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Everything Electric Podcast
Donut Labs Solid-State Battery Could Change EVs Forever…If It's Real!
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- [00:00]
A
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C
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast. This is the battery special. This is just. This is so dense and full of information. Please watch it because it is just an amazing episode and please listen. Two just fantastic guests that dived in at the last moment. So we had an unexpected dropout of a cancellation of a podcast guest and who is going to be recording a show in a couple of weeks time. But just, you know, stuff happens and these two amazing people jumped in at the last minute with very little warning and were just amazing and wonderful. So what we're talking about here is all the incredible developments that are going on in the world of batteries and the impact that that has on our lives. A little bit of discussion about data centers and their energy use and the potential benefits and negative aspects of that technology, but generally speaking, just fascinating, really generally optimistic discussions about those topics. And I think importantly both these people are going to be appearing at our show Everything Electric north in Harrogate on the 8th and 9th of May. So that's enough of all that Waffle. Please do. Welcome to the Everything Electric podcast, Dave Borlace and Dr. Ewan McTurk.
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A
Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun packed test drive tastic events in the north west and Greater London and our events down under. Next up, Everything Electric North 2026. Plus check out EverythingElectric store for merch and much more.
- [03:21]
C
Well, thank you so much guys for, for joining me on this. I think it's a, I think that we are traveling through a little bit of a pivot period as regards batteries. I think we ought to, I'll explain to the audience that this is a very battery heavy episode, I think, and, and various related technologies. But it is very good to have you here. And I mean let's start with, with Donut Labs because that announcement, which I don't know what it was about two or three weeks ago. Yeah, I knew, I knew nothing about the man who presented it until I sort of googled him and I went, oh, he's got a slightly checkered history, I can't remember his name. But he's not a hundred percent undodgy in his past. So it's so difficult because what he's suggesting is this monumental step in, in battery technology isn't a little bit of an improvement or 10% better, it's mind bogglingly. But I mean, Dave, can you start with just giving me your take on it? I mean, how you felt about it?
- [04:23]
D
I've only referenced it once in one of my videos, very flippantly. I said, has a man from Finland with questionable facial hair strategy produced a product made of moon dust and angel and what did I say? Moon dust and unicorn tears? That's going to disrupt the entire market because from what I've heard from, you know, my Patreon supporters and my listeners and what have you, and some of whom are very knowledgeable, maybe not as knowledgeable as Mr. McTurk here, but very knowledgeable people and also other people, like the guy on Zero for example, he's done a bit of a deep dive on it. It's very hard to, it's very hard to, to tally up all the, all the data that they provide, particularly in my mind, particularly the 100,000 cycles claim. Yeah, you can't do all this fast charging that they claim and all sorts of temperatures and then claim 100,000. How can you claim 100,000 cycles anyway? I mean, how do you test that? It's just so for me, right from the get go, the very first day Someone said, oh, there's a thing called donut. And I watched his video. I thought, I'm a layman, but I've done some videos on batteries. This sounds like complete BS to me. So I decided from the get go, I'm not in terms of videos. I'm not going to touch this with a barge pole. I'll wait for all the other people on YouTube to see. I actually said, until Sandy Munro physically dismantles one, looks inside it and tells us exactly what it is, because he's looked at it, I'm not going to trust any of it. And then obviously it'd be very interesting to hear what you. And that's got to say about it.
- [05:47]
C
Yeah, no, it is. I mean, I think you're absolutely right that if they'd done the three, if they'd done two of their breakthroughs, which is energy density and I can't remember what they're. There were two things that you go, well, I don't know, but that's plausible. But it was the speed of charge, speed of charge, energy density and speed of charge. You go, well, that is amazing. If that's true. I'm not sure. You know, I still would have been skeptical, but as soon as I heard the hundred thousand charging side, because I remember, I mean, and you, and you'll, you'll get this as well. But the first time I heard that, you know, lithium ion battery is good for, you know, in the early days of electric cars, 2 to 3,000 charge discharge algorithm. Oh, that's not, that's not very good. That's not going to last long. Then you work out how long, how many years.
- [06:29]
D
Yes. Yeah.
- [06:31]
C
And now we're already in sort of 5 to 8,000. You know, the latest CATL batteries are sort of, you know, and we're talking 50 to 20 years useful life at the very.
- [06:41]
D
I mean, no one, no one. Well, very few people are going to charge and discharge their battery fully every single day. And even if they did, that's 365 cycles a year. So as you say, that's. That if you did it every single day, that would be 10 years. And that would be to get. You'd still probably have 80% capacity left at the end of that. So you could make it stationary energy storage. So I mean, these things are, as you've said many times, and Ewan has that these batteries now are proving to be so much more robust than the naysayers were trying to convince us some years back.
- [07:10]
C
Yeah, but 100,000 cycles is just it Just, it's irrelevant. It's a stupid thing for them to say. Even if it was true, it's a. It shoots down their own arguments. Because you go, well, in 90 years this battery is still fine. I mean, I've certainly reached an age where in 90 years is science fiction. You know, I'm not going to be. Unless I'm a. It could be a brain in a jar, which I've always quite fancied with two. With two little video cameras at the top. But you, I mean, I'm just going to remind our viewers and listeners that you're my, you're my battery guru. I worship you in the, in the temple of batteries, because.
- [07:46]
E
Why, thank you.
- [07:49]
C
I mean, you know more than anyone else I know, but I mean, what was your take when you first saw it?
- [07:56]
E
Yeah, just like every other electrochemist in the land, I was rather skeptical as well, but I was intrigued and I think that, you know, if we had a, a quid for every time we see some miraculous chemistry being advertised on popular science articles and so on, you know, us electrochemists could retire quite healthily. But, you know, this one has an interesting history. It seems to have attracted some very well respected personnel from within the UK battery sector.
