The Battery Everyone Uses Is The One They'd Never Build | EnerVenue x HiNa | WTF are Batteries?
Business
I went to Dalian with a selfish question. I run a fund that invests in energy transition, and I've come to think energy isn't the problem moving it and storing it is. So I sat down with Henning Rath, who runs EnerVenue out of Silicon Valley and is building his first gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, who runs HiNa Battery, a sodium-ion company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's now ten years old with 600 people and a gigawatt line. I told them I don't know anything about batteries and asked them to teach me. We started at what a cell even is, went through why the entire industry standardised on LFP and what a thermal runaway actually does, and then Henning told me something I hadn't heard: the world had over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone. I asked whether I should start an electric car company or a battery company when I get home. Both said battery and Henning was blunt about it: don't build anything that needs rare earth. Fifty million dollars to start. We got into nickel-hydrogen at 30,000 cycles, sodium carbonate at a tenth of what lithium carbonate costs, why solid state is still at level four out of nine, and the idea I keep coming back to that your car sits idle 98% of the time with a battery and a stack of chips doing nothing, and there's a version of this where every parked car is a micro data center.
00:00 Introduction
06:45 China's bet on chemistries beyond lithium
12:14 Cell chemistry and the trade-offs it forces
17:15 Thermal runaway and the limits of LFP
22:44 Production quality and how long a battery lasts
27:07 Why China won the electric car
33:54 Decoupling a battery business from lithium and rare earths
38:50 Sodium's cost advantage and its energy density ceiling
43:51 Recycling nickel and renting the metal
48:17 Where generation, storage and demand should sit
54:05 Decentralization and the car as a grid battery
1:00:19 Three super cycles and AI's power demand
1:05:30 Automation, jobs and China's social contract
Footage Courtesy: World Economic Forum (WEF) CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/amnc26_summer_davos_highlights/
Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue
- Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa Battery
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/
Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas
Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast
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