Episode 149 | Limitless Lithium | Electrovaya
I’ve not been shy about my feelings on lithium ion’s promise to be everything to everyone–powering all our cars and backing up every megawatt of renewable energy. I prefer a balanced basket of energy resources.
Ontario-based Electrovaya has been supplying lithium ion batteries since the earliest days of the technology. While other lithium manufacturers plan to become ubiquitous, Electrovaya has repositioned itself with laser focus on the material handling sector.
My guest, Dr. Raj DasGupta, became CEO last June. He says Electrovaya initially moved aggressively into the passenger electric vehicle market, with plans to build vehicles for Dodge, Daimler, and India’s Tata Motors, circa 2010. “What we were finding was that it was extremely cost-competitive. We were making losses on our products,” he says.
In 2018 they made a pivot away from passenger EVs. “We essentially bet the company and the company almost didn’t make it at the time, but we did,” he says.
Material handling is far from a niche market. It’s worth billions of dollars. Raj says the key to their “Infinity Battery” technology is the enormous number of cycles they can endure. He says a typical EV battery is good for 1,000-2,000 cycles. Their Infinity Batteries can do 9,000 full cycles (0-100%) before dropping to 85% of original capacity.
“If you put that into your EV, you can last much longer than the chassis of that car,” he says.
He adds that Electrovaya’s ceramic separator is far more robust and less likely to result in “thermal runaway” –fires. This is critical in a setting like an Amazon warehouse where there could be as many as 200 battery-powered forklifts.
Raj also mentioned that these batteries could potentially work on utility-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS). I asked if these batteries could help limit the number of “augmentations,” or need to add capacity as the original batteries begin to degrade.
“As the CEO, as I look at this energy storage industry, I know we have the right technology for that market,” he says, “but we’re not pushing it too much at this point because I have to wait until some of these energy storage systems reach their end of life and then developers start scratching their heads and go, ‘Oh, maybe we should have picked a different battery technology.’”
In addition to forklifts, Raj says they are planning to move on to trucks and buses. After that, BESS sites, robotics and potentially space.
“That’s one of the things I’ve pushing as CEO is have a bit of focus and win at the first one and then go to the next one.”
So, is lithium best confined to a small number of applications?
“I’m of coursed biased. I’m a lithium guy,” he says. “We’re just at the start of this revolution.”
Useful Links: