Speaker 1: With Laurent's segle End from London and Gerard Reed from Berlin.
Speaker 2: This is redefining energy.
Speaker 3: Today on Reefin Energy, we're going to talk about batteries,
Speaker 3: but not battery chemistry. We're going to talk about the
Speaker 3: digital layer around.
Speaker 2: The batteries exactly. And I suppose it's all about getting
Speaker 2: the best out of batteries while at the same time
Speaker 2: making sure that they stay as healthy for as long
Speaker 2: as possible.
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Speaker 3: Back to the show, Yeah, absolutely, and there's been a
Speaker 3: few startups developing unique expertise around monitoring those batteries and
Speaker 3: there with absolutely phenomenal results. So we decided to bring
Speaker 3: another doctor, you know where the doctor last week and
Speaker 3: then being another doctor. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it's great to get doctor Kyle Philip Kiris on
Speaker 2: the show. I call them Kyle Phillips, but everybody these
Speaker 2: days call them KP. Anyway, it was really super to
Speaker 2: bring KP on the show. So he's obviously been an
Speaker 2: incredible entrepreneur in the space and very knowledgeable and around
Speaker 2: batteries and what you should and shouldn't do with them.
Speaker 3: Right, He is the founder and CEO of a German
Speaker 3: company called a Cure, which is probably one of the
Speaker 3: best in the world in the field of predictive battery analytics.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: A Cure currently suppose of six gika what ire of
Speaker 3: batteries system across evs and just storage marine application all
Speaker 3: over the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, so listen, why don't we just bring them
Speaker 2: on the show.
Speaker 3: KP. Welcome to the show, and I see behind you
Speaker 3: there's a picture saying get shit done.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, thanks for the invitation. Great to be here. And
Speaker 1: as a startup founder in an industry that tends to
Speaker 1: be somewhat slow moving, sometimes I think startups like a
Speaker 1: Cure can really be an agent of acceleration and change.
Speaker 1: And so it's a mantra that I try to involve
Speaker 1: into everything we're doing here to just keep moving.
Speaker 2: Well, I think actually what's really lovely is to see
Speaker 2: the other thing that's behind you, which is a book
Speaker 2: on energy storage, and that's actually what we're talking about today,
Speaker 2: And maybe I just kick off. Philip's great to have
Speaker 2: you versually on the show. But really what I'd be
Speaker 2: interested in talking about, certainly at the beginning here is
Speaker 2: it's just what's going on the whole area of battery technology.
Speaker 2: And when I say battery technology, I'm not even just
Speaker 2: talking about the chemistries and this, that and the other thing,
Speaker 2: because there's battery management systems, there's analytics in your area.
Speaker 2: There's a whole part of stuff going on that we
Speaker 2: sort of don't talk about. So could you give us
Speaker 2: just a quick overview of what you see going on
Speaker 2: and there's sort of technology landscape in and around batteries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hope you're sitting comfortable. This will take about
Speaker 1: two or three hours. Well, now, I'll try to keep
Speaker 1: it short. My personal background really is I've been working
Speaker 1: with batteries professionally since two thousand and eight, over fifteen years.
Speaker 1: And what's mind boggling and has been mind boggling for
Speaker 1: over a decade is the continuous growth, exponential growth of
Speaker 1: the entire industry along every perceivable dimension, and so the
Speaker 1: complexity of this entire battery landscape is continuously increasing, and
Speaker 1: it's hard for people to comprehend exponential growth. And what
Speaker 1: I mean is today we are looking at prices, for example,
Speaker 1: or energy densities of LFP batteries that are far beyond
Speaker 1: the most optimistic predictions from five or six years ago.
Speaker 1: We're off the charts today and we continue to be
Speaker 1: off the charts with any upcoming prediction. And as an industry,
Speaker 1: as an energy industry, we're always two or three steps
Speaker 1: behind in adapting to the new realities that are coming
Speaker 1: our way, mostly driven by Chinese industry policies which have
Speaker 1: been amazingly effective in unlocking this entire new vertical in
Speaker 1: the energy industry. And from a technological perspective, I would
Speaker 1: really see batteries are by far the most interesting area
Speaker 1: that you could work in today as an energy professional.
