Dan Steingart:
My hope and my thesis is that with more batteries in the United States making people’s lives better, it will encourage better upstream manufacturing in the US because we just think it’s important. We just think it’s worthwhile. We’ll think about it the same way we think about oil refining, which is what we should do.
Bill Loveless:
The conflict in Iran is a reminder of how quickly global energy markets can be disrupted. It also underscores why advances in things like battery technology, from grid scale storage to electric transportation, are becoming central to energy resilience and security. It’s been about 50 years since British chemist Stanley Whittingham laid the foundation for the first lithium ion battery at an Exxon research lab in New Jersey.
In 2019, he and two other scientists, John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino, earned a Nobel Prize for the breakthrough. By then, lithium ion batteries had transformed consumer electronics in a growing segment of the transportation sector. And today, battery storage is playing an increasing role in supplying new capacity to the electric power sector.
So what is the state of battery innovation today? Are there battery chemistries that could dethrone lithium ion technology? How do mineral availability and environmental health play into the battery market? And what does the federal government’s waning support for renewable energy mean for the battery industry?
This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless.
Today on the show, Dan Steingart. Dan is the Stanley Thompson professor of chemical metallurgy and a professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University. He also chairs the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering and co-directs the Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center. Prior to joining Columbia in 2019, Dan was an associate professor at Princeton University.
Dan and I talked about technology improvements in the battery space and what those could mean for both performance and cost. We surveyed the leading battery chemistries, looked at different energy storage applications, and Dan told me what battery innovation he’s excited about, but also what he thinks is being overhyped today. Here’s our conversation. Dan Steingart, welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange.
Dan Steingart (02:41):
It’s wonderful to be here, first time caller, longtime listener.
Bill Loveless (02:45):
Well, we appreciate that. It’s good to have you here for a conversation about a technology that’s getting a lot of attention these days, and that’s batteries. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see headlines about some breakthroughs. And it gets me to question how well we understand these technologies and the opportunities and challenges that it represents. So here we are. For people who don’t live in the battery world every day, Dan, what’s the single most important development in batteries right now that they might be missing?
Dan Steingart (03:22):
Well, it’s such an interesting question because it’s impossible for anyone who’s listening to this podcast not to be living in the battery world. I challenge a listener to not count at least three lithium ion batteries within 10 feet of them right now. It’s a remarkably ubiquitous technology. And I’m going to date myself. I’m going to date you a little bit here, Bill, and I apologize for this. I think we both remember a time where people complained more about batteries and them not working when we needed them to. So whether it’s a flashlight not working and you open it up and it’s crushed over with that nasty white stuff, or in the first set of portable phones where we had to deal with this silly memory effect like, did you remember to fully discharge the battery before you charged that? And anyone who’s older than me, the first question I get from them is, do I still have to do that?
(04:16):
My kids have no idea what they’re talking about. And so it’s less that the technology is getting better because the technology is getting better. But what I want to convey is that the technology now is good enough that we should be thinking how to install batteries everywhere to stabilize and improve, excuse me, grid performance and stop waiting for the next revision. What I hate hearing as a battery technologist is, “Well, we’re going to wait for batteries when they can hit metric X, Y, or Z.” As a battery technologist and having colleagues in chemistry and mechanical engineering and chemical engineering and material signs that are working on new materials and certainly improvements, yeah, we’ll get there, we’ll get lighter batteries, we’ll get batteries with longer range, but we’re in a moment now where in order to make those improvements worthwhile and in order to have companies want to make those improvements, product designers end users of batteries should be thinking, how can I use them more and how can I get the public comfortable with the ubiquity of batteries?
(05:27):
And then how do we make sure that they’re as safe as possible and we drive fires to zero? So I think that the most exciting thing in batteries now are the products that are coming out in and around batteries. And I’m not a disinterested party in this. A company spun out of my lap this summer that participated in a ConEd pilot where we put large-ish one kilowatt-hour LFP batteries in series with air conditioners. ConEd gave a signal, said, “We look like we’re going to get to brown-out conditions.” The company sent a signal to the battery saying, disconnect the air conditioner from the wall, but continue to run the air conditioner and it worked beautifully. And all these consumers in the pilot had to do was put a lunchbox size battery between the wall and their air conditioner and it had remarkable impact on the grid.
(06:27):
The company’s called Standard Potential. I apologize for that same shameless plug, but there are a lot of really fun products in and around this space. And the more products that enter this space, the better batteries we’ll get because now upstream producers of cells will say, “Okay, consumers really want this functionality. Let’s put the R&D in. Let’s get the UL certifications. Let’s go.”