- [08:27]
C
Right.
- [08:27]
E
Can't say too much at this point other than I'm not involved with it, but I know some people who are. So yeah, there's some interesting kind of credibility to it in sense, but the fact that they have gone from the usual thing of either kind of tweaking what we've got already today, just small but significant steps and then if there is going to be a significant breakthrough, you would normally replace one component at a time, whereas what they've done is they've seemingly replaced several components all in one and getting all new components to work together is incredibly difficult to achieve. You would think that that's a recipe for disaster, but it might actually be that each of them on their own would have been such a disaster to try and get to work with conventional stuff that if you throw them all together, all of a sudden you've got this chemistry that does work, which is what they claim, you know, so they claim it's not lithium. They seem to be claiming a solid state and that it's stupidly powerful, etc. We've seen the independent test data. We know that it can do a five minute charge. That's impressive. Or thereabouts.
- [09:32]
D
90 degrees C though, Ewan, wasn't it?
- [09:34]
C
Yeah.
- [09:35]
E
I mean, that said, you know, obviously, yeah, the higher the temperature, the lower the internal resistance. But there was a 25 degree C test where they did something like 11 or 12 C charge rate. So in other words, being able to charge it in five minutes. But what was interesting about the high temperature test, which shows the resilience of it? Well, two things. One, the cell was not charged at those high temperatures. It was only held at maximum voltage and then discharged at those temperatures. Which I thought was kind of cheating, but not necessarily cheating, but it's like, you know, we want to see how it does with charging. Charging inevitably gives off more heat than discharging, but we still want to know how well it can go. What was also interesting was that the temperature that it was the test was run at, the second one was run at 100 degrees C. And that temperature is so high that the hot melt glue on today's conventional pouch cell laminated pouch melted and it lost its vacuum. Now if that was a conventional liquid based chemistry with organic solvents in there, they tend to be pretty flammable. They wouldn't be too happy about being introduced to air at very high temperatures. The fact that they claim that it's solid state, that could well actually be true based on the fact that nothing really happened to that cell. VTT didn't say, oh, and half an hour later it set our battery storage bin on fire. You know, they said, you know, it seemed to withstand it despite the fact that the vacuum was lost. So that's promising. Solid state electrolytes should be non flammable. So that removes the volatility and the flammability, or worst case scenario, flammability of electric vehicle batteries. I mean, that said, you know, there'll still be some materials in there that if you're determined enough, you could get them to catch fire. But that would be because there was a fire around it. Just like if I was to, you know, hold a flamethrower against my wooden office desk just now, eventually it would go, oh, are we doing this? Okay, I'll catch fire too. But it wouldn't be that exciting. So yeah, that seems to be true. But we can come back to whether or not it's lithium later on.
- [11:31]
D
But can you, can you charge that? Sorry, but I was just going to ask, just I'm curious if they've done one test at those sort of temperatures, surely that even though it survived that test, there must be some degradation at that temperature. So surely that undermines the claim for a hundred thousand or even a thousand cycles, but a hundred thousand? I mean, you're going to be kidding haven't you?
- [11:53]
E
Well, with solid state they do tend to these electrolytes, although they're experimental, they do tend to withstand higher temperatures better and it seems to be the electrolyte that does arguably most of the degrading at high temperatures in conventional lithium ion cells. So they might not get 100,000 cycles, but they still manage to put up more of a fight at elevated temperatures than your conventional liquid based electrolytes and conventional lithium ion cells we've got today. But yeah, it's worth pointing out that those tests as I said, were done at 25 degrees C. The, the high temperature test was all about proving its safety in a kind of worst case heat scenario that wasn't realistically how they expect it to be used. Although that said, I would imagine that there's Formula 1 and Formula E teams and other kind of specialist niche applications where you have loads of heat being generated because of the sheer amount of power and potential proximity to an internal combustion engine as well, which of course gets very hot. You know, dissipating that heat is a complete faff. So if you can just live with that heat for a couple of hours then that makes it so much easier to deal with. I would imagine they'd be paying very close attention to this.
- [13:02]
C
Right. But I mean the energy density argument was, that was the one that fascinated me because I've, you know, from, I think from discussions with you and other people in the battery field, the, you know, the comparison to my original Nissan Leaf 24 kilowatt hour battery size and weight, you know that that size and that weight would now probably be about 60 kilowatt hours. You know, that's how, how much it's improved in that 16 year period. And, and you know what, the battery I've got in it in that Nissan now is 40 kilowatt hours and it's the same size. I think it's something like 4kg heavier. It's not 100kg heavy, it's a little bit heavier and a lot more energy in it. But you know what they were saying because aren't they talking about 400 watt hours a, a kilogram is that? Yeah, yeah.
- [13:50]
E
Somewhere around there. Yeah, yeah. So that's your, your gravimetric energy density per kilogram.
- [13:56]
C
To give someone a comparison, what would the best sort of BYD/tesla/catl lithium ion battery energy density be?
- [14:05]
E
Yeah, you're kind of leading market leading electric vehicle NMC cells. So that's your lithium nickel, manganese cobalt oxide used in longer range electric vehicles today. You're looking about 270 to 280 watt hours per kilogram for your kind of established market leaders. So 400 watt hours per kilogram is a decent improvement. It's also of interest to aerospace because weight is so important to them. 400 watt hours per kilogram for several years now has been the magic figure that aerospace has been aiming for because that will literally allow electric flight to take off. However, for electric vehicles, that's not the important figure for energy density because you've got a finite amount of space to shove all of that battery into. And what they've just said just now is they have a material that's fairly lightweight, but for all we know it's the battery equivalent of expanded polystyrene. Yes, light, but there's not much of it that you can squeeze in there. So volumetric energy density, watt hours per liter is the key thing here. And we've already seen this with another much more established next generation battery chemistry, which is lithium sulfur, which again is 400 plus watt hours per kilogram. So aerospace loves it. But it's actually a fairly similar volumetric energy density to leading NMC cells today. So yes, you would get an increase in the range of the vehicle because it's lighter, but not because you've actually squeezed more capacity in. You've just effectively jettisoned the weight of a passenger. So that is what I'm particularly interested in and that is what Donut has been conspicuous in their absence of reporting. So for the automotive sector, we want to see volumetric energy density. That's what I'm holding out for.
