Words Greg Offer
I regularly get asked to comment on scientific breakthroughs. Papers published that make bold claims about how they will change the world, or company announcements of new technology. Academic papers can sometimes be hard to reproduce, but company announcements are even harder to scrutinise. Companies don’t have to publish enough information so others can repeat their work. In fact, the exact opposite is the case – they don’t want to give away vital IP to competitors. Therefore, it becomes a difficult task to assess which advancements are going to be the next big thing and which are just marketing and investor relations.
When looking at companies, I normally follow the people. Look at the key founders, and see if they have published any papers, or filed patents in their name, not just the company name. This often gives us a reasonable insight into the IP the company might have started with, but beyond that the trail can often get harder as a business mindset takes over the academic one.
The other thing I consider is the technology readiness level (TRL), with some important caveats.  With academic papers it is straightforward and reasonably safe to assume they are at TRL2, perhaps 3 but rarely further. For new materials I then apply a crude three-year rule. That it takes around three years to scale up production by an order of magnitude. Annual cathode demand exceeded 500kt in 2021 and is projected to increase by an order of magnitude by the end of the decade. Therefore, if to write a paper you need to have made 10g, it could take 15 years to make a tonne, and another 15 years to commercialize and make a 100kt a year. That’s just 2% or less of the market by the time it comes to market. To put this into context silicon was first ‘discovered’ as an anode material in the late 1990s and is finding its way into batteries at increasing proportions almost 30 years later.
The three-year rule doesn’t apply to everything. Some technologies can be scaled up quicker, such as changes to manufacturing processes particularly if they are modifications to existing processes rather than requiring new technologies. This is a challenge facing solid state batteries, in addition to meeting the challenge of scaling up the volume of materials available. I predict that the successful companies are most likely to be those that can adapt existing manufacturing processes rather than innovate entirely new ones.
However, possibly the most exciting, with the fastest route to market, is software. Incumbents like Tesla have been doing over-the-air software upgrades since they started. It is possible to go from a new battery control software, after a few years testing, to a widespread rollout across millions of vehicles or devices, within a few years.
