Replay: Battery Storage and How to Make It Better | With Shirley Meng

This is a replay of our conversation with Dr. Shirley Meng from the University of Chicago on battery storage. It's one of our favourite deep dives because batteries touch everything from EV range anxiety to grid scale storage, and even the whole critical minerals conversation.

When we recorded this in May 2024, Shirley was predicting real solid state battery platforms by 2027 or 2028, and here we are getting close to that window, so it's worth listening again with that timeline in mind. 

The fights over re-shoring battery manufacturing, the US-China race, the economics of lithium versus sodium, all of it is just as live today as it was then, or maybe even more so.

Episode page and show notes.

About Our Guest:

Dr. Y. Shirley Meng is a Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She serves as the Chief Scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Meng is the principal investigator of the research group - Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC), that was established at University of California San Diego since 2009. She held the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at University of California San Diego (UCSD) from 2017-2022.

Follow us on:
LinkedIn
Bluesky
X/Twitter
Instagram

Energy vs Climate relies on the support of our generous listeners
Donate to keep Energy vs Climate going

Produced by Bespoke Podcasts

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

[00:00:00] Ed Whittingham: Hey everyone, it's Ed here. While EvC is on break pending the start of our new season later on in September, we're bringing you some of our most popular episodes from the past. We're replaying our conversation with Dr. Shirley Meng from the University of Chicago on battery storage. This was one of my favorite deep dives because batteries touch everything from EV range anxiety to grid scale storage, and even the whole critical minerals conversation.

When we recorded this in May 2024, Shirley was predicting real solid state battery platforms by 2027 or 2028, and here we are getting close to that window, so it's worth listening again with that timeline in mind. The fights over reshoring battery manufacturing, the US-China race, the economics of lithium versus sodium, all of it is just as live today as it was then, or maybe even more so.

So here's Shirley Meng walking us through why we're going to need a whole lot more batteries and how we get there. Happy listening.

Hi, I'm Ed Whittingham, and you're listening to Energy vs Climate, the show where my co-hosts David Keith, Sara Hastings-Simon, and I debate today's energy challenges, highlighting the Canadian context. On May 7th, we recorded a live webinar with Dr. Shirley Meng, a professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago, and the chief scientist at the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science.

We called the show Fully Charged: Battery Storage and How to Make It Better. This is the first time we've gone deep on energy storage of any kind on EvC, but given the importance of scaling storage solutions, I suspect it won't be the last. We had a great conversation with Shirley, and I hope you'll enjoy.

Now, here's the show. So Shirley, let's get to it You know, I think my first experience with batteries I really remember was plugging D-cell batteries into my first ghetto blaster, you know, a stereo as a kid, so I could walk around town with it on my shoulder blasting The Police or AC/DC or whatever it was.

But that is just one application. Tell us about the battery types that you work on, the ones that are used for energy storage. What are those types specifically? 

[00:02:15] Shirley Meng: My, uh, PhD started with, uh, trying to find a replacement of, uh, cobalt in lithium-ion batteries, um, ear-in early 2000. So my primary research focus is on lithium-ion batteries, how to make them last longer and be more powerful.

Particularly recent ten years, we are all looking at beyond the lithium-ion battery technologies such as lithium metal batteries, uh, sodium-ion batteries, and then solid-state batteries. Very exciting. I think we will have variety of choices for people, uh, who are interested in getting mobile energies, uh, for different applications.

I think, you know, we talked about electric vehicles, grids, and I think people should also think about, uh, possibly flying cars. I certainly hope that, uh, in my lifetime, flying cars will be a reality because of the electrification. You know, depend on what applications we will design the batteries that will enable the applications.

[00:03:16] Ed Whittingham: I personally underestimate prevalence of batteries in our society, and so you have said we need batteries, lots of them. So given the challenges we have with electrifying our economies and decarbonization, what's the magnitude of the increase of capacity that we need? Is this a 10X increase globally? Is this 100X?

Like, can, can, can you put a quantum to it for us? 

[00:03:36] Shirley Meng: At the moment, there's only two battery technologies that actually reach the terawatt-hour scale. Terawatt-hour is a unit that battery people use. It's like a jargon, but if I do it for the chemist and the physicist, it's basically petajoule. So only in the last 200-plus years of human histories, only two battery technologies actually meet that petajoule scale that really matters for us.

So when we think about the electrification or deep decarbonization

of our economy, we are anticipating we will need to have ten times more energy storage. But we only need to do about one decade or two decades because batteries can be designed as infrastructure where we will be able to recycle and reuse all the elements that we have mined from the ground. So I hope I clarify this.

Even though we will need 100 times more batteries, however, if we produce them 10 times more in the next decade, we will be able to complete the mission of having enough energy storage capacities for the use of renewables. We promise you 100% recyclable. We will make all the batteries recyclable, just like lead-acid batteries.

All lithium-ion batteries will be recyclable. All the future battery technology will be recyclable 

[00:05:02] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, I'm glad you raised that. I think we'll get to it a bit later on, recyclability and also the lifespan of batteries. It's a barrier for some in the marketplace, whether it be an EV or home-based energy source system.