- [15:42]
D
And these are cell densities, aren't they? Not packed entities.
- [15:45]
E
Correct? Yeah, as far as I'm aware, it's cell level. So as you've alluded to, once you add on kind of bus bars and modules and the overall pack, that obviously comes down a bit. But the same can be said of that 270 to 280 watt hours per kilogram figure that I mentioned earlier. Incidentally, those class leading NMC cells off the top of my head are about 750 to 800 at most watt hours per liter. So that's the headline figure you want to be beating. You know, if you're going above a thousand watt hours per liter starts, it starts to get pretty exciting. Right, but if it's 700ish, then yeah, it's later, but we're not going to see huge improvements.
- [16:23]
C
Yeah, that is very. That is so annoying that you're that, that you can explain that so, so clearly and Cleverly, because, you know, I always just think of it, I'll just use the metric I've read about, which is, you know, watt hours per kilogram by the weight, you know, and I think that tells me everything, Never thought of it about the space. So the watt hours per liter is. Liter takes up in any structure is critically important.
- [16:47]
E
Oh yeah. When it comes to electric car batteries, watt hours per kilogram, that's how they sting you. That's the sales pattern, that's what lures you in. But no, the tech savvy tire kickers, they know it's whatever's per liter that really matters.
- [16:59]
C
I'm gonna, I know that now, I'm gonna have that tattooed on my thumb so I don't forget. But that it is what I think is intriguing about it and I think you probably agree with me on this, Dave, that, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't easy to just instantly dismiss it as a load of old nonsense. There were some little bits of information in the, in all those press releases and in the, in the independent test where you go, oh, hang on, oh, I don't know if I quite know where to stand on this. I think, you know, it's, you know, as you said, David, time will tell. We can't.
- [17:32]
D
I mean, the very fact that they were prepared to stand up and make videos about a product as a known entity, and especially they've got this motorcycle verge, is it motorcycles that obviously are very good at making the. Or they are able to make these, these motors for the back wheel, that's their thing. And so, and then they're saying, we're going to put these batteries in our verge motorcycles for Delivery later in 2026. I mean, that's a reputational risk. If you're talking nonsense, if you're lying, then you're going to be very easily found out. So I suppose it just that now either they've got the kahunas of, you know, I don't know what, brass, a brass monkey and they just don't care. They're prepared and they're thinking, well, we need to give a bit of flannel at the front because we're getting a lot of upfront, we need the Capex to develop this product and therefore we need lots of deposits on lots of motorbikes, which I'm sure they've now got to bring some cash in. That's a possibility. And then they thought, well, we're close, we've got a product here that's pretty close. We're pretty sure, we're going to get it right within six months. So if we can get all this cash in with a nice big glossy video, maybe that'll get us across the line. Now, that is entrepreneurial risk taking at the nth level. That is, if that's what they've done or everything they've said is true and it's just a matter of time before they prove it. But as Ewan says, if that was the case. If that was the case, two things. A, they would have told us everything, including volumetric energy density. B, they would have provided any battery samples to the likes of Sandy Monroe and anybody else who wants to look at one to verify their details. And this is three things. I lied. Catl and BYD would have bought them already.
- [19:13]
C
Yeah, that would be. You would think. Yes, they would be very keen to find out.
- [19:18]
E
Surely there is that argument. But then again, I suppose there's the geopolitics of it as well. There has been an attempt to kind of localize production and to reduce the utter dominance that China has on the battery supply chain. So it could well be that Donut has genuinely done this because they want to try and build up European powerhouse. Who knows, maybe that's why. But certainly if this is as good as it is claimed to be, then the EU would be wise to make sure that we support the scaling up of this chemistry because we've seen too many promising startups wither on the vine and the same goes for the UK as much as continental Europe. Whereas the incredible support that not just startups but, you know, well established businesses get in China to weather more kind of turbulent times during, during kind of suppressed markets and so on, so that they can be the most competitive companies in the world. We need to be trying to emulate that. But that's, you know, that's going out of the lab and into the kind of commercial side of things. So probably out with the scope of this podcast, but it's another thing to consider.
- [20:24]
D
Very good point.
- [20:31]
C
This episode is brought to you by Hankook. The Hankook ion tyre is built exclusively for electric vehicles, engineered to deliver what EV drivers need most confident grip, quietness, energy efficiency and long mileage. As the official tire partner of Formula E HongKook proves its EV technology is at the highest level of performance and brings that same innovation to every ion tyre on the road. Move on. Because I think one of the weird things that's come up in the same time period which Elliot has made a video of in Shenzhen, he went to the BYD factory and Saw the launch of their flash chargers. This is a 1.5 megawatt charger for cars. So they've built, they've got one model, I think it's Adenza, which is their luxury brand, which can take that charge. And there's about six cars from different companies that can accept a 1.5 megawatts. You know, it's so funny, isn't it? Because all those things. Yeah, I remember when I first heard about a 50 kilowatt charger. Oh my God, that's enough electricity for a village, you know, which is. We're now looking enough electricity for a major suburb in a, you know, an urban environment. I mean, 1.5 megawatts, but massive batteries, all batteries, massive batteries on site. And they can do that. I mean, the, the design and the structure, I don't know if you've seen it, but the, the T shaped double charger hub just means, oh, such, I mean, it's so simple. Like, why didn't they do that right at the beginning underneath a cover, not out in the open in the rain, you know, it's all those things. But I mean that, you know, it's easy for, you know, a lot of people are focused on Donut Labs and the arguments around that, which is completely understandable. But meanwhile, huge companies that make millions of have introduced a totally sort of next level charging experience. Like, you know, really, you're talking in the real world, you'd stop there, you'd plug in for five minutes, get a cup of coffee and go on. I mean, and you've added probably a couple of, you know, 300km range in that time.
