US battery production enters new era as Solid Power’s pilot production line debuts

Solid Power’s new pilot line is a groundbreaking moment in the march toward solid-state batteries for electric vehicles. But don’t count on a revolution in lithium-ion battery chemistry happening on the line itself. That’s by design.

The new facility, unlike the company’s previous pre-pilot line, will be “highly inflexible,” said Doug Campbell, Solid Power’s CEO. In the battery world, an inflexible pilot line is a good thing — it means that the company is honing its production skills with an eye toward commercialization. Mass production, after all, relies on repeatedly performing a sequence of refined steps over and over again without any surprises.

The pilot line will make cells between 60 and 100 Ah (amp hours) depending on the customer’s requirements — “a fairly large cell,” Campbell said. “That’s all it’s going to produce, and it will produce them in relative high-throughput — high-throughput enough that we can get multiple OEM partners through a full design freeze, otherwise known as a conclusion of a B-sample validation phase.”

Think of the B-sample as a beta test: The big kinks will be worked out and the top-line specs will be fixed. Before that, though, Solid Power has some refinements to make, as all battery companies do in this phase. 

“I don’t want to promise that we’re going to have phenomenally performing cells coming off the line tomorrow,” Campbell said. “There’s going be some debugging. There’s going to be some process optimization. Everything’s getting scaled up, and every time you do that, you’ve got to tweak and iterate to replicate what you did at the previous scale. So we baked that into the schedule.”

Solid Power is aiming to deliver the B-samples in the first half of 2024, just two years from now. After that, the march toward production begins in earnest. By Solid Power’s very realistic timeline, we might have the opportunity to buy a solid-state battery EV as soon as 2028.

But Solid Power’s progress represents more than just a potential step-change in range and power in the EV world. It likely marks a new phase in the U.S. battery industry.

“We are in early-stage planning for our next stage of production,” Campbell said, “and it is, by and large, being looked at here in the United States.”

Lessons learned

The current crop of battery companies, Solid Power included, grew up in the shadow of A123 Systems’ implosion. Over a decade ago, the Massachusetts-based startup was a darling of the clean tech industry, promising a battery chemistry that would be safer and more powerful than the rest. It would finally usher in an era of mass-market plug-in hybrids and EVs.

It wasn’t to be. The company faced several uphill battles almost simultaneously. It had to build its own massive battery factories and feed them from a supply chain it created largely from scratch, all against the backdrop of promising demand signals that never quite resolved. Then the Great Recession hit. Government grants and loans couldn’t quite get the company across the valley of death, and it eventually went bankrupt. Most of its assets were bought by Chinese auto parts giant Wanxiang at a fire-sale price. A123 Systems was ahead of its time.

Scientists and engineers fled the wreckage. Call them the A123 Mafia. They may not have had money to rival the PayPal Mafia, but they were armed with enough experience and ideas to seed a fresh crop of startups that has given us today’s battery startup landscape.

Solid Power may not trace its origin to A123 directly, yet the former startup’s fingerprints are evident. The Colorado-based company’s vice president of R&D was a principal research scientist during A123’s heyday, and its VP of cell development and COO both did stints at the firm after its sale to Wanxiang. A123 Systems was an early investor in Solid Power.

But even more important were the lessons that Solid Power learned from A123’s implosion. The new company doesn’t want to make cells from start to finish — and it doesn’t have to. Instead, it’s selling its secret sauce — the solid-state electrolyte — to larger firms, which will then insert it into their existing production lines. 

“Our long-term business model is really to be the industry leader in solid electrolyte and other associated materials,” Campbell said.

For now, Solid Power is focusing on its sulfide-based solid-state electrolyte. The component would replace flammable liquid electrolytes that are vulnerable to penetration by spiky dendrites that can form on the anode when a battery is charged too quickly, too often. Those dendrites can cause a cell to short-circuit and lead to a fire. Solid electrolytes prevent disaster in two ways: one, by physically blocking the dendrites, and two, by not being flammable.

Beyond that sulfide-based solid-state electrolyte, Solid Power is also working on high-silicon anodes that can store more lithium, lithium-metal anodes that promise to significantly trim a battery’s weight and so-called conversion-type cathodes that store lithium ions by reacting with them chemically, another advance that should further bump energy density.

Not only is Solid Power looking to make the ingredients that big companies like SK Innovation and LG plug into their massive gigafactories, but it’s also hoping to license its designs to make the most of its materials.

“We will absolutely monetize the cell side of the business — the cell designs and that sort of thing. Licensing is probably the most likely outcome,” Campbell said. “There’ll be two handoffs: one is a license agreement, and the other is a supply agreement, the electrolyte.”

A different world

By placing itself further up the supply chain, Solid Power is hoping to avoid getting ensnared in the sorts of logistical and cap-ex challenges that tripped up A123 in the early 2010s. It recognizes that cell production is only profitable at scale and that several other companies are already operating at scale.

Solid Power has also acknowledged that it no longer has to build the entire supply chain to be successful. Much of what exists today didn’t during A123’s early days, and while building it was probably necessary, it was a drag on the company. Solid Power and similar firms can afford to be more nimble because they can plug into a supply chain that is functioning pretty well, notwithstanding a few growing pains. It’s all happening at a time when demand for EVs is finally materializing.

Such a slimmed-down approach lets the company focus on what it’s best at — creating novel battery materials and designs — to wring the most profit out of its part of the supply chain. And in doing so, it’s arguing the case that U.S. companies can compete in the battery world, or at least a part of it.

None of that would be possible without some government policies to support it. Some of Solid Power’s earliest funding came in the form of state grants for economic development and federal grants for research and defense. The company recently received $12.5 million from Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, better known as IARPA, to develop high-energy-density conversion-type cathodes made from iron and sulfur, two cheap minerals of which no single country dominates production.

“As of today, we have no plans afoot to stand up any sort of production or operations outside the United States,” Campbell said. He can’t promise that will always be the case, of course, but it is for the foreseeable future.

“Honestly, taking off my Solid Power CEO hat and just putting on my citizen of the United States hat, I would love to see innovations, like what Solid Power is doing — and it was born here, was invented here — it’d be awful nice to see that manufacturing, as much as it can, continue to reside here in the United States.”