Bill Loveless (06:50):
Right, right. And I want to talk about the applications on the grid because that’s really a prevalent topic these days. But more broadly for the moment, how would you describe the state of battery innovation today? Are we seeing incremental improvements or true step changes?
Dan Steingart (07:07):
I think it’s incremental in the best way. And again, disruption is great for the venture capitalist and the innovator that survives. And it’s okay for society. Things get better, but what’s better for a field is what is referred to in the semiconductor world as the TikTok moment, not TikTok, the controversial social media platform that I’m obsessed with, but rather this roadmappable performance improvement. Battery companies now can roadmap ways of reducing the cost of cells and systems while increasing the energy density, not quite in a Moore’s Law fashion. These things don’t improve… they know double every 18 months, but they cost-decrease by a few percent every year and energy density increases by a few percent every year. And what’s important is that this is now predictable. And that’s what’s so exciting about the state. It’s evolutionary, but it’s evolutionary in the best way. Now we can roadmap what equipment we need to make these cells better, what software innovations we need to make the battery control systems better.
(08:18):
This is all predictable. Companies can allocate the engineering resources and the non-recurring engineering fees to get this done knowing that there’s a product at the end of the rainbow that people want, despite potentially the mishegoss that’s happening in the US right now with respect to batteries.
Bill Loveless (08:37):
Well, it’s important, I think, to talk a bit about battery chemistry. I mean, one thing I look forward to in this conversation, Dan, was to make sure people understand fundamentally battery chemistry and all. I certainly would benefit from that. And we can talk about the different chemistries. Of course, there’s lithium ion batteries, which have been optimized for what, some 30 years. Are we approaching fundamental limits or is there still a meaningful runway left for that technology?
Dan Steingart (09:04):
It’s a hard question. Look, we’re approaching a fundamental limit on the total amount of energy density because there’s simply not a metal that is better at being an anode than lithium. Lithium is very light and it’s very reducing. It’s what makes lithium-ion batteries part of what makes a lithium ion battery potentially dangerous because lithium is so reactive. So the lithium ion system is the platform, and it will evolve into having less and less other stuff and more and more lithium in it. So right now, the lithium ion battery has an anode. This is where the lithium is stored when the battery is charged and it’s graphite. And just the way to think about it is that every lithium needs six carbon atoms around it in order to keep it safe, in order to make the performance predictable. The next step that I see, and this is something that’s been in labs for 20 years and it’s beginning to see commercialization now is silicon.
(10:10):
So silicon is a little heavier than graphite. One silicon atom is a little bit heavier than a carbon atom, but I can store, and this is going to sound weird to your listeners, and it’s even weird to material scientists, but I can store 22 lithium atoms per four or five, depending on how I’m doing it, silicon atoms. And so the silicon alloys with the lithium. So this means that I’m effectively putting more lithium in for less superstructure, and this is what makes the battery more energy dense. And then the holy grail is to get rid of that superstructure altogether, just have pure lithium. So what this means practically is that if I go from my graphite system now to a system that has a pure lithium metal anode and I change nothing else, the range improvement you will see in your car will be somewhere from 30 to 50%, not orders of magnitude, but seriously reducing the range anxiety.
(11:15):
If I can improve other aspects of the battery, if I can improve where the lithium has to go in the discharge state, we call this the cathode. If I can reconfigure this to enable higher voltages, right now the nominal voltage of a cell is 3.8 volts. If I can reconfigure this to make it 4.1, 4.2 nominal top of charge would be 4.6, 4.7, I can get further improvements. If I can store more lithium in that cathode, I get even more. So if I roadmap everything I can possibly roadmap now and I squeeze every ounce performance out of it, it would be a two to 300% improvement. So range would double or triple potentially. That’s the holy grail. That is exceptionally difficult, but that’s the limit. And it’s going to be in and around lithium. If that happens, lithium will be involved in that system. There is a move to sodium.
Bill Loveless (12:17):
And sodium too has been getting … There’s been a lot of hype over sodium recently. I just saw a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency that said sodium ion batteries could offer a promising cost reduction alternative to lithium ion batteries. So is that hype or is there really an opportunity to reshape cost and supply chains there?