- [22:44]
E
But for most people, is that genuinely practical? Because as I've discussed so many times before, the fastest form of charging is often, paradoxically, the slowest. Because when I come home from work, plug in my car to my home charge point and then wake up in the morning to unplug it, that's only taken a few seconds of my time. And also because you don't have those massive grid connection costs, capacity charges, et cetera, the tariff that you pay as an end consumer is so much cheaper when you go for more conventional high power charging infrastructure. Plus, in the uk, the average dwell time at a motorway service station is about 25 minutes. So during that, today, what we do is we pull up at the service station, plug in our EV to a 300 odd kilowatt charger, go in for a Burger King and a Wizard and then come back out to a car that's ready to go. Whereas with these 5 minute chargers, the 1.5 megawatt units nightmare, which are perfect for. I mean they're perfect for HGVs that need it because they're physically bigger vehicles. But for a passenger car there's going to be 100 to 120 kilowatt hours at most. For now you're looking at turning up, probably queuing for it because it'll be like a petrol station, because it's a five minute turnaround time, so there'll be less of them, so there'll be a little queue. You then stay with your vehicle, then move into a conventional parking space to go in for a whiz and a sandwich, rather than having saved all that time by getting your car to be busy whilst you are elsewhere. So yeah, I must say that I'm skeptical about the use case for cars, with the exception of blue light services, emergency response vehicles, maybe some logistics. While I've already mentioned HGVs, of course, but for car and van size you might have your sort of dvd, maybe
- [24:25]
C
delivery vans or something like that, but
- [24:28]
E
not for most people listening to this podcast, I don't think it's going to worth your money or your time.
- [24:33]
D
Is there not a case for future. For saying it might be future proofing, as though you. And when we've got 20 million electric vehicles on the roads of Britain, is that not going to be more? Because you're right about home charging, of course, and I was. I'm always staggered by this statistic that something like 63% of homes in the UK have off street parking. I find that absolutely extraordinary. But that does leave 30 odd percent that don't. And if those people want to get into the EV world as well, they need some kind of reassurance. All of what you said is correct, but nevertheless we still have people like my neighbor for example, who still believes the old paradigm that EV charges don't work, they're too slow, I can't charge me van up and all the rest of it. Is there not a case that these sort of technologies are going to eliminate the last 30% of naysayers in the future when we literally have got critical density of vehicles on the roads?
- [25:30]
E
I mean, yeah, there is an argument that that is true, but that said, if we're able to deploy on street and sort of off street car park AC charge points, large banks of them, and supplement that with vehicle to grid capability, having those vehicles plugged in for longer is advantageous to the grid because it means, especially if they're bidirectional, that we would Have I haven't actually sat down and done the maths, but countless gigawatt hours worth of additional storage capacity handy so that at peak times, on cold winter nights without much wind, you can power all of the homes that are now cooking dinner and so on. And then obviously as the wind speed picks up overnight and the electricity demand dies, you can then start to charge those cars again. And you as an EV driver would be financially rewarded for that, even if you're using a public charge port, or at least you should. So that is the kind of ideal utopian future where you're actually reducing that equality gap between people who have driveways and people who don't because you're rewarding people for being able to contribute towards the grid, which by the way, I should point out, does not affect the battery any significant amount. Vehicle to grid. Actually, some batteries seem to enjoy that. So yeah, I wouldn't be too worried about, you know, using up the lifespan of your battery pack by doing vehicle to grid. This conversation incidentally, is being powered by my Nissan Leaf. So that gives you, gives you an idea of my faith in the, in the system. But yeah, that said, you know, for people who are genuinely in a hurry, then maybe having a handful of these greater than 1 megawatt car chargers, potentially in busy urban hubs and so on, as well as would it really be necessary for a motorway, but certainly for those kind of urban areas densely populated, no driveways, that could be handy. What I would say is it definitely makes sense in China where there is so much kind of on street. Well, not so, not so much on street parking, but like apartment blocks that have car parks, there's not necessarily designated parking spaces. What we have in China is a vast, you know, just kind of almost fields of high power chargers, isn't it? So they're treated like a giant petrol station. I think it's something like 50% of public charging infrastructure in China is DC rapid as opposed to AC slow stuff like you'd have on your wall at home.