If you think, "I'm gonna spend all this money, put a big battery pack in my garage, and then it's gonna die in eight to 10 years." And then you think of where that battery's gonna end up. So we'll get there, but let's, let's talk about a couple of the big drivers of demand for new battery capacity, and specifically EVs and grid-scale energy stor- uh, storage.

But EV success will rely on the success of the batteries that power them, and we need to increase, obviously, the battery capacity just as EVs have greater and greater market penetration. What's the, the bottleneck with EV batteries particularly? Is this a case we just need to ask Elon Musk to go and build a bunch new, a bunch of new gigafactories?

[00:05:53] Shirley Meng: First of all, I think it, uh, is the engineers that building the gigafactories, not Elon. He, uh, is a good businessperson who enabled that. The second of all, I would say that the major bottleneck, in my opinion, uh, I think there's three major bottlenecks that we have to address. The first one is really to think about the affordability.

Um, I think let's be honest that the price of the EV still not at the level where a lot of people who can recognize EV is affordable choice. The reason being that a lot of the battery production, the lack of varieties in the battery choice. For instance, uh, countries like India, why would we need a 300 miles per drive?

Because if you have been to India, you know you can barely move in the city. However, lithium ion battery should not be the top choices, but we don't have the alternative like sodium ion batteries that probably per charge is only 200 miles or 150 miles. I think the lower price electric vehicle is still very limited, right?

So that's number one bottleneck. The second bottleneck I would say is really about the infrastructure of charging. We were in... David and I probably both experienced the extreme cold in early this winter, that a lot of the Tesla cars couldn't charge on time, and, uh, that is actually infrastructure problem.

It's not the battery problem in per se, because Norway is actually having cold weather, but they were able to handle the situation with really good infrastructure for charging. So that, I think, the second bottleneck, uh, must be resolved. I think the third bottleneck really, uh, for me, the most difficult part is that I do see a concerted effort in the mainstream media that keep emphasizing the downside of the EVs, even though EV is a nascent technologies.

And that constant reminder to the public about the disadvantage of the EV, uh, is not helping. In my opinion, that is a bottleneck. For nascent technologies, there's always troubles and challenges. But we are working on to resolve this. And bottom line is electric vehicle is a more efficient technologies, and in the human history, we always move towards more efficient technologies regardless what's the political situation.

I hope I clarify these three bottlenecks for me that all of us have to solve them from the different angles, you know. And it cannot be only solved by technologists, the scientist like me. Uh, we need everybody's hands on deck to resolve those bottlenecks. 

[00:08:26] Ed Whittingham: Thank you. That's great clarification. And to go back just to give a shout-out to an episode that we did, our last formal episode with, with all three of us, where we did a deep dive on the recent media emphasis in some quarters of the downsides of EVs.

So let's talk grid-scale energy storage and long-duration storage. Recently, it's been newsworthy. There's a project, the Edwards and Sanborn Solar plus Storage project in California. It's now fully online. It's huge, 875 megawatts DC of solar PV, and I was astounded, 3,287 megawatt hours of battery energy storage system capacity or BESS capacity.

So that's impressive. But why not electrolytic hydrogen or pump hydro storage when we're talking about grid-based power storage? Why this emphasis on batteries? 

[00:09:16] Shirley Meng: All right, so the choices for pump hydro, I just want to emphasize that I grew up in a pump hydro family. My dad, my late dad was a engineer who work on building dam for hydroelectricity in China.

But I want to emphasize that the location for the site, you know, really determines whether the place will be suitable for pump hydro or not. And plus California, you know how precious water is, therefore, I'm sure that option probably for me is not available. I do want to give a shout-out to pump hydro. It is one of the best energy storage solutions that humans have, uh, used over the last few cen- many centuries.

The second option for electrolytic hydrogen, I just want to say with confidence, since I teach thermodynamic classes, to produce hydrogen, maximum sixty percent efficiencies. To use hydrogen in a fuel cell, maximum efficiency sixty percent. So sixty percent times sixty percent give you thirty-six percent.

The round-trip efficiency simply does not make sense compared to batteries, where we have typically round-trip efficiencies over ninety percent. Particularly lithium ion batteries sometimes can be ninety-four, ninety-five percent. So I think the choice that the California state made is very reasonable. Plus all the battery cost is coming down significantly below hundred dollars per kilowatt hour if you actually spread over the cycle lifetime.

So per kilowatt hour storage cost is now coming below ten cents per kilowatt hour. I think we have to do better of course, but we're making progress. So I do think that this project, by choosing batteries as the main storage mechanism, is very reasonable for me. 

[00:11:00] Ed Whittingham: David, so I know that you have looked at long-duration storage as well and done relative comparisons of round-trip efficiencies between the different battery types.

With your esteemed University of Chicago colleague, do you agree? Do you disagree? What are your thoughts? Uh, I think we, we pretty much agree, but I'll, I'll, I'll give some background.

[00:11:17] David Keith: First of all, a-another shout-out in intro to Shirley. Uh, as some listeners may recall, I and Ken Caldeira ran meetings for Bill Gates on energy for about 10 or 15 years, and Shirley was one of the guests on those meetings.