Dan Steingart (12:39):
It is a real opportunity, but the game theory around it is super tricky. Sodium ion batteries are effective. They work really well. I do a lot of research in my lab on them, but one for one, it’s very difficult to point to a single thing that they’re better at than a lithium ion battery. Even cost, right? So sodium is far more abundant than lithium, but the cost of lithium in a lithium ion battery, that the percentage that lithium makes up in the total lithium ion battery is well under 10%. And we saw the sensitivity in real time during the pandemic. Lithium prices shot up for lithium carbonate from something like $15 a kilogram to $60, $70 a kilogram. But the price of a lithium ion battery only went up by 3% to 6%, depending on who you ask. So lithium prices can have a lot of elasticity and not have a whole lot of impact on the price or the cost of a lithium ion battery.
(13:43):
That said, sodium is globally abundant. So if we take away just the pure cost economics and we look at security, national security, geopolitical stability, all of that good stuff that you love to think about at CGEP, sodium’s available everywhere. And so if I have to, and I want to take a performance hit, I don’t get as much range, for example, in my car or I need a larger battery to store the same amount of energy in my home, I can source almost everything I need for a sodium ion battery immediately from the United States or friend-shored countries. So this is all a long way to saying that sodium ion technologies exist as a platform as a ceiling for the price of lithium ion cells. If lithium ion cells hit a price that the market doesn’t want to bear, sodium ion can saturate it. So it keeps lithium ion producers honest.
(14:42):
And now here’s the tricky game theory. If I’m a sodium ion producer, I literally exist as a check on a lithium ion producer. How do I make money other than getting government subsidies or some kind of reassurance market to make sure that there’s cells that are existing? And this is the macroeconomic picture that sodium ion producers find themselves in now. It’s an effective technology, but when the lithium ion supply chain is behaving itself, it’s not really necessary.
Bill Loveless (15:11):
Interesting. What other technologies, solid state batteries, they’ve gotten a lot of press too. From a materials, a manufacturing standpoint, what’s actually hard about making them commercial?
Dan Steingart (15:21):
A solid state system still has lithium in it. It’s the electrolyte. It’s how the lithium moves from the anode to the cathode. Right now, we have an organic solvent, and that organic solvent is what enables a lithium ion battery to work, but it has some challenges we can get into in a moment. The ability for an ion to move quickly enough in the solid state to compete with a liquid is from a material science perspective magic. When I was a student thinking about, we call these materials superionic conductors, thinking about room temperature superior conductors, that’s a fancy name for them that could compete with a liquid conductor was almost unimaginable. So the technology breakthrough is fantastic. But if I can have your listeners take their hands and put them together, two solid objects, and you’ll notice that as tightly as you squeeze your hands together, there’s still gaps.
(16:24):
There’s still gaps. And this is the challenge with all solid state systems. If I zoom in at the nanoscopic interface, there is nothing that is perfectly smooth. And if I have a gap, whether it’s vacuum or an air gap, I can’t do electrochemistry at that gap. And so this is the main challenge with all solid state batteries. How you actually get this solid layer, which is remarkably effective, in intimate enough contact with the anode and the cathode at the scale that’s required for cars and homes — it’s a huge manufacturing challenge. I can’t emphasize that enough. Companies are spending billions of dollars to tackle this challenge, but it is as of yet not scaled. There’s a lot of very compelling laboratory demos that indicate that it could happen, but it’s still an outstanding scaling and engineering challenge.
Bill Loveless (17:25):
So lithium ion remains the preeminent technology here. Sodium ion could provide some measure of competition under certain circumstances. And solid state batteries, while interesting, perhaps promising in some ways, are still sort of farther behind in terms of these three types of technology.
Dan Steingart (17:43):
That’s right. And what we debate about in the battery community is whether or not solid state is required to get to that two or 300% increase. Right now, just to lay my biases clear, I’m sort of team liquid, but plenty of people that are far smarter than I am are team solid. And I would love to be wrong about the scalability of solid state electrolytes within lithium ion and lithium metal systems. But this silly hand-on-hand nook challenge is non-trivial. It’s really hard.
Bill Loveless (18:16):
Can we talk a little bit more about chemistries? There’s new chemistries as I understand it, right? Zinc, aluminum, iron-air, lithium, sulfur. Do any of these technologies or chemistries strike you as genuinely promising? And what are the challenges, I guess, the physics challenge that must be solved for each of them?
Dan Steingart (18:37):
It’s a great question. 20 years ago, I would’ve said, yeah, these are all very promising because there are a lot of things that it looks like a lithium ion battery can’t do. And you could find a spirit animal, and I could really bore you to death with the details of it, but it’s sort of an irrelevant conversation because the way we have to start with any question in batteries is we have to ask ourselves, why can’t lithium iron phosphate do X? Lithium iron phosphate is a cathode for lithium ion battery. It’s not the best at anything, but it’s very good at everything. And it is iron, which is, depending on how you’re counting, second or third, most abundant metal on the earth’s surface and phosphorus, which is phosphate, which is used in fertilizers. And just to give you a sense of it, if we increased the production of lithium iron phosphate batteries by a thousand fold, it would make maybe a 1% dent in the fertilizer market, and it probably wouldn’t scratch the structural steel market.