Speaker 3: But unfortunately sometimes they burn. Unfortunately they do, and regardless
Speaker 3: of the chemistry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, there's been a lot of discussion around LFP,
Speaker 1: you know, lithium iron phosphate is now winning against NMC,
Speaker 1: the more traditional nickel manganese cobalt batteries that had mostly
Speaker 1: been developed for immobility. However, the flammable agent in the
Speaker 1: battery is the electrolyte, and LFP batteries actually have more
Speaker 1: electrolyte in them per unit of energy per kill what
Speaker 1: our because the energy density is somewhat lower. So even
Speaker 1: the LFP battery can ignite and can burn and can
Speaker 1: cause damage. They are slightly more stable in terms of
Speaker 1: temperature resilience, but however, it's the same in any energy technology.
Speaker 1: If you force a lot of energy into a small space,
Speaker 1: you create a risk, and as engineers, as an industry
Speaker 1: is our job to manage those risks through good design,
Speaker 1: through high production quality, through analytics of course, and through
Speaker 1: processes and quality assurance. The industry has made tremendous progress
Speaker 1: over the last couple of years. The last really big
Speaker 1: disaster that we had, most landing was built with a
Speaker 1: system layout that no one would use anymore today, So
Speaker 1: it's kind of not representative of what's going on right now,
Speaker 1: and the fact that everyone can agree that we should
Speaker 1: never build something like that is a good sign for maturity.
Speaker 2: Sorry, let me cut it cross there because I actually
Speaker 2: don't think that's a fair question from wrong. And the
Speaker 2: reason I don't think it's a fair question from Lron
Speaker 2: is that we've been dealing with flammable fossil fuels for
Speaker 2: one hundred years in the exact same situation where oil
Speaker 2: and gas you can blow up, your house, you can
Speaker 2: blow up It's an engineering thing.
Speaker 3: That's the resort.
Speaker 2: And the point is it is being sorted. And for me,
Speaker 2: the thing that is interesting about batteries is you said
Speaker 2: at the beginning, it's the innovation in the battery space,
Speaker 2: which is creating new markets that were not there five
Speaker 2: years ago. I don't want to get lost in the
Speaker 2: negativity about what goes wrong. I want to talk about
Speaker 2: what the hell you can do with batteries and what's
Speaker 2: happening in the market because you're sorting all these issues out.
Speaker 4: You know, jeoh, no, I can down.
Speaker 2: Wasn't It was just I just don't under Sorry, Maybe
Speaker 2: it's just I didn't have a coffee in the morning
Speaker 2: or whatever, right, but it was just like, why do that?
Speaker 3: Because we're bringing solutions.
Speaker 4: But the question you understand where I'm coming from it
Speaker 4: we have a big picture we're talking about how great
Speaker 4: batteries are. And then your first question is a negative
Speaker 4: question in and around fire risk, which is a tiny
Speaker 4: risk in the market that we're in now talking about
Speaker 4: people listening to what we're talking about. That's not the
Speaker 4: appropriate second question on that podcast. Okay, that's all.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, it's fine. So ask your question.
Speaker 4: I don't want to ask you question. You go and
Speaker 4: ask another second.
Speaker 3: What is it you're gonna make good? Oh?
Speaker 2: Okay, maybe just dig in a little bit. I like
Speaker 2: what you said. A said there and Techno talk a
Speaker 2: little bit more about the innovations in the last few
Speaker 2: years that you've seen in the marker.
Speaker 1: So one kind of meta development that I find incredibly
Speaker 1: interesting that and I think a lot of people aren't
Speaker 1: fully aware of it, is if you track each of
Speaker 1: those dimensions in which batteries got better, lower prices, higher
Speaker 1: energy density, more vendors, higher availability, and all these things,
Speaker 1: if you all take that together, you end up with
Speaker 1: a deflation spiral where lower battery costs unlock new markets,
Speaker 1: which create more demand, which create more supply, and supply
Speaker 1: again lower prices. We've seen similar things with SOLA over
Speaker 1: the last years. But because batteries are much more versatile
Speaker 1: and can be used in more applications, and you have
Speaker 1: more cross pollination if you will, between the more mobility
Speaker 1: and the energy space. The cycle is actually much faster
Speaker 1: and much stronger. So any new improvement in battery technology
Speaker 1: will lead to more batteries, which in turn will lead
Speaker 1: to better improvements. A friend of mine who's working in
Speaker 1: the battery production industry recently told me in China at
Speaker 1: the moment, there are over one thousand independent battery cell
Speaker 1: manufacturers that are trying to outcompete each other. The competitive
Speaker 1: pressure is incredible and only the strongest will survive. And
Speaker 1: the rest of the world at the moment really benefits
Speaker 1: from these incredible competitive dynamics through cheap, extremely high quality batteries.
Speaker 3: And here I like to quote a friend of the
Speaker 3: show friend of ours, Mark Kubic. It publishes regularly the
Speaker 3: results of the tenders that you're in China, which are
Speaker 3: very transparent and just before the summer are the result
Speaker 3: of the CEEC tender. They came at system level, not
Speaker 3: cell level, at fifty dollars what hour, which is insane.
Speaker 3: It's a drop of fifteen percent in six months.
Speaker 1: When I started my PhD. Over a decade ago, we
Speaker 1: were working on some market studies of hey, what are
Speaker 1: reasonable assumptions in ten years? And the rock bottom that
Speaker 1: a lot of researchers always saw was one hundred US
Speaker 1: dollars on cell level, not on system level, and now
Speaker 1: we're talking about between fifty and sixty US dollars on
Speaker 1: system level, So we're fifty percent below rock bottom already.
Speaker 1: And the industry is still scaling up and still professionalizing,
Speaker 1: and there are still i want to say, the low
Speaker 1: hanging fruits have all been reaped, but there are still
Speaker 1: developments that companies like HLBYD and all the others are
Speaker 1: working on that will reasonable compress prices by another five
Speaker 1: to fifteen percent over the next three or four years.
Speaker 3: For me, the big revolution is going to be behind
Speaker 3: the meta because you know, we've put the big system
Speaker 3: at transmission level and those you know, three hundred make
Speaker 3: awards and five hundred make a word. But this is
Speaker 3: going to unlock a lot of you know, new load
Speaker 3: data centers ense on because let's admit, the grid as
Speaker 3: is cannot support all that additional demand. Now, if you
Speaker 3: look at that additional demand is going to be probably
Speaker 3: five or ten percent of the time. The rest of
Speaker 3: the time the grid can deal with it and the
Speaker 3: batteries are going to solve all those problems.
Speaker 1: And just in terms of timing in order to extend
Speaker 1: your grid, the companies that are responsible for it, they
Speaker 1: tend to work at a conservative pace. So it might
Speaker 1: take three, four or five years to put in place
Speaker 1: a new grid connection, whereas adding a micro grid with
Speaker 1: solar and batteries you can do that in six to
Speaker 1: nine months. And if you look at the hyperscalers, it's
Speaker 1: a myth that they have a twenty four to seven
Speaker 1: constant load profile. They actually have fairly dynamic load profiles.
Speaker 1: They just don't want to talk about it because you
Speaker 1: can actually reverse engineer some of the underlying strategies by
Speaker 1: looking at the energy consumption. And so it's a secret
Speaker 1: how the power consumption is and those low profiles are
Speaker 1: in public. But batteries will be a key enabler of
Speaker 1: adding additional computational power, especially in markets that are low
Speaker 1: regulation like Texas for example, in the US, where you
Speaker 1: can just start building.
Speaker 2: Can I take that a step further because if I
Speaker 2: look at my desktop here, I've got six devices on it,
Speaker 2: and four of them have batteries.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now I'm going to make it prediction and say we
Speaker 2: sat here and we had this conversation. In five years time,
Speaker 2: they'll all have batteries. And I think you're going to
Speaker 2: have the batterization of our buildings, which means the devices
Speaker 2: have it. And it makes a huge amount of sense
Speaker 2: because you can then if you're selling a washing machine,
Speaker 2: you put a battery in there. Actually you have a
Speaker 2: different business model. And if I look at the white
Speaker 2: good manufacturers or battery manufacturers, Samson, LGA and a Sonic,
Speaker 2: you know, and I don't know if you think I'm mad,
Speaker 2: but I think that's where we're going because the technology
Speaker 2: is just so cheap.
Speaker 1: It is and continues the idea of energy storage, and
Speaker 1: batteries are really the most advanced and most practical form
Speaker 1: of energy storage. But the problem on the fundamental level
Speaker 1: that we're solving at scale now is the question of
Speaker 1: energy storage. For one hundred years, it was basically impossible
Speaker 1: to store energy outside of fossil fuels. The reason as
Speaker 1: a society we're so much in love with fossil fuels
Speaker 1: is because they are energy on demand. Oil is fairly
Speaker 1: easy to store gas as well, and when you need energy,
Speaker 1: you know, you just push a button and you convert
Speaker 1: it from coal, gas oil into electricity. But energy storage
Speaker 1: batteries really allow us to do the same thing without
Speaker 1: the fossil fuels. And if you look at modern warfare,
Speaker 1: if you look at the conflict zones of the world
Speaker 1: right now, the conflicts are now fought out with drones,
Speaker 1: and drones are most often, not always, but in a
Speaker 1: fair share battery powered devices. So batteries also gained this
Speaker 1: critical defense importance, and that of course again triggers the
Speaker 1: question of can any country afford to be one hundred
Speaker 1: percent reliant on foreign batteries when it comes to grid stability,
Speaker 1: when it comes to being able to defend themselves. And
Speaker 1: right now there's no country outside of China and perhaps
Speaker 1: you know a bit South Korea and Japan who has
Speaker 1: a fully functioning battery industry KP.
Speaker 2: Can I ask you? Then, I would say to myself,
Speaker 2: what's more important. It's not the battery cells or whatever.
Speaker 2: I think they're almost a commodity. But what's really interesting
Speaker 2: is the management of those batteries and the analytics. And
Speaker 2: that's the area that ultimate you're working in. So could
Speaker 2: you talk a little bit about the innovation you're seeing
Speaker 2: in that area and your views in and around the
Speaker 2: importance of it.
Speaker 1: If you just look at the general trajectory of what
Speaker 1: industries develop like, you start with something really simple, and
Speaker 1: then you kind of build a more sophisticated product, and
Speaker 1: at some point you add intelligence. You look at the iPhone.
Speaker 1: It started as an amazing hardware device, but one of
Speaker 1: the main reasons it keeps getting better today is not
Speaker 1: better hardware, but actually better software. It's better intelligence, better
Speaker 1: connectivity with other parts of your life, and the same
Speaker 1: thing is happening with batteries. You need a solid quality
Speaker 1: of hardware to start with, that's the foundation. But once
Speaker 1: you have that, better intelligence will provide better results for
Speaker 1: you whatever you're doing. And you know, the industry that
Speaker 1: we're most familiar with where most of our customers sit,
Speaker 1: is the energy industry. Owners and operators of big batteries
Speaker 1: five hundred megawad hours a gigawad hour. We have analyzed
Speaker 1: about fifteen one five gigawad hours of large scale storage
Speaker 1: and you can just see that depending on which factory
Speaker 1: they got produced in, which BMS they're using, which energy
Speaker 1: management system they're using, which operational strategies the companies have.
Speaker 1: The outcome is incredibly wide. So if we narrow it
Speaker 1: down completely and say how much money can you make
Speaker 1: with one megawat hour, depending on how you use the
Speaker 1: battery and how intelligent you're operating it, it can be
Speaker 1: plus minus twenty percent. And most people that are funds
Speaker 1: or investing in energy storage, they don't really look at
Speaker 1: technical performance so much. They are very passionate about trading optimization,
Speaker 1: bidding into the right markets, having smart tolling agreements with
Speaker 1: a floor and a cap and all these things. But
Speaker 1: then they're kind of ignorant about this huge lever that
Speaker 1: you can pull and just make fifteen percent more revenue
Speaker 1: by orchestrating the hardware that you have in a smarter way.