I looked it up Shirley in 2017, so that's a relatively small group of people, and she was the battery superstar that we brought into Bill's office, and she did great. Yeah, I've done a bunch of work on hydro, and I've been, uh, on, on, on storage necessity and this, this electricity system modeling, and I was kind of a skeptic of batteries, but I think I'm probably turning out to be wrong.

But let me give a little bit of information I think is important for users. The issue isn't so much round-trip efficiency. Uh, Shirley's completely right. That's terrible for hydro, and I think that's why hydro won't be an important role for storage. But for these other technologies, the round trip is all pretty high, so that's not the issue.

But the issue is there's really two numbers that matter. One is dollars per kilowatt. That's dollars per peak power the energy storage system can supply. The other one is dollars per kilowatt hour. That's for storage. The, the, the energy storage. So one is power, one is energy. So no question batteries win for power.

But for energy, not so clear, and at least when Hossein Safaei and I and others looked at this, we really thought that in the long run for deep decarbonization, other technologies that had cheaper energy storage costs would end up winning. And, you know, as of today, pumped hydro still dominates batteries by far.

And if you'd asked me five years ago, I would've said batteries will be very important for short duration. Batteries certainly win for cars. Agree with what Shirley said, but I think there's just deep reasons why batteries are gonna take the vehicle market and even flying cars. I agree. But I would've said maybe not for batteries for long-duration storage.

At this point, I'm thinking maybe batteries just chug along, but, but it's important to say they're still a long way away from what looks like maybe the cheapest, very long-duration storage, which are new variants on pumped hydro or compressed air energy storage, adiabatic. Uh, there are a bunch of technologies moving around, and I think it's not clear-cut.

So I guess I'd like to hear Shirley on prospects for getting the dollars per kilowatt hour really low and also on prospects like flow batteries. The great thing about flow batteries is supposed to be that they're mechanically separated, that you have the electrochemistry part that is power, then you have a separate storage that is just a liquid storage that's the energy, and that all seemed great.

But I think what's really interesting is it just isn't turning out to win, and it looks like conventional technologies will take it. 

[00:13:32] Shirley Meng: Yeah. I personally have researched on flow batteries for a few years and, uh, decided to, uh, move on to other solutions. Uh, I think one of the challenges for flow batteries is that when there's a lot of moving parts, the mechanical wear and tear typically make things last less than 10 years And I want to take this opportunity to say that personally, I'm extremely excited with the perspective of solid state batteries because there's simply no liquid, no moving parts at all.

That give us an opportunity to really make the future batteries, uh, last for a century. There is basically no thermodynamic limits about how batteries, how long they can last. And that, I would say, is a different way to kind of tackle the question about the cost for the battery. Of course, David, think about all the companies.

They were all horrified to hear that I said the batteries can last for a century. So, um, I wanted to say that, uh, this dollar per kilowatt hour, uh, challenge, we gladly take it, but we might tackle this problem from a different perspective, and then we may not be fully appreciated by commercial companies.

But I certainly hope that, uh, people who are building infrastructure, architects, you know, governments who are thinking about building roads and, you know, we talked about the national stockpile of petroleum, and please think about the national stockpile of batteries, because if once the scientists crack the problems of we can make batteries last for decades or even century, we can really enable things that previously unthinkable for the batteries, and that naturally lower the cost for the storage.

And I think that's, for me, the most exciting perspective for battery storage. 

[00:15:19] Ed Whittingham: Shirley, I want to pick up on something that you said and about battery types. You said, you know, lithium-ion batteries and lead-acid batteries are the two battery chemistries that can really meet that terawatt per hour s- terawatt hour scale.

And with the new chemistries, just because you can get a novel chemistry to work in a lab, of course, doesn't mean that you're gonna be able to scale it up to, you know, even gigawatt per year of new capacity. And I've heard, you know, scientists saying, "Hey, this chemistry passes electrons better," but then how do you take that and produce them at scale without requiring ten to 15 years from desktop to factory?

And I want to throw to Sara because, Sara, you've looked at that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the commercial... the, the desktop to commercialization challenges. And this is something that we deal with on EvC all the time with people coming in with novel new energy technology pathways, and it's like, great, but then how do you get to that massive deployment and timeframe that we need given the electrification and decarbonization challenges?

Over to you, Sara. 

[00:16:15] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, and I mean, I think about, in particular, the challenge of, and, and I think Shirley has more to say probably on the process of really going from benchtop to, to kind of commercial scale, but one of the challenges there on the commercial side is what are you competing against, right?

And we're now in a world where lithium ion 4, as you were mentioning, Ed, you know, we were willing to pay quite a lot of money for lithium-ion batteries for our cell phones and for our computers because we didn't need such large ones, and they were providing a service that, you know, we sort of, we the collective, you know, economy, was willing to pay a fair amount of money for, right?

That having a mobile phone that lasts a certain amount of time or having a, a laptop battery that you can use, um, you know, untethered from the wall. It's not understated to say that that has played a big role in, in really enabling, um, sort of lithium-ion batteries to move ahead and then end up kind of outperforming made of B when it comes to things like EV and grid scale storage to have that head start because anything that comes in, you're not starting sort of the race from the beginning where both technologies were, you know, nascent and you, you could maybe even pick a, a, a different winner perhaps if you had started from the same point.