(19:45):
So this is just to say that it’s incredibly abundant. It’s an effective material at what it does, and it’s safe. Lithium iron phosphate cells are less likely to explode than their nickel-bearing counterparts. So before we ask this question, should I use aluminum? Should I use zinc? We have to ask, why not use lithium-ion phosphate? Where is it going fail? I love zinc batteries. I’ve worked on zinc battery for 20, 25 years. Zinc batteries were the first batteries they’ve been around for. If we put the first zinc silver battery, zinc copper battery, the Voltaic pile and the Daniell cell at say 1800, we play with history a little bit. It’s been an active material in the battery space for 225 years, remarkable. And it’s used in our Duracell alkaline energizer alkalines all the time, and that’s not going to be displaced anytime soon. It’s a robust, shelf-stable chemistry that is very safe.
(20:45):
But to be blunt, it is very difficult to make a zinc battery that has a competitive levelized cost of energy stored. So the way to think about this is I pay some amount of capital for my battery, and then I divide that capital by how many times I get to use the battery. And there’s a much more extensive equation, but that’s the easiest way to think about it. I pay for the battery and then I figure out what my cost per use is. Lithium-iron phosphate is very hard to beat. And I’ve published a lot of papers trying to beat this and I haven’t. I’ve come close and I have these edge cases where I say, “Well, if this happens and mercury is in retrograde, then maybe.” But lithium-ion phosphate is very good at what it does.
Bill Loveless (21:30):
So could zinc, sodium, other chemistries meaningfully reduce dependence on scarce minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel? I mean, I understand what you’re saying. There’s limitations to them in comparison to what’s available now with lithium and batteries, but there’s also the big concern over dependence on scarce minerals.
Dan Steingart (21:49):
Absolutely. So look, the scarcity of lithium is debatable. Lithium is scarce, but lithium and zinc, order of magnitude, are the same abundance. So we have to be careful on what problem we’re trying to solve. Sodium is far more abundant. Aluminum, iron, far more abundant. But abundancy is a satisfaction condition, not a maximization condition. You just need enough. So just because there’s more sodium, much more sodium than lithium, doesn’t mean there’s not enough lithium. So we have to be careful there. And I emphasize that because I’ve made that mistake in the past. Now with nickel, yeah, absolutely. But lithium iron phosphate solves this nickel problem. So it’s important for listeners to understand that within the ecosystem of lithium ion batteries, we can trade mineral, resource content, and performance.
Bill Loveless (22:40):
What about cobalt?
Dan Steingart (22:41):
So cobalt, that’s an excellent point. Cobalt is so expensive on its own that the battery industry has just naturally shedded to reduce the cost. And it turns out that through materials engineering and better system design and better electrolyte design, the benefits of cobalt can be replaced by nickel. And in fact, systems that have more nickel and less cobalt are more performative once you solve some of these stability challenges. So cobalt is roadmap to be effectively out of cells if I’m optimistic out of EVs and grid store it sells by 2030. And if cobalt is used, it will be in consumer electronic applications where it has some benefit.
Bill Loveless (23:27):
That’s interesting to hear regarding cobalt because there have been concerns of where cobalt comes from, for example, in the Republic of Congo. And I guess the same could be said too for dependence on other minerals, nickel, for example, our dependence on nickel from other places whose supply might be in question at some point.
Dan Steingart (23:45):
Absolutely. So luckily there’s a multi-pronged approach to it. Cobalt can largely be replaced. There are non DRC sources of cobalt. They have their own challenges that I’m happy to get into. Most of them are permitting and social license challenges, which I don’t mean to reduce their importance. Those are exceptionally hard problems to solve, but they’re less technology challenges. There are some technology challenges in extracting new cobalt. And my colleagues here at Columbia, particularly Alan West, is thinking about this. Alan has thought remarkably clearly about nickel and has an exciting new technology that can valorize nickel that’s produced that’s mined in the US. The challenge around nickel, and I give this as an example to show you how multifaceted these challenges are. There is a lot of nickel in North America. There is a lot of it. Historically, refining the nickel is an environmentally awful process.
(24:44):
We think of nickel as it’s just a nickel, and jewelry is made out of