The Electric Flash Analysis: A Surprising, Potent New Battery Would Marry the Old and the New
Leading battery researchers are talking up the idea of a Goldilocks battery that combines one of the most exotic electrodes under commercial development with one of the cheapest. The objective: a dirt-cheap battery that will take an electric vehicle more than 300 miles on a charge, and thus attract a broad swath of mass-market EV buyers.
The idea is to pair an inexpensive lithium-iron-phosphate cathode—an increasingly popular formulation about which I have been writing quite a bit—with a next-generation, pure lithium-metal anode. But while probably making for a blockbuster pairing, the combination, if it gained commercial favor, would be yet another blow to the establishment nickel-dominant batteries of the new electric age, along with billions of dollars of multi-year investment plans made around them.
For the last decade, battery-makers have ordinarily twinned LFP with an equally cheap graphite anode, sufficient for an EV able to go moderate distances. As for lithium metal, which has yet to be commercialized but has extremely high theoretical energy density, it is typically thought of as belonging with a relatively expensive cathode like nickel-manganese-cobalt 811. Such a battery could theoretically be configured to go 400 and even 500 miles on a charge.
Until now, a marriage of the two very different classes of battery hasn’t generally been discussed—in cuisine terms, think of it like putting bearnaise on a hamburger, a notion that simply doesn’t generally occur. But Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT professor and an LFP pioneer, told me he foresees the LFP-metallic lithium combination becoming a scaled-up feature of EV batteries by the middle of the decade, when automakers plan to start to inundate the market with EVs.
Chiang made the remarks last week when he was my guest for The Electric’s first monthly Live Chat. The topic of our discussion was “The New Iron Age.” In the late oughts and the early part of the last decade, Chiang was co-founder of probably the hottest battery startup of the time—A123 Systems, which introduced LFP into the U.S. market. But the company was forced into bankruptcy in 2012, its assets were largely sold to China’s Wanxiang Group, and LFP vanished as an EV battery in the U.S. Taking its place was NMC and its sister formulation, nickel-manganese-aluminum, which together ruled the rest of the decade, equipping most Teslas and all EVs made by GM, Ford and virtually all the other major automakers.
It has been presumed that NMC and NCA will continue their EV dominance this decade and beyond. But, under the radar, LFP has taken off in China, whose battery makers improved its performance. Now, LFP is challenging NMC and NCA’s hold on the global EV market, with the potential for competing right up to the edge of ultra-premium vehicles.
Meanwhile lithium-metal startups like QuantumScape have been scaling up and plan to commercialize in the second half of the decade or later. It’s been assumed that QuantumScape’s anode would be used in electric sports cars and luxury vehicles with ultra-long range.
But last month, QuantumScape surprisingly said it was testing its solid-state cells with LFP. This was QuantumScape appearing to jump on the LFP bandwagon by showing that, if you twinned its anode with LFP, you would get NMC-level performance. “A lithium-metal anode is a natural fit for a lower voltage cathode chemistry like LFP, which would otherwise need thick conventional anodes to deliver high energy,” QuantumScape said.
Such a configuration would eat even further into the luxury segment presumed to be the province of NMC and NCA. But Chiang said one shouldn’t be surprised that LFP is back and finding its way into such crannies. “One might ask the question not of why we are going away from nickel,” he said, “but why we didn’t embrace iron from the beginning.”
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About Steve LeVine
Steve LeVine is editor of The Electric. Previously, he worked at Axios, Quartz and Medium, and before that The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He is the author of The Powerhouse: America, China and the Great Battery War, and is on Twitter @stevelevine