But you're having to start any new battery chemistry against a technology that has already had quite some time to, to develop and commercialize. You know, I don't think that means that, that we won't get other technologies coming out. But I do think that lithium ion now You know, when I think about sort of constraints and, and the degree to which lithium availability, you know, is or isn't really a, a constraint to scaling, there's a lot of ways where all the moving parts of energy transition, I think also change the game there too, right?

One of the big factors that goes into kind of the underlying price of metals and minerals, so I'm not talking about, you know, what we've seen, the dramatic fluctuations, of course, with rising lithium prices in recent years as you have sort of a, a spike in demand and, and supply has to catch up. But sort of the fundamental cost drivers of producing metals and minerals, a big piece of that is really the cost of the energy that it takes to get them out of the ground and to process them.

And so as you go through an energy transition where you potentially lower the sort of cost of energy on the bulk side, when you think about low-cost sources like renewables, there can be a bit of a feedback loop to, you know, lower costs of energy ultimately means the potential for lower costs of, of resources like the lithium that you need to, to produce those batteries.

And so I do think we're sort of in a very different world now, and I actually just saw this morning, IEA, International Energy Agency, has a new report out on the advanced clean technology manufacturing status. And in that report, um, you know, solar, which has been a few years ahead, I guess of, of lithium, uh, of batteries, is already at a stage where the output capacity, the manufacturing capacity is at a level that's basically needed to get to a twenty-thirty net zero scenario deployment.

So what we would need to be prepared to build in twenty-thirty to be on a net zero pathway, and battery use now is at the stage where essentially, if you look at the existing manufacturing capacity plus the announced, and not just announced like we're gonna build it, but really committed, announced manufacturing capacity, it's basically, you know, just a, just a hair below what's needed for twenty-thirty.

So things are moving, I think, very quickly in that space. 

[00:19:37] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And for things to move quickly, just with batteries generally, we, we don't have to, 'cause you mentioned as a, as a bottleneck, Shirley, that we don't have to entirely wholesale build new infrastructure, but we can build upon the existing infrastructure that we have.

So I think of not just lithium ion and lead acid, but sodium batteries, metal air batteries, solid state batteries, or even lithium iron phosphate batteries. To what degree, Shirley, can we use the existing infrastructure that's been designed specifically for lithium ion batteries? 

[00:20:07] Shirley Meng: So there's a few things that, uh, I would like to take the opportunity to clarify.

The first of all is that the battery technologies never compete with each other. Never, ever think about that lithium-ion batteries will be replaced. It will not be. All right, so lead-acid batteries is over 160 years. Um, it was invented the 1860s. It took the humans about 100 years to scale it to terawatt-hour.

Lithium-ion batteries was first commercialized in the 1990s and took us 30 years to go to terawatt-hour. So rest assured, okay- Don't worry that we will figure out to do the next, uh, battery technology to terawatt hour scales with a shorter time, precisely because that the lot of the technology accumulations of know-hows and best practices and things like that could be utilized.

So sodium ion batteries is one of those candidates that you will not need a major significant reinvention of the gigafactory infrastructure to build the sodium batteries. In fact, China is already leading the way. Then lithium iron phosphate is actually a type of lithium ion batteries, and completely use the same infrastructure to go for gigawatt hour or terawatt hour scales.

So I do think that we have a good learning experience, right? So really think about how it is possible. You know, I put the challenge out to our colleagues, can we do sodium ion batteries to terawatt hour within decade? And many think it is impossible because of the challenge with mining. So Sara, you're absolutely right.

The way how we mine, uh, minerals, the way how we, uh, you know, have globalized the entire supply chain and the, the carbon footprint that comes with this global supply chain, and then eventually how we manufacture the batteries. Uh, who says the current gigawatt factory is the best? In fact, Tesla, Elon said in 2019 about the whole dry process will completely revolutionize the manufacturing process, shorten the steps, lower the carbon footprint, lower the cost.

And we're not there yet because there were a lot of doubts, a lot of difficulties that we have to, uh, overcome. Um, so that I think, uh, are really important for all of us to realize that the battery technologies, new types will enrich the variety and the, the choices that people will have for battery technology.

The second important thing I would say, IEA reports, I think that, uh, the 200 terawatt hour or 300 terawatt hour total amount of battery, uh, needs were not clearly reflected in the IEA reports because that, uh, the definition of net zero for many places are quite different. I, I have to say that, uh, I learned a lot from IEA reports.

For scientists, the estimate of, you know, in United States, all of us consume 10,000 kilowatt hour or more than that, 11,000 kilowatt hour per year. And I'm thinking more about how we meet that demand and to meet that quality of life that we provide the amount of energy in green electrons. And battery itself is not a renewable.

We really don't care if the electrons comes from the fossil fuel source or from the renewable source. What we provide is the ability for people to have this flexibility. So some countries will move towards renewables faster, some countries might lag behind, but we want to make sure that the infrastructure is there for countries who are ready to transit.

We are part of the energy transition network. We are the bricks. We're the, we're the foundations for that transition to happen, and I think every country have to invest in the infrastructure if you want that transition to happen. And I cannot predict, uh, different countries when the transition precisely will happen, but I think many countries won't be able to do it in 2030.

