Decarbonizing an economy, rather than just power or transport, changes the nature of the challenge ahead. The transition to a low-carbon economy, for instance, blurs the distinction between the transport and power sectors. Batteries underpin this transition and are of strategic importance to companies and countries alike across industries. In this session, we review energy transition investment and activity and highlight notable technology advancements and the implications for battery demand.

This presentation will explore historical investing approaches to batteries that have failed and suggest a path forward for making battery investments pay off. Investing in companies that incrementally improve Li ion performance will always have a better chance at success than investing in a completely new battery architecture.

COnovate is a seed-stage company with a novel composite material developed by the co-founders at a University of Milwaukee laboratory. The COPHITE™ material is the world’s first known form of solid carbon monoxide (CO) at room temperature and pressure. This new patented material has a unique set of beneficial properties as an anode material, including a larger interlayer structure that facilitates much faster lithium intercalation than graphite, and can be produced from a variety of carbon sources (including renewable feedstocks).

New materials are required for lithium ion batteries to significantly advance in both performance and sustainability. While the auto industry has embraced silicon additives to enhance anode performance, no similar solutions for the cathode have existed...until now. Ten-Nine Technologies’ proprietary nano-additives can up to double pulse power capability when blended with traditional cathode materials, including at low states of charge, and are nickel and cobalt-free.

Coreshell is unlocking the true capacity and economics of batteries to enable the timely deployment of electric vehicles and clean energy. Our founding team has a proven track record of commercializing world-leading nanolayer materials in polymer membranes, thin-film solar & electrochromic. We're now applying that expertise to create a low-cost liquid-deposition electrode-level coating that enables high-energy, low fire-risk, and significantly reduced cost/kWh batteries.

Battery production must scale with unprecedented speed, while decreasing cost by >40% and improving reliability. Our breakthrough inspection and intelligence platform enables customers to detect production issues upstream at their source, as opposed to days or weeks later. By providing in-process insights into production quality, we help customers speed up development of new batteries and processes, accelerate scale-up and yield ramp for new manufacturing operations, and increase steady-stated productivity and profitability.

Lithium-ion batteries are now extensively being used as the primary storage source. Capacity and power fade, and slow recharging times are key issues that restrict its use in many applications. Battery management systems are critical to address these issues, along with ensuring its safety. An efficient BMS should be able to accurately predict the internal states of the battery such as the sate-of-charge (SOC), state-of-health (SOH) using the voltage and current measurements from the battery, along with maintaining safe operations of the battery. The accurate determination of these internal states holds the key for the optimal performance of batteries. The effect of inaccurate state estimation leads to conservative use of batteries and at worst, may cause potentially unsafe situations leading to thermal runaway. This necessitates the development of accurate models that could predict different states of the battery more accurately, which at the same time are not as computationally complicated to be deployable in current BMS. BattGenie's innovation is the development and deployment of physics-based fast solving electrochemical models which are computationally efficient and can run on low-cost microcontrollers. These models have been validated to increase cycle life over 100%, and reduce charging time by 40%. This talk will give an overview of BattGenie 's BMS algorithms.

This presentation will explore Li-Cycle's patented and commercial approach to lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery resource recovery and how it can be applied to multiple verticals and across diverse markets. Ajay Kochhar, our President and CEO, Co-Founder, and Executive Director will also detail the scalability of Li-Cycle’s technology and how it plays a key role in our global expansion plans. Additionally, Ajay will discuss the approach to financing this growth and different business model approaches in international markets. As a capital-intensive business, this presentation will also touch on the opportunities and challenges of raising capital, particularly during the pandemic.

A novel class of high-energy-density batteries will be developed by dropping lithium metal anode into conventional lithium-ion battery, enabled by an advanced liquid electrolyte. The development process employs a closed-loop machine learning and high-throughput robotic experimentation workflow, which allows for an efficient search of the vast chemical and material space for possible electrolytes.

ReJoule’s diagnostic system, based on electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, is a fast and non-invasive solution that can help maximize the value of every battery. We’ve tested our system on used battery modules and will be moving upstream to characterize battery packs in-vehicle.

EnPower, Inc. is a lithium-ion battery company building cells that solve the trade-off between energy and power. EnPower’s patented multilayer electrodes enable high energy density cells to repeatedly fast charge without causing degradation or capacity fade in the batteries. The company operates an R&D line in Phoenix, AZ, and plans to expand U.S. production for e-mobility applications in 2022.

Silicon can hold about 10 times the number of lithium-ion as the existing material in lithium-ion batteries – graphite, and its use could lead to 20-40% higher energy density. The main obstacle with the use of silicone is that in reaction with lithium during charging it expands over 300% in volume which heavily damages the battery life. Our patented anode architecture combined with proprietary electrolyte design produce an expansion-controlled pure micron sized silicon-based Li-ion battery with a long-life span. This talk will provide the performance of silicon anodes based on pure µm silicon.

SSB’s composite polymer electrolyte (CSPE) and liquid ionic nonflammable technology are comprised of an ion conducting polymer additives and nanoparticles. The SSB electrolytes achieved ionic conductivity of 3-7 mS/cm2 at room temperature and slightly elevated temperature higher, than liquid electrolyte which has outperformed many reported in the literature.

Enovix is the leader in advanced silicon-anode lithium-ion battery development and production. This presentation will describe the company's 3D cell architecture, its "drop-in" cell assembly process, its first 100% active silicon-anode lithium-ion battery production facility in Fremont, CA, and its go-to-market strategy, including commercial delivery to leading mobile electronic device OEMs in 2022. The presentation will conclude with an update on the company's EV battery development program.

A decade of research in Li-ion batteries has brought good advancements in energy density, but less so in charging times. Most "fast charging" cells in the market in reality achieve around 2C and by an excessive charging current to the detriment of cell cycle life. In this talk, I will address the challenges in fast charging and the potential solutions to reduce the trade-off between energy and fast charging beyond 30C.

The start-up pitch winner will be presented their award during the plenary session on Thursday, December 9th and will do a 10 minute presentation during the plenary keynote session.