Speaker 1: And that's really we're working on and where we're trying
Speaker 1: to make the industry faster, because if you can get
Speaker 1: more output from the same hardware, it's cheaper and it's faster.
Speaker 3: Let's go to your company that you created five years ago,
Speaker 3: and congratulations, you continue to attract more capital. We'll talk
Speaker 3: about your cap raise. So if I read a cure
Speaker 3: Battery Intelligence mbH founded in Achen, Germany, develops AI powered
Speaker 3: predictive analytics software to optimize battery safety, performance and longevity
Speaker 3: for evs and battery energy. Soigy stembas It's cloud based
Speaker 3: platform use AI physics, base muddeling and fill that too
Speaker 3: many top battery health detectissues the matter on a way
Speaker 3: provide the Okay, so how does it work? Because that's beautiful?
Speaker 3: But I guess what your computer everywhere? And then you
Speaker 3: where do you plug into? Because if you're monitoring some
Speaker 3: batteries in Australia in Texas, how does it work?
Speaker 1: Let me give you like two minutes about the background
Speaker 1: of how we ended up starting a company. To be honest,
Speaker 1: two years before starting a cure as an engineer, I
Speaker 1: never thought about starting a business. It was not something
Speaker 1: I thought I could do. Were in Germany do you
Speaker 1: need a license to start a business? I don't know.
Speaker 1: Everything is complicated here. But in my last job at
Speaker 1: the largest research group on grid connected storage systems that
Speaker 1: I had the honor to lead for a couple of years,
Speaker 1: we developed our own five mega at our battery that
Speaker 1: was back in like twenty thirteen. It was a really
Speaker 1: big battery at the time time. We were one of
Speaker 1: the first ones in Europe, and so we tried our
Speaker 1: best to do it well and to do it professionally,
Speaker 1: but there were just a lot of questions that no
Speaker 1: one could answer, so we had to try, and we
Speaker 1: tried and failed and tried and failed, and eventually we
Speaker 1: had five different battery technologies up and running. They're still
Speaker 1: operating profitably in Germany. And during that time we were
Speaker 1: so busy with fixing issues, among others. We had the
Speaker 1: first Coatl battery that was installed in Europe at our site,
Speaker 1: but it really had some issues in the beginning with
Speaker 1: the bms, with state of charge estimation or with power
Speaker 1: limits and these things, and just to help ourselves during
Speaker 1: the time, we developed algorithms that help us pinpoint any
Speaker 1: issue and then suggest fixes, and we did similar things.
Speaker 1: Actually was behind the meta storage systems, and over time
Speaker 1: we gathered so many of those algorithms, physics based models,
Speaker 1: some ais, some pretty straightforward decision trees that we thought, hey,
Speaker 1: someone else could benefit from that, and that's how we
Speaker 1: started a cure. So we did it ourselves first, and
Speaker 1: now we want to help others in doing it, and
Speaker 1: we plug into the energy management system. The data we
Speaker 1: need is already there. And it's fairly easy to connect
Speaker 1: and then you just see exactly what could be better
Speaker 1: and the impact is pretty crazy, like ten percent more
Speaker 1: revenue within the first three months, are not rare.
Speaker 3: What type of data you collect charging, discharging, temperature.
Speaker 1: Voltage, correct temperature, really the basics, so what the sensors collect,
Speaker 1: and then any other metrics that the BMS might calculate,
Speaker 1: state of charge, state of power, stet of energy, HVAC,
Speaker 1: inverted data.
Speaker 3: Do you do it like at the container level or
Speaker 3: you can go on the cell sell by seller.
Speaker 1: It depends a bit on the manufacturer. Some manufacturers have
Speaker 1: cell level available for some of its module for from
Speaker 1: its string.
Speaker 3: Okay, so let's say I'm a big owner of batteries
Speaker 3: and I say, KP, your system extraordinary. Can you plug in?
Speaker 3: So how long does it take to plug.
Speaker 1: In technical integration? Usually about six weeks and this is
Speaker 1: including some buffers. Sometimes people are on holiday. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: manufacturer needs to answer a question about how did you
Speaker 1: connect this here? How did you connect this here? But
Speaker 1: so we can onboard new customers fairly quickly, and if
Speaker 1: they have multiple sides of the same type, say you
Speaker 1: have three fluent assets or three bid assets, any other
Speaker 1: asset after the first one, we usually can onboard within
Speaker 1: a week, so that goes really fast.
