But the goal, according to CEO Doug Campbell, is to start delivering cells to car makers like BMW and Ford for automotive testing by the end of the year. That’s a trickle compared with the millions of cells produced each year by gigafactories, and getting there will still take months of finessing tools and processes.
#All solid state battery full#
At full capacity, it will produce 300 cells per week, or about 15,000 per year. In recent weeks, Solid Power, among the more lavishly funded of those solid-state companies, has fired up a pilot line in Colorado that it hopes will address that question. There’s still a ways to go until those cells are road-ready, but progress is setting up the next challenge: Once you’ve built a good-enough battery under painstaking lab conditions, how do you build millions of them quickly? “These companies are going to have to have a massive mindset change, going from being R&D companies to manufacturing companies,” says Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. Little battery cells that once sputtered after being charged are growing up into bigger ones that go much longer. In recent months, startups working on solid-state batteries have made steady progress towards those goals. Getting all that right in one go is among the hardest questions in materials science. A solid-state battery not only needs to send you farther down the road on each charge, it also has to juice up quickly and work in all sorts of weather.
But the trick lies in making that switch while preserving all the other qualities a battery should have.
A perfect fix would be replacing that liquid with a solid-ideally one that’s light and airy. But it’s also cumbersome, adding weight and bulk that limit how far electric vehicles can go on a charge-on top of which, it can catch fire when a battery shorts. This electrolyte is key to how batteries work, shuttling ions from one end of the cell to the other. For decades, scientists have wondered what to do with the liquid inside a lithium-ion battery.
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