- [27:46]
C
Right. And the other thing about this particular thing is, you know, I had to, I read from four different things, then watched Elliot's report. But it was basically, they launched it the other day and Elliot was there, that they'd already installed over 4,000 of these charges in China. They're installing 20,000 this year. But you know, before they publicly launched it and got the press in to look at them and try them out, they'd, they put in 4,000 of them. They just operate in a way that we cannot even begin to imagine. But just quickly, Ewan on that point, because I had a Xpeng G6 which we filmed the other day, and I was driving around in it for a week. Very nice car, bit too big for me, but, you know, amazing car with an incredible range, all that stuff, and 400 kilowatt charging, which I went, oh, I've got to have a go at that, you know. And eventually I found not far from me, so I could easily have got home without it. But it was a very nice comfort break for me. I'd driven a hell of a long way that day. Plugged it in, saw it charging. I think it didn't do 350 kilowatts, you know, that's what it says on the tin, but it never quite gets it. But it was two. I think it was 298. And I went, oh, that's impressive. Took a picture of it, literally, sort of trotted because I, desperate, I was desperate, trotted into the facilities, relieved myself, then bought a cup of coffee, got back to the car and it was at 98, charging at 110 kilowatts. So in that time, and I'm talking, I think, maximum of 12 minutes, and it wasn't empty. It was like at 40% when I plugged it in, so it wasn't going from nothing. But, my God, it's fast. And then I immediately thought, this is too bloody fast, I haven't got time, I need to. I was in a panic rush because also it was a really busy services with a lot of electric cars. There's 20 electric car chargers there, but there's only four 350 kilowatt ones. You know, it's all that stuff. So. And it's next to the car wash, so it's catastrophically complicated to get in and out all those stresses. But what you say is absolutely right, because what I worked out then was if I'd gone there in a petrol car, I'd have driven up, which was right. It was right next to the petrol pumps. I'd have driven up in the petrol car, got out, stood by the petrol car for maybe two minutes, only two minutes to fill it up, up maybe three, I don't know, you know, standing there waiting, then put the thing back, then put the cap on, then move the car because you can't leave it there, park the car, then go back to the garage because you need a Wii and you need a coffee. That takes longer than plugging in an electric already now, today, you know, without, with that, you know, that 300 essentially, you're. I'm with you on your argument. 350 kilowatts is fast enough for the next 20 years until we've got flying cars with 10,000 kilowatt hour batteries that weigh four ounces.
- [30:41]
E
You know, the thing is, this phenomenon is not new. When Tesla unveiled their V3 superchargers and started rolling them out in North America, the complaints from the new Tesla Model 3 drivers were that the superchargers were too fast. They were literally kind of running out of the service station, doing up their flying like, God damn it, you know, have to get back to my car before I get fine, you know, for staying too long. So, yeah, we're already at this stage and I mean, I've seen that with my own car. I've got an Ioniq 5 these days for kind of cross country stuff. It hooks it up to a 300 kilowatt rapid charger and it was topping out at like 220. And that seems like a heck of a lot to me. And it was something like 13% to 84% in 18 minutes, something like that. It would have been so much faster to me if the car park it was in had anywhere nearby to get a whiz in a sandwich. Unfortunately, it didn't. So I was sat in my car going, you know what a whiz would be getting mint right now. So that was the longest 18 minutes ever. But it was an impressive 18 minutes from the car's perspective.
- [31:43]
C
Yeah, no, it is. The thing I love is when you, you know, I've sort of, I try and explain this to people who've never driven electric cars, but I was driving in France year before last to go and visit a friend. It was a big birthday party and I wanted to take some wine and cheese, but I didn't want to take English wine and cheese. So we stopped at a big supermarket and that was why we stopped. We had had ample range to get to where we were going. And in that supermarket were 18, 350 kilowatt charges of some French thing and 26 Tesla chargers. Just like there, just in the car park. And the whole car park was covered in solar panels from one end of this huge, you know, out of town, you know, shopping center thing.
- [32:26]
D
That's legislation in France now, isn't it?
- [32:28]
C
It is. You. Yeah. Over a certain number. I think it's over 90 if you cut. If you can park more than 90 cars, it has to be covered in solar.
- [32:34]
D
Yeah.
- [32:35]
C
So we plugged the current. So when we arrived at our friend's house where I'd said, oh, maybe we might try and plug in your house. I said, don't worry about it. We were so. We were like 85 when we got to their house. It was just, you know, that stuff when it, when it arrives, when you don't know, that's the best experience. That's the exact opposite of arriving at two chargers, one of which might not be working, and the other one has got a. An eon van plugged into it for two hours. I'm just checking. Oh, no, the other one I'm interested in because I saw this last year in real life and I feel now you. And I was. It was so wasted on me. So I was at Catl's R D department where we were very kindly invited and I think we saw what they wanted us to see. You know, they made a couple of announcements about a month later I went, oh, then tell us about that. But, but they're sodium ion. They did show us the sodium ion batteries which they're talking about. It was really, the cost, I think, was fascinating. So 40, $40 a kilowatt hour cell cost for sodium ion batteries is, has got to be a kind of economic game changer if nothing else, you know, regardless of what, how good or bad the batteries are. Is that something you've discussed with your, you know, peers, how that's possible?
- [33:56]
E
Yeah, I mean, sodium ion at scale, that is entirely possible, but not immediately. So if we, if we have a look at how it's possible, there are three. I mean, just like lithium ion, sodium ion is a broad church of chemistries. There are three main families and there are numerous variants of them.
- [34:14]
C
Right.
- [34:14]
E
Just like, for example, when we see, when we say NMC, are we talking NMC? 111-6228-11523. All these.
- [34:24]
C
I mean, you've always been, been telling me that, Dave.
- [34:26]
D
Exactly.
- [34:27]
E
Like, you know, your hardcore electrochemist will go, all right, that one's going to be less thermally stable, but it will have better energy density or, oh, well, you've copped out a bit for stability, but you've used a bit more cobalt. You know, there's that kind of thing going on with sodium. It's highly unlikely that any of those chemistries will use cobalt. Some of them might use nickel, but they generally don't.
- [34:47]
C
So, I mean, they told us they don't use cobalt. They don't use cobalt. I don't remember about nickel. Yes.