Speaker 3: Okay, So and then so the information start flowing, can
Speaker 3: you immediately benchmark versus all the others you have in
Speaker 3: your database, and that's how it starts working. So you
Speaker 3: have your best in class, worsting class and.
Speaker 1: Immediately see where a battery falls into the broader quality
Speaker 1: comparison in terms of safety, in terms of performance, in
Speaker 1: terms of aging, warranty, in terms of imbalances and state
Speaker 1: of charge estimation errors and all these things. Of course,
Speaker 1: just knowing that you have an issue isn't helpful. What's
Speaker 1: helpful is taking that information and going to fix it.
Speaker 1: And so we have a strong and large team of
Speaker 1: experts that work closely together with our customers, like really
Speaker 1: they become a part of their team as the technical
Speaker 1: helper to help them fix these issues, and then we
Speaker 1: can validate that it's actually better and that they're now
Speaker 1: making more money. And that way, ideally, after three or
Speaker 1: six months, we can clearly show hey, since you started
Speaker 1: working with a cure, you made three million dollars more
Speaker 1: in revenue, but you only pay a cure. I don't
Speaker 1: know one hundred two hundred thousand, and so the difference
Speaker 1: is just pure profit for you, and that's our business model.
Speaker 3: Do you think some guys would like to develop that
Speaker 3: in house because they said super proprietary or are people
Speaker 3: happy to have view look into their system.
Speaker 1: I think one of the limiting factors really in the
Speaker 1: industry at the moment is talent. The battery industry is
Speaker 1: growing exponentially. That means the growth every year is larger
Speaker 1: than the growth in the last year. And all these
Speaker 1: new owners and operators that are being created, the growing ones,
Speaker 1: they're already struggling to backfill fundamental positions and it's incredibly
Speaker 1: challenging to find the twenty twenty five engineers and pay
Speaker 1: them to build such tools. And if you just do
Speaker 1: a very quick back of the envelope calculation, it's not
Speaker 1: a good business decision to build these things. If there
Speaker 1: are ready made solutions that large parts of the industry
Speaker 1: are using. In some markets we have over twenty percent
Speaker 1: market share. It's the classical built or buy decision, where
Speaker 1: buying is just lower risk and faster and cheaper.
Speaker 3: Usually, I guess there are two types of institution who
Speaker 3: are interested by your result. It's bankers than eachure. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: So a big part of our platform is we make
Speaker 1: reporting easier and more granular for customers, and we have
Speaker 1: insurance partnerships where our customers can benefit from improved insurance conditions.
Speaker 1: But of course the insurance wants to see that the
Speaker 1: suggestions that we make are actually being followed, and so
Speaker 1: we have automated insurance reporting, we have automated investor reporting.
Speaker 1: If you think about resell value, it's incredibly challenging to
Speaker 1: say how much a battery system is still worth. But
Speaker 1: in the spreadsheet, in the financial modeling, resell value is
Speaker 1: a very relevant factor. And so through our analytics, through
Speaker 1: warranty management, through the state of health analytics, we can
Speaker 1: give them a precise number of where they stand. And
Speaker 1: of course also if you want a flip a system,
Speaker 1: if you want to sell an old asset to buy
Speaker 1: a new portfolio. In all these transactions, having better data
Speaker 1: really streamslined that, and I think the industry is still
Speaker 1: at a point that's quite immature, and having an independent
Speaker 1: third party that does it for everyone, just give you
Speaker 1: a full report on this is the state of your technology.
Speaker 1: It just makes things easier.
Speaker 3: Guy.
Speaker 2: Just on the insurance point, there are we going to
Speaker 2: see insurance companies really incentivize, maybe even force battery owners,
Speaker 2: be they in the home or elsewhere, to actually deploy
Speaker 2: your type technology.
Speaker 1: We are seeing this, So this is happening as we speak.