It's quite clear, regardless what the politician says, that we will have to have a longer view. You know, maybe by 2050, many industrialized countries will be able to do energy transition, uh, and I hope we-- by that time we have enough batteries to actually enable that transition. 

[00:24:26] Ed Whittingham: Shirley, I want to pick up on something that you just said that every country needs to invest in, in that battery infrastructure, and I want to talk about battery cells in particular and some of the geopolitics around it.

You know, almost all the battery cells in the world are coming from Asia. You know, no one in North America is producing lithium in the quantity that is need. There's a Canadian company that's called First Phosphate that's doing some manufacturing. What I often hear from battery proponents in North America that, you know, we want to restore manufacturing capacity here, we want to reshore manufacturing.

Like, and I hear the same thing about renewables components. We want to reshore it here in North America. We want to take the best techniques that come from Asia, bring them here, add in our Canadian ingenuity or our American ingenuity, work with our companies that are already leading, whether it be Rockwell or Siemens or Johnson Controls or whomever, and then we're gonna add in the computing, the high-end scanning, the recycling, and we'll leapfrog particularly China in terms of manufacturing.

But will we ever be able to do that on price? And if price is the single most important thing to commercialization, then I worry and I question, just like with renewables components, have we just lost the price game? So, and I'd love to bring in David and Sara as well 'cause this is a, a wonderful and prickly conversation.

Should we bother? Should we really push for this reshoring of, of battery, not just cells, but battery components here in, uh, North America? 

[00:25:48] Shirley Meng: That's a, I would say a sensitive question. I hope I don't offend anyone, um, but I will give my honest answer. In the '90s, uh, when lithium ion batteries was first commercialized by Japanese company Sony, I think that the U.S.

seriously look at the possibility for manufacturing domestically. The decision was not to do it because of the profit margin was really, really thin. We were talking about things like less than 10% of profit margin, so it is actually a corporate decisions back in 30 years ago not to pursue manufacturing.

And you are right, if we do it now, how we compete, right? So number one, I want to s- give a real shout-out to all my colleagues in Asia because South Korean, Japan, China, basically Japan has always been the technology leaders in the battery field. South Korean did extremely well. I think considering that, uh, LG, Samsung, SK, in the country of that size, they actually are doing really great work in the lithium ion battery production.

And China, of course, it's a national priority for them to dominate in EV because China never succeeded in making internal combustion engine cars very well. So EV is the opportunity to take over the leadership, right. So I think we should recognize that they achieved dominance Through persistency in industrial policies and also investment in talents, in workforce, in the infrastructure of manufacturing.

So do-shall we do it here? So first of all, Canadian company, I do want to say Hydro-Québec actually has been really doing a lot of the battery research. In fact, the lithium iron phosphate, if you trace back, Hydro-Québec is one of the pioneers in making the lithium iron phosphate chemistries work. I believe if every country recognize that they will have to build their battery infrastructure, just like, you know, you will have to build your infrastructure for water infrastructure, for petroleum, for instance, like you have to do it because the whole country relies on the infrastructure to function.

So I think if we change the mindset infrastructure building, that it will become less competitive in terms of thinking that the price has to be low, it's only a commodity, and I think that, uh, um, I will invite David and Sara to come to debate this topic because the problem is that the battery is only considered as commodity, disposable, you know, something that's not critical for national security, for the society's well-being, and I really want that mindset to change.

If I accomplish anything in today's podcast, I hope my, my message is clear, and I hope David and Sara can give some, uh, suggestion as well. How, how can we convince that, uh, the price war has to stop because it's a race to the bottom That no one will win 

[00:28:46] Ed Whittingham: I feel like I'm, I'm half getting it.

[00:28:48] David Keith: I think there's something very strong in what you're saying that we need to look at batteries as this long-lived instr- infrastructure that, along with the grid, makes industrial societies work.

I, I buy that picture. When you say the price war half-- has to end, I think m- my reaction is, what the heck? Like, we're still a long way from batteries being cheap enough to, to deliver us, uh, large scale grid storage. They're-- As you said, they're not even really quite cheap enough now to make commodity cars.

Anne also asked me to comment on, on reshoring, which is a related thing, and I feel like, I don't know. I can say a couple things. One is, if a whole lot of countries each individually try and reshore, this certainly won't work. There are deep reasons why you get this network effect of a set of suppliers and skilled, uh, labor that allows some countries to really specialize in something, and I think it's really inconceivable we're gonna do that in, like, 10 different places.

On the other hand, I think there's some level of this c- that can happen, and I think we don't know how much the supply chain can be slightly separated. So I think in mining it, it clearly is gonna happen, I believe. Another way to think about it is, is if the battery total amount of installed capacity is gonna grow as large as Shirley thinks, which I think she's probably right in the long run, then, then there's lots of room for new kinds of technologies, like maybe solid state batteries, to be the place where, say, North America grows.

And it's not like North America has to replicate what China's doing, it does something different. I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you, Shirley, is how much of the supply chain is really all in China? So for solar, and we've had a great previous speaker on this, on this podcast talking about this, for solar, people often think of it all as being in China, but in fact it's much more complicated than that.