- [34:54]
E
So Catl's chemistry, from what we've been able to glean from it so far, if it's what we think it is, it's particularly interesting. So the most expensive sodium ion chemistry, and this is relatively speaking, so it's still, if you were to produce it with the same kind of scale of supply chains as lithium ion has today, it would be cheaper than the cheapest lithium ion cell easily. So you're looking at layered oxides. Those are the closest to what lithium ion is today. You're typically looking at, you know, very, very cheap materials like iron and phosphorus and so on. You know, it's cheap stuff that goes into there, off the top of my head anyway. There's also polyamonic cathode materials which to be honest, they're kind of tricky to describe in a way that a non electrochemist would be able to understand. But you're looking at having multiple negative charges within the particle. But it's also an incredibly stable 3D structure. So the lifespan on them is actually fairly decent. The materials that they use are also pretty cheap. So, so NFPP is one of the more popular ones that's being developed just now and that is sodium, iron and phosphorus and some oxygen. Sometimes there's vanadium in there, sometimes there's manganese. But fundamentally you're looking at longer lifespan than layered oxides. And I suppose, yeah, there's at the expense of energy density a little bit. But here's a fun fact for you as well. If you go to the French equivalent of B and Q at Leroy Merlin and pick up their own brand of cordless screwdriver that is powered by a French made polyanionic sodium ion cell, I am getting one. Yep. You know what, I actually tried to find one online but I couldn't get it shipped. I was like, damn it, I want the first commercially.
- [36:38]
C
I'm due to be in France in June. I'm buying three. I'll send you, I'll send each of you one.
- [36:42]
E
Happy days. There we go. Thank you very much. Then you get to the really interesting stuff, which is Prussian blue, which is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen. There's nothing too exciting on going on in there. There's some metals you know, chucking about, but you know, it's, it's incredibly cheap materials, it's incredibly long lasting. You're looking at upwards of 10,000 cycles. Seemingly the efficiency might not be as high, but the safety is, is much higher. And as I say, the cost is so cheap that I remember sitting, watching Sky Arts one lunchtime and it was the joy of painting with Bob Ross.
- [37:20]
D
Yeah.
- [37:20]
E
And he was just painting A Woodside cabin. And I was just sitting there eating my lunch, minding my own business, and I just hear him come out with. And I said, we'll just get a little bit of the Prussian blue. It's like, that's a chemistry thing. Okay, so Bob Ross actually paints with Prussian blue. So that's how chief it is. You know, I mean, there's various analogs of it, you know, variations of it with different materials in there, but it's the fundamental structure that's similar. So the issue with the Prussian blue blue is that you're typically looking at the lowest energy density of the lot. And sodium ions already starting on the back foot because it's a bigger, bigger atom than lithium, so it's bulkier, it's heavier and so on. So if you are clever enough, if you're able to remove the anode and just because it's all like disorganized hard carbon rather than graphite, because sodium, you know, to put it crudely, sodium is too big to squeeze into the graphite fight. You know, there's, there's, there'll be a few electrochemists out there going, well, actually, it's like. Well, yeah, in the broad scheme of things, you know, if we want to keep it simple. But the point is that disorganized hard carbon allows sodium to, you know, to kind of get into the structure and out of the structure without physically damaging.
- [38:34]
C
So the sodium is replacing lithium. That's what its job is, effectively.
- [38:37]
E
But it's, it's slight. It's not a straight swap you have. It's a bit trickier to do. So if you are able to remove the carbon in the anode, which is a bulky structure, and if you're able to get away with using a pure sodium metal anode. So literally all of that anode could take part in the reaction. All of it could store energy, rather than being the stuff that stores the stuff that stores energy. Or if you go anode free, which is where you have the bare current collector which connects to the outside of the cell, and then you're basically just kind of Tracy, emining or splattering sodium atoms onto it during charging and then peeling them off again on discharge, that massively improves energy density. So Catl are talking about a lifespan of upwards of 10,000 cycles, which has Prussian blue all over it. But then you look at the energy density, which I think was about 175, whatever. Yeah, yeah.
- [39:30]
C
It's much lower. Is it?
- [39:31]
E
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's. I mean, that that's quite high for Prussian blue. It would be believable just about for your layered oxide structures, for example, but no, for your Prussian blue it's like, yeah, there's no way they're doing that with a hard carbon anode. So I suspect what they have is a pure sodium metal or so called anode free anode and then Prussian blue because they've talked quite heavily about using Prussian blue and the cycle life suggests it is. This is where they come out and say, oh yeah, we managed to get stupidly long life, layered oxide or something. But you know, know, it's interesting that they seem to have hopefully solved Prussian blue's biggest issue. And that means that you'd be looking at cells that at scale catl claim could make for about $19 per kilowatt hour. Once you've scaled up those supply chains, once you've scaled up those gigafactories, I mean you can make sodium ion cells on lithium ion gigafactories, but there's a lot of demand for lithium ion just now, so you might as well build new gigafactories for it. We will need to ramp up supply chains for some materials, but they are a lot more abundant than the materials lithium ion, so it shouldn't be too hard.
- [40:41]
D
Touch wood.
- [40:42]
E
Yeah, it's exciting, but it'll take a while for sodium ion to come down in price as we scale up the production, the supply chain. And also remember, lithium lithium ion batteries are incredibly cheap at the moment. They're the cheapest they've ever been. Expect to see those prices spike towards the end of the decade as demand starts to increase again. And I mean all of the kind of likes of benchmark mineral intelligence and so on. All of the big like consultancies that work on raw material supply chains have forecasted major deficits for lithium, cobalt nickel, all the stuff you really need to make a long range lithium ion battery. Watch as the industry rapidly pivots to sodium ion. As soon as we start to get into that territory.
- [41:23]
D
Is there a potential dendrite issue with the solid sodium anode or is it not the same as lithium in that sense?
- [41:28]
E
So yeah, it is still a risk if you're using a liquid electrode electrolyte. It's, it's always difficult to get the metal to plate evenly. And of course, you know, there's different chemical considerations with sodium ion versus lithium ion. But fundamentally if you're able to use a solid state electrolyte you have, you wouldn't necessarily have removed the problem entirely, but you vastly, you Vastly reduced the risk. You've almost mitigated it. Solid state electrolytes are dendrite resistant, heavily dendrite resistant. So. So that would make it quite an impressive thing if Catl has done that too and gone straight ahead with solid state. But even if they're using a liquid electrolyte, they'll probably have some clever additives in there that do encourage the sodium ions to plate evenly on that surface, if you're clever with your electrolyte formulation. There's so many different electrolyte formulations that are obviously industry secrets, but they will have figured out some clever additive that goes. Goes. Nope, you stop, you know, stop piling up on one another. You go over there, you go over there and it just kind of.