Speaker 1: As the saying goes, the future is already here. It's
Speaker 1: just unevenly distributed. Some insurance groups are much more advanced
Speaker 1: when it comes to these issues, while i'll are still
Speaker 1: quite new to this, and so it's unevenly distributed.
Speaker 2: Kai Phillips, maybe just to wrap up there, can you
Speaker 2: talk a little bit about how you see the future
Speaker 2: in terms of technology developments. What you see is the
Speaker 2: major technology developments, whether it's battery chemistry, whether that's power electron,
Speaker 2: whatever it is, what are we looking forward to in
Speaker 2: the next three years.
Speaker 1: The battery industry is incredibly buzzing. People are working on
Speaker 1: thousands of potential new cell chemistries and system designs and
Speaker 1: all these things. And as a researcher and as an engineer,
Speaker 1: I get really excited about these things from a theoretical perspective,
Speaker 1: but from a practical perspective, I believe it's going to
Speaker 1: be more of the same. I think that the recent
Speaker 1: developments we've seen with lithium prices with the advancements in
Speaker 1: LFP batteries are a showstopper for sodium mine Right now,
Speaker 1: sodium iin is solving a problem that doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 1: The same is with solid state incredibly interesting, like I
Speaker 1: love reading those papers and the smart approaches that these
Speaker 1: researchers found to solve these fundamental challenges. However, no one
Speaker 1: needs solid state batteries. My controversial opinion when you look
Speaker 1: at trends in the automotive industry, in the stationary storage industry,
Speaker 1: everyone is moving to lower energy density, lower price options.
Speaker 1: Solid state batteries are high energy density, high price options.
Speaker 1: So my personal take is for consumer electronics, for smartphones,
Speaker 1: smart watches, solid state batteries, even if they cost double
Speaker 1: will be a huge win. I'm certainly willing to pay
Speaker 1: one hundred bucks extra to have a phone that lasts
Speaker 1: for three days easy, But I think no one's willing
Speaker 1: to pay thirty thousand more for a car that has
Speaker 1: one thousand kilometers of range, because by now people have
Speaker 1: figured out that they're rarely driving more than three hundred
Speaker 1: in one trip, and it's just not a good investment
Speaker 1: to get even more battery into the car.
Speaker 2: I love the controversy. Great, thank you very much for
Speaker 2: coming on the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me, Thank you very much. Well, j'all,
Speaker 3: it's absolutely extraordinary. How the old battery consisted is devel opinion. Look,
Speaker 3: he was absolutely right. This is enough experts. The industry
Speaker 3: cannot produce sufficient technicians, so they have to subcontract part
Speaker 3: of the monitor into companies like a Qure and you
Speaker 3: know what, they have eighty employees, so they are in Germany,
Speaker 3: they're also in Boston, and the multi discipline team around battery, thetacientists,
Speaker 3: I can tell you there's not a lot in the world.
Speaker 3: So those companies are very avaliable.
Speaker 5: Oh absolutely absolutely. I know again this was also a
Speaker 5: little bit technical as well, but it's critical firstly and
Speaker 5: se secondly, it's just again it's just pushing this battery
Speaker 5: revolution that we've both been talking about for many years along.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, you just can't install your prismatic c ATM
Speaker 3: and hope for the best. You need your make sure.
Speaker 3: So on one hand, you get the guys like a
Speaker 3: model or checking the revenues and it's really about reading
Speaker 3: strategy and it's really about location and so on. But
Speaker 3: that's outside. That's what's happening outside the battery. What's happening inside.
Speaker 3: We need guys like a Qures say hey, guys, you
Speaker 3: know the same battery and now they can compare you know,
Speaker 3: they have a really sufficient database and say, look, the
Speaker 3: same technical box could give you ten percent more power
Speaker 3: if you manage it, you know, slightly differently. And that
Speaker 3: is fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, totally with you. And again the other thing
Speaker 2: is I think it's also the we're on at the
Speaker 2: beginning of it, which is the use of AI with batteries, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, Jard, thank Dr KP for coming on the show.
Speaker 3: We learn a lot and wish him the best exactly. KP.
Speaker 2: Keep in contact.
Speaker 3: See you so okay, Joab, talk to you next week.
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