequences of irrevocable climate change and environmental harm. Present Li-ion batteries (LiB), with a total addressable market of over $12B, expected to grow to over $23B in the next four years, cannot meet these burgeoning needs, for reasons of cost, performance and safety.

Present manufacturers of the incumbent technology all employ liquid electrolytes and lamination processing in highly conserved plant designs, producing cells that are not differentiated in cost, performance or safety. Additionally, lamination processing of LiBs has enormous built in costs, including up to two months' of careful, pre-processing time for cells before they can be shipped to customers, comprising tremendous work-in-process (WIP) and additional, unremovable process cost and time. These formation and aging costs, coupled with limitations in construction due to lamination, physical limits of transport and mechanics and limited ability to integrate new materials into the existing manufacturing approach, will severely limit gains in performance and safety in this generation of technology. The incumbent technology further requires massive downstream costs to assure the safety of these liquid-based systems, in the form of safety and containment systems. Examination of a mapping of the available materials against their probable effect on cell properties yields a simple conclusion: the incumbent technology benefits have essentially reached their limit, as established holistically by laboratory developments, optimization simulations, and recent commercially reported properties.

Solid state battery technology, though offering a very different development path enabling breakthrough performance and safety, has been relegated to the realm of R&D due to intrinsically high cost, unscalable manufacturing processes that result in high cell cost. Recently, however, Sakti3, a University spinout founded by researchers and engineers with decades of experience in battery research and thin film and other manufacturing, developed an approach for production of cells which offers all of the benefits of the theoretically highest energy density materials available. These massively replicable, cheap and reliable production methods enable cell manufacturing in a single, unified line and produce product that is ready to ship.

Integration of new, environmentally benign energy generation technologies will require improved energy storage both for regulation of load, and for storage of solar and wind power. Non emissive automobiles and use of existing electrical power grids to power them, require safe, onboard traction storage systems. And finally, the democratization of information and the use of mobile devices as the primary, and often the only, connectivity to the internet and commerce, requires safe, high energy density storage technology be available to the consumer. We discuss our vision for technology deployment and future product development using solid state processing of energy storage technology and integration into existing and new infrastructures.

Speaker: Ann Marie Sastry, Sakti3 Inc.