The final production is mostly in China, but a bunch of the production of the equipment used to make the solar cells is actually spread quite globally. So depending on how you draw the box, it's much more of a global supply chain than you think. I don't have a sense in batteries. In batteries, how much of the specialized equipment needed to make the batteries in the Chinese plants is made in China compared to in the rest of the world?

[00:30:48] Shirley Meng: Yeah, the, you are right, the supply chain just similar as the solar industry. The mineral refinery is mostly in China because it's probably the simply biggest emitter and the polluter in the process. So we do have a lot of minerals, including Canada, have a lot of minerals that's needed in the supply chain.

Australia, I think people know most of the nickel come from In- Indonesia, and it really did not follow quite a lot of the environmental regulations, um, for those nickel. Someone can do a deep dive on the machinery. I do know that the South Korean, Japan, German engineers are very good at producing gigafactory machineries.

May not be as low cost as the China made, but I also think that this kind of large instrumentations, the European countries are really good. Right now, the North America, of course, we're trying to learn a lot from the European colleagues how, you know, including the semiconductor industry, how can we onshore those, um, manufacturing of the machines?

Yeah, so I do think, uh, you're absolutely right. You know, if we move towards, uh, new battery technologies that need a new infrastructure, new machinery, there is still an opportunity that we will do better, and that I want to do the math, you know, 200 terawatt hour needed. We are only at a two or three terawatt hour now.

One or two percent down with the game. Who's the winner? And by the way, you know, if people really want to take-- pick winners, I'm hoping that, uh, there will be multiple winners in this game. 

[00:32:19] Ed Whittingham: And two hundred is actually a low number. I mean, it's eight thousand hours in a year. Uh, a world is over ten terawatts, so that's total is eighty thousand terawatt years.

Obviously, you don't need all that in storage, but that's kind of a low ball if you really wanna decarbonize, I'd say. 

[00:32:34] Shirley Meng: Absolutely, David. I was hoping hydrogen will have some success because- 

[00:32:38] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. Yeah ... 

[00:32:38] Shirley Meng: it got a lot of investment. 

[00:32:40] Ed Whittingham: But I wanna come back to pollution. Somebody else, maybe it was you, was saying, like, the fundamental reason that, that a bunch of this mineral processing in China is because they have lower pollution standards, and that's what allows them to do it cheaply.

To the extent that that's true, one of the things that could happen is that consumer countries adopt better supply chain standards that basically say, "We won't buy batteries where the supplier can't demonstrate that the level of toxic emissions was less than X." And if that happens, that might be a way to either encourage China and Indonesia to clean up, which is to the huge benefit of Chinese and Indonesians, or to shift the balance of cost so there's more competitiveness, uh, for other places without kind of heavy-hand industrial policy choosing the winners.

So what about some kind of supply chain restrictions on the most polluting practices? 

[00:33:26] Shirley Meng: I certainly hope so. I, I would very much people pay attention to the carbon footprint and the pollution than the geopolitical reasons when they pick, uh, where to source the materials and the batteries. 

[00:33:38] Ed Whittingham: I would underplay the carbon.

I mean, carbon is a global thing. Uh, yeah, we gotta think about the carbon footprint of these things, but that's not the big issue. The big issue is these metal contamination problems are very long-lived and, and horrific environmental problems, and we do need to push the battery supply chain to clean those up.

[00:33:54] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, and I do think that the, you know, looking into the purchasers of the batteries, meaning not the, not the ultimate end users, but the, um, companies that are building, say, the, the EVs or, or other pieces is a good place to do that, right? And there is already some, I think, sort of movement in the industry in terms of automakers and battery cell manufacturers actually getting more directly involved in the critical minerals value chain.

So I think there is a path to get there as well too. I wanted to come back to, to Shirley's point around kind of energy security and the cost question. When we're talking about the cost and sort of the race, I guess what... The way that I sort of see that or interpret that, maybe, whether or not that's what, how you intended it, but is a bit really that we need more countries to kind of view battery technology and investment in, in, uh, mining and manufacturing through the lens of energy security, right?

Much in the way that we do and that we have for many, many years when it comes to, uh, oil and gas. You know, no question there are some properties of those sources of energy that make them, you know, sort of well-suited to be, to be a driver of, of our economy. But certainly, there have been massive, massive investments by the US government and by other governments, sort of all the way deep into kind of geopolitical relationships that really stem from trying to ensure energy security.

You know, and I think we have to be a little bit careful in, in how much we sort of carry over some of the lessons of, a- and, and the understanding of the way that those markets develop, right? And I think there's some lessons that do apply and some that don't. I, I sometimes hear comments that almost imply, like, we're stuck with the amount of lithium that we mine today as if we haven't, you know, in the oil and gas industry, demonstrated that we're able to, you know, when there is a market for it, find new and, and ways to, to extract more complicated resources.

So I think there's a lesson there that really does carry it over into the battery space. It cuts both ways, right? On the one hand, the overall market size for lithium is going to be smaller than the overall market for oil. But that said, um, on the flip side, of course, as you were, as you were saying, Shirley, the fact that fundamentally you don't burn up this resource, you can use it again.

And so there is not the same kind of- 

[00:36:08] Shirley Meng: Well, we don't need that much. 

[00:36:09] Sara Hastings-Simon: Exactly. We don't need as much. 

