In 2003, Gene Berdichevsky heard about a group of entrepreneurs who were planning to build electric sports cars for the US market. He was an undergraduate at Stanford University, and he’d become fascinated by the energy industry – he’d been building lightweight solar-powered cars that ran on lithium-ion batteries and racing them across the country.
Berdichevsky had calculated that the energy density of lithium-ion made it possible to build real cars that could go almost 500km on a single charge, and had even written a business plan based on this idea. Six months later, he dropped out of Stanford to join those entrepreneurs and became Tesla’s seventh employee.
But the more time he spent at the company, the more frustrated he got with the state of the battery industry. “By today, the whole world should have been electric,” he says. But performance was flat-lining, price declines were slowing down – and new battery technologies that promised to replace lithium-ion were still decades away.
Berdichevsky left Tesla and went back to Stanford to study for a masters in materials science, aiming to explore potential solutions. But he realised that any new technology would need to slot into existing manufacturing processes if it was going to catch on – the solar industry offered a cautionary tale, where incremental improvements and price drops in incumbent silicon-based solar drove innovators out of business. The answer, he decided, wasn’t to replace lithium-ion but to make it better.
In 2011, he founded Sila Nanotechnologies with Georgia Tech engineering professor Gleb Yushin and Tesla colleague Alex Jacobs. The company is aiming to make lithium-ion up to 50 per cent better by replacing the anode – one of the four key components of batteries, which also have a cathode, a separator and an electrolyte. (Lithium ions shuttle from anode to cathode through the electrolyte when a battery is used, and in the opposite direction when it’s charged).
The anode is usually made of graphite, but Sila has created one composed primarily of nano-engineered silicon, which can hold about 24 times as much lithium without swelling and degrading, so a battery of the same size can hold a lot more power. This will be vital for decarbonising freight and aviation. “This 50 per cent improvement we’re delivering, absolutely it will enable long-haul trucking, it will enable electric flight,” Berdichevsky says (although he says electric flight will probably only ever be viable for short regional trips).
Sila is working with BMW and Daimler on electric vehicles, and with other partners on consumer devices to be announced later this year. When products hit the market (“within six months,” Berdichevsky says), they’ll represent the biggest change in battery technology since the early 1990s, when lithium and cobalt-based batteries first reached consumers in the Sony Walkman.
One of the concerns about lithium-ion is the negative impact of lithium and cobalt extraction on communities and the environment in South America, Asia and Africa. That – and rising lithium prices – has been one of the drivers behind the bevy of new energy storage technologies being touted, such as lithium-sulphur, aluminium-ion and carbon-based supercapacitors.
But lithium is one of the smallest and lightest elements. “Those chemical bonds are some of the strongest you can make per unit of weight and volume,” Berdichevsky says. “From a scientific standpoint it’s hard to see what that replacement is.” And it’s not fundamentally scarce, he argues. You can extract it from sea water if you need to.
Sila’s strategy of improving the incumbent technology is certainly paying off on the investment side – it recently raised $600m to finance a new production line, and although the company has no plans to build its own batteries, in the coming years it will build a plant capable of providing anode materials for the power cells of a million vehicles, or a billion consumer devices.
By focusing on just one part of the technology rather than trying to re-invent the whole battery, Sila has been able to bring improved energy storage products to the market now, and in a way that can be integrated into existing production lines, while other technologies are still years away. Further improvements to the other parts of the battery may squeeze even more juice out of lithium-ion further down the line, and get us to where we need to be to tackle climate change. “It’s a revolution in parts,” Berdichevsky says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