- [42:31]
C
I think it's worth. Just quickly, just for the. There might be some people listening who aren't. Because even I know what the dendrites are. You know, that is. Even though. I mean, although that's kind of fairly basic, but it is the fact that there are. You can build up little spikes of the material which then ostensibly reduce the lifespan of the battery. I mean, is that a reasonable basic explanation?
- [42:56]
E
Yeah. Little branch, like growths of metal, whether it's lithium or sodium, or if you've really knackered a lithium ion cell, the copper from the current collector, if you over discharge it, and that is a harder metal than lithium. So that's an even more spiky branch which gradually grows.
- [43:13]
C
Yeah.
- [43:13]
E
And then, as you say, punctures the separator, touches the cathode deposit electrode, creates an internal short circuit, it rapidly discharges, it vents cross gas, it catches fire, possibly depending on the chemistry.
- [43:23]
D
You don't want that.
- [43:24]
E
No, no, no. Best. Best avoided.
- [43:26]
D
Yeah.
- [43:26]
C
Well, it's just like the. The recent story of the big fire next to Glasgow Central Station in a vape.
- [43:33]
D
Vape shop. Yep.
- [43:34]
C
God.
- [43:36]
E
Anyway, the thing is, vape batteries are terribly made. Like the single use ones as well are horrific. Like, there's basically no. No safety checks on these things. And then of course you get the vape bros who will take the ones that are rechargeable and have the likes of. For the sort of 20% or so of you who are actually watching this rather than listening, I have in my hand just Now a Panasonic 18650 cell, the type of which you would see in a Tesla Model S and also potentially in a rechargeable vape. Now, Panasonic, reputable brand, trustworthy. When you start getting brands that literally have the most ominous names Ever like ultrafast fire. Not good. So, fun fact, about a decade ago when I worked at WMG University of Warwick, myself and my good friends Taz and Joe, we were basically like Ant and Dec and Steve Mulhern. We were all just like, you know, thick as thieves. And we, well, it was. Taz actually had bought some of these really cheap and nasty 18650 cells off of eBay or somewhere like that and we did a tear down of them in, in the glove box and we actually creased ourselves laughing at how badly they were made inside because we're so used to taking these likes of these Panasonic ones, chopping the top off them, you know, doing various bits and pieces to them. We know what a well made cell looks like and you can literally tell without doing any significant work other than hacking the top off it, that it was an absolute abomination of a thing that should never have been granted. Well, it should never have been made and it should never have been granted the right to be sold anywhere. So yeah, vapes are bombs in your pocket. They are horrific. And if you start doing overclocking and things like that, for goodness sake, make sure that you're buying reputable batteries for the rechargeable ones and the single use ones. Not only are they an environmental catastrophe, but they are a massive, massive health hazard that's just taken out one of the most iconic buildings in the center of Glasgow. Ban them. Ban them now.
- [45:32]
C
Yeah, they should be bang turned. Yeah, take up smoking.
- [45:38]
E
It's much safer.
- [45:39]
C
Much safer. That's terrible. I didn't say that.
- [45:47]
A
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- [46:20]
C
I just want to touch on one last topic because it's been fascinating. I've got a. I'm getting a small bee in my bonnet. Slash chip on shoulder slash grumpy old man. About D centers and about energy use in data centers. I think my, my problem is for years, and I know you two will have heard this, you know, there was people going on, oh, all these electric cars. If we all had electric cars, we'd melt the grid and then suddenly data centers are really Cool and amazing and the government wants them and they're going to create jobs and they're going to be brilliant. And there are massive, massive energy use in one specific location. Not spread all over the country with hundreds of different charges. Is one place in Devon or Sunderland where there's colossal city level energy demand all of a sudden for one big box building. I mean this stuff that when people are listening and watching this is stored in a data center. You know, I'm not saying it's them over there, it's all of us, we're all in, we're all viable, liable to it. But I mean the impact that I'm, I'm. See, I've seen too many and read too many articles about, about the negative aspects of them. But I mean, Dave, I mean can I ask you because that, do you feel that they are, that they could be? I don't know. Well, we, that we've got to live with them.
- [47:37]
D
Yes.
- [47:37]
C
I mean AI ones are the ones that. I think that.
- [47:41]
D
Yeah, I mean there's two things there. There's this and both of them have a certain amount of hysteria around them. One is AI and one is data centers. And I think AI has definitely got a lot of hysteria around it. American companies are very good at driving this hysteria because of course it builds the sales, it builds the value of their businesses and it builds the investment opportunities that they get. And you know, and we are living in a bubble at the moment, certainly from the point of view of AI that's going to burst at some point. Not that I'll disappear, we'll always have AI. Data centers are an inevitable part of our future. There's no question about that. We are, we are an increasingly electronic society, more remote. You know, we rely on these electronic devices more and more. That's not going to go away. Barring a nuclear conflagration of course, which could change all the rules. And that's not, that's not beyond the bounds of possibility moment of course. But let's put that to one side.
- [48:29]
C
Yeah.
- [48:29]
D
All things being equal, that they are a part of our future. One of the biggest challenges with data centers is keeping them cool. As, as you told you probably more than me, but and there are myriad different ways of doing that. In fact, some, some, some options. You know, you can heat the, you put them into district, heat them, cool them with water and run that back through a district heating system, for example. That's just one example. And you know, you don't. And some of these, Google and others are purportedly Asking to build their own gas fired power stations to run their data centers, utter madness. And that would not happen outside of the Trump administration. They'd be looking at renewables to do that or possibly nuclear power for the very distant future. And that, you know, let's go not get into small modular nuclear reactors, that's a different thing altogether. But the point being cooling them is the challenge. And there's lots of very good ways of doing that without using as much electricity, I think, as we're using at the moment. I don't know if you would agree with that in Ewan.