[00:36:11] Shirley Meng: Unlike an oil and a gas also, the waste that they gave out is in the air, up in the air. That we cannot deal with the mess, but, uh, the battery mess we will recycle for solid waste, uh, and the, the... Even now there's technology to recover the lithium in the salts and in the electrolytes.

So yeah, I really think that, uh, your point precisely, we don't need that much. That's why this thinking about the perpetual, you know, the size is ever-growing, I think a lot of the times that we have, uh, a different types of market that, uh, we're thinking when we think about minerals. For example, you know, if I'm the country leader, I will invest in the permanent magnet elements, right?

Because so much of the wind power, you need the permanent magnets so that the wind turbines could be built with lower or more secure the supply chain. But, uh, to me, that again, people recognize the market size is smaller, but please remember when we achieve material circularity, those materials can be perpetually circulate on the planet Earth to serve the humanity.

So I really hope, yeah, all the, uh, economists and the policy makers could help us to think about a incentives, a solution to incentivize investment in, in materials, in minerals. 

[00:37:31] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, and I think it's even more important in that case, right? Because we have the smaller market, and so there is a maybe even bigger role for the governments and the public sector to play a role in helping to secure those.

But the, the sort of thing that makes that more possible is the ultimate size of the market, and the total amount of money that we're talking about is smaller as well too. So I think the overarching points that I wanted to, to make is there are a lot of lessons that we can draw from our experience with commodity markets, but we need to be very careful as to which ones apply and which ones are very fundamentally different.

[00:38:02] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, and surely on this show, we often make the point there's no free lunch when it comes to energy, and there certainly is no free lunch when it comes to critical elements like lithium and cobalt and copper. Another reoccurring theme, and certainly in the last year and a half, uh, has been the Inflation Reduction Act and massive driver of investment that it has become in the US.

The Canadian government's made a big bet on the EV supply chain. It's invested and provides support and subsidies for a few big factories, and two of them dedicated battery factories. It's got an investment tax credit for energy storage associated with renewable electricity. I think IRA's approach has been a bit different, and I, I think it's...

there's now domestic content requirements associated with it and incentives for integration. So you can still be getting your cells overseas from China, but to your point about renewables, David, it's kind of depends on where it's assembled, and that's the, the support in IRAs in the actual assembly and wanting to incentivize more of the actual battery manufacturing.

Is my understanding right? 

[00:39:05] Shirley Meng: I haven't paid too much attention for the In- Inflation Reduction Act because the most of the academic institutions, so we don't really benefit from the industrialist policy. But through my interaction with the companies and the industrial partners I think everybody are very excited, but at, at the same time worried because there's a lot of fine prints in the, in the, uh, IRA, you know, what you can qualify, um, you know, how you can qualify.

For instance, our German colleagues, right, you know, some of the EVs, they think they can qualify for the tax credit, but then turns out that, uh, you know, they had to basically give the customer discount because actually it was not qualified. Uh, I just want to say one thing. It's incredible, incredible that the US established the Inflation Reduction Act, that some people thought it would never happen.

But I would say that when that passed, uh, in the US government, we thought, "Okay, you know, that this is the time." And if we cannot succeed in the man- bring the manufacturing... And by the way, those manufacturing job are extremely well-paid manufacturing job, and they utilize autonomous, you know, auto, uh, robotics, AI.

They uti- utilize a lot of the high-end, uh, uh, instrumentations. So I would say that this is actually the golden opportunities where as engineer, because we educate a lot of engineering students, and they are really excited and motivated because people know that, uh, there will be jobs. In the end, you know, we all worried about if the price competitiveness compared to China particularly.

But at the same time, you know, I think South Koreans are coming in to build their factories. European companies are coming in to build their chemical companies. I mean, in Canada, you have Umicore coming in to build their material supply for the gigafactories. In terms of economic growth, this is all positive things.

We should be really happy, and hopefully that persistent policy will continue. I mean, the challenge with the US is that every four years we will, "Okay, is it gonna continue? Is it gonna change?" The reason that the Asians did so well for the EV and the battery manufacturing, the policy was extremely persistent for 20 years.

If you want to accomplish big vision, big tasks, it takes time, time and hard work, right? So I would say what you are seeing today is gonna be the very beginning of what IRA can do, and I'm really hoping that in the next few years that we are going to see the fruit, the real fruit that will be bear by the, this incentive the government put out.

Because the criticisms we face mostly coming from the establishment, you know, the voices about how we cannot possibly live without gas and petroleum. And, uh, I just want to say that in my mind, the vision is very clear, that humanity can and will be able to live on the renewables. 

[00:42:05] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. Ed, you mentioned the US election.

People are looking ahead to November 5th to see the outcome for things like not just battery policy. It will have obviously momentous consequences for the world. Uh, let's get the questions here. We've got a question from Lal, uh, Tritton. We hear about lithium-ion battery fires regularly, and the references here, sorry, the most common sodium-ion battery types seem to be Prussian blue cathode, which is made with iron and cyanide, with transition metal oxides running second.

Is there a risk of cyanide release from this chemistry in the event of some significant incident? So this is a weedy question, but going back to the fires, I've also heard that, as I mentioned before, lithium iron phosphate batteries, they replace the use of nickel and cobalt with iron phosphate, and that helps to avoid some of the nasty upstream environmental and social problems, and it also has less risk of catching on fire.

So maybe one is, fires, is it a genuine risk? 'Cause you read about them in the paper. And then two, some of these other chemistries that help to avoid risk 

[00:43:07] Shirley Meng: When you have high energy density batteries, um, I think intrinsically if things goes out of control, the amount of energy released is gonna be very high.

So I want to say, first of all, Prussian blue use aqueous electrolyte, okay? So fire risk is very low. However, in case of extreme conditions, yes, there is a slight possibility that the cyanide will be released, and this is the reason why many companies still moved away from the Prussian blue type. But I want to emphasize the circumstances is very extremely rare, right?

The second question regarding lithium iron phosphate, the energy density of lithium iron phosphate is lower, 20% lower than that of the nickel cobalt, uh, manganese oxide cathodes. So intrinsically fire risk is lower, and then it's correct that the structure of lithium iron phosphate also make the batteries intrinsically safer.

But the culprit is the electrolyte, which is non-aqueous organic flammable electrolytes. And this is the reason why people like me spend my career working on solid state batteries, and then we are hoping to come out with a solution where people don't have to compromise between energy density and the safety.

But I hope by 2027 and 2028, you're gonna see some major players going to launch their solid state battery platform to show it's real. Because without showing you the real big sized batteries to demonstrate, everything I say about safety is actually just a hypothesis. 

[00:44:43] Ed Whittingham: I think you're underselling safety.

You said the battery energy densities were very high, but of course, they're still 10 times lower to 20 times lower, the best, than gasoline. It's true they're unstable, but they're less unstable than gasoline. So I think on a comparative basis, the difference between a liquid that can evaporate easily, it's flammable with a 10 times higher energy density, and a battery that occasionally goes wrong, it's pretty clear cut where the fire risks are.

It's not batteries. 

[00:45:08] Shirley Meng: And by the way, in the last, uh, 20 years, uh, battery fire incident, uh, um, I wanna say we ship out a billion cells with 100 battery incident. You're talking about one in 10 million. Yeah. So you think about the product quality, uh, there's many people forget that we're really ramping up the number of batteries sold to all the people.

It's a real commodity, but the accident rate, one in 10 million, is the typical numbers we believe that, uh, the product quality of the batteries. 

[00:45:38] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. I've yet to see a Hollywood film involving two EVs that after a furious car chase collide with one another, and then they both explode into flames. It's far more common with internal combustion engine vehicles.

[00:45:51] Shirley Meng: We are given the requirement of five minutes. The person has to have five minutes to escape once the computer gave the signal something is wrong. 

[00:46:01] Ed Whittingham: On a similar car note, we've got a question here, and sorry, I'm, I'm not looking at the QA. I don't know the questioner. Should we standardize and implement V2G, vehicle-to-grid technology?

With V2G, batteries can help the electrical grid when they are not driving EVs. This could reduce the amount of batteries we need to produce and of course reduce environmental impact and the risk and reducing the cost of making this transition. 

[00:46:24] Shirley Meng: Very good question. Um, for the personal cars, I think that will be difficult because of the current business model.

Uh, however, for fleet heavy-duty truck, buses, there is a possibility. So we look at the Class 8 long-haul trucks. You know, those trucks have to carry somewhere around the 500 kilowatt hour to one megawatt hour batteries if they are run by electricity. So naturally, those cars will become part of the solution to the grid.

We should not separate them from the grid. So V2G program is something that, uh, many researchers are looking at it, uh, really thinking about how we can incentivize that kind of program to come online. The challenge is really that the majority of the trucks and the fleet, they are- they have not electricificated yet.

No, they're still in the very beginning, but I do think that, uh, this is an active research topic. The bottom line is the battery lifetime has to be guaranteed. If the lifetime of the batteries cannot be guaranteed because they are connected to the grid and the grid operations are operated the batteries without the consumers knowing it, I think we have to absolutely guarantee the batteries will operate well.

And second important thing is that, uh, duty cycles in the grid, uh, it is a misunderstanding that the grid operation have less requirement on batteries. Yeah, it will take another whole episode for me to explain, but actually batteries is more difficult to operate on the grid duty cycles compared to the electric vehicles because of the properties, certain properties.

And I don't have time to go through this today, but I think that, uh, I hope everybody have a chance to do the research yourself. It's actually not by default the grid battery should be a lower-end batteries compared to the electric vehicle batteries. Uh, in my dictionary, it should be the reverse order.

[00:48:21] Ed Whittingham: We're out of time, but I want just a rapid-fire yes or no, uh, answer if you can, Shirley. Will batteries play a prominent role in developing grids in less developed countries, say parts of sub-Saharan Africa or parts that are just building up their grids now, or will they be too unaffordable to play a significant role in the short term?

[00:48:40] Shirley Meng: Yes, but new chemistry, sodium or potassium or zinc. 

[00:48:45] Ed Whittingham: Got that. Thank you. Shirley, thanks so much. I'm leaving fully charged now after this deep dive on batteries, so we're, we're all grateful. 

[00:48:53] Shirley Meng: Thank you for having me.