- [49:23]
E
Yeah, I mean, honestly, the electricity consumption that we're seeing from data centers does need to be taken into account. I would say that if you're building a data center, you need to be able to prove that you can power it through green means. And admittedly, merely covering the roof with solar panels is not going to be an option. But if you can at least demonstrate that you are doing your bit. And I'm not talking about the kind of dodgy home builder cartel thing of we'll put three solar panels on a three bed family home. I'm talking like every last inch of that roof is covered in solar pv, as is the car park. Have some wind turbines nearby, some battery storage, et cetera, and then also demonstrate that you're somehow managing to benefit the grid at peak times as well. Which, by the way, the data center would be financially rewarded for partaking in grid supporting markets with any on site battery energy storage. But yeah, what we're seeing over in North America is that a lot of data centers, because the present administration does not like renewable energy, are being built with on site fossil fuel generators, which is revolting. So what we need to see here is genuinely green generators. In other words, your solar, your wind, potentially hydro, if it's suitable for the area, so that we don't end up literally boiling our planet alive just because you wanted to make some amusing kind of AI slop photo of yourself to put on Facebook.
- [50:47]
C
Facebook, yeah. Now that is the slightly depressing side of it, isn't it? There was actually some. I saw an advert today, earlier today, which was an advert by an AI company showing what you can do with their generative AI. It was a visual thing. It was like a movie with a monster that attacked some soldiers or something. And it was dire. I mean, technically it was stunning. It looked amazing and it was totally plausible and the humans were totally plausible. Human. Humans. And all the comments, there was not one positive comment. That's just Slop. No one's going to watch. It's not interesting what a stupid adverts backfiring on you, you know, that's, oh, you know, anyway, but that, that I, I accept very readily that there are much better uses that we will finally come to. But I mean I think it is, I think it's mainly my grumpiness about how long I've had to put up with people saying electric cars will melt grid. Electric cars might actually facilitate the use of AI because if they have a big car park and all the cars are electric they can power the bloody data center.
- [51:48]
D
We should also remember, as all of, all of us have said on multiple occasions with the primary energy fallacy, which is that we don't have to replace all the, all the primary energy that we currently generate. 80% of our world energy comes from fossil fuels today, but we don't need to replace that because 60% of it goes to heat and wasted. We need to replace the use. Not even the final energy actually just the useful energy. So you get the primary energy is what you produce, then final energy is what the consumer buys. But then that consumer puts that through a device which also has its inefficiencies. So you've got the actual, what we need to replace is the useful energy that actually makes useful work for a consumer. And that is when you, when you go through those stages and eradicate the waste from those stages, it's a much, much more, it's like 30% of what we generate in primary energy today. And that's a mass consideration that often gets missed out of these like for like, but not really like for like comparisons between what we use today and what we're going to use in the future.
- [52:49]
C
Yeah, yeah. But I think what we've covered today is the fact that whatever happens, I mean I think let's, let's take the thermonuclear destruction of the human race off
- [53:00]
D
the list for a moment.
- [53:01]
C
But whatever happens, the change that we're, we're seeing now, and I find this is what I find exciting, this is what gets me up in the morning is, you know, is beyond, you know, any sort of criticism of tree hugging liberals wanting electric cars because they think they're cleaner. You know, electric cars are still cars. You know, when you park them, they still block up the street. A traffic jam still happens with electric cars. You know, there's lots of, plenty of negative, but they are different and they will have a different role in our lives as will, you know, about the fact that batteries, it Keeps coming back to batteries. For me, that. That's where the biggest change is happening because you suddenly can. Like there isn't now a solar farm. I've just done a report about solar farm in Dubai. Well, Abu Dhabi, which I'm hoping is okay. It's still there, but that is supplying 1 gigawatt of electricity 24. 7. So that is a 5 gigawatt solar farm, which is mahusive and God knows how many gigawatt hours of batteries, but it supplies a constant 1 gigawatt of electricity 24 hours a day, day all year round and without any fluctuation. So they. It produces lots more than that, obviously at certain times, but it can guarantee a 1 gigawatt supply, which is. That's the first one I've heard of that is doing that. And that is because the economics of that much solar and batteries makes sense now. It's cheaper to do that than to build a 1 gigawatt gas turbine. Much cheaper. Yeah. Which is, you know, I'm just going to end, like sort of end us. End for us there. But that's a good thing. Thing that we can. We can end on a happy note. But thank you so much, guys. Ewan, I mean, that was brilliant. There's a cut about two things you said that I didn't understand that I didn't ask to go into, but you know, there's a huge amount you said that I think was just fascinating. I'm sure you agreed.
- [54:52]
D
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- [54:53]
C
Wonderful value. Yeah. But that was really good. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk today and really appreciate it. And let's. I want to do the. I want. I want to do this again. Can we do it every week? Sure.
- [55:09]
E
I can squeeze a bit of my
- [55:11]
C
schedule, but I'd certainly. I really hope we can do it again soon because it is really interesting. Yeah, great. That's good. Thank you.
- [55:18]
E
Thanks for having us on.
- [55:24]
A
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- [55:55]
C
Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Just fascinating. Mar my brain did melt at one or two occasions when Ewan was explaining various aspects of battery chemistry. But fascinating and just so exciting and so many possibilities. And it's not entirely impossible that Donut Labs actually have a battery that would actually work. Really exciting to learn all those things. I'll remain skeptical for the time being. Anyway, that's what we've got time for. For I won't mention subscribing, but obviously if you want to, please do. And as always, if you have been, thank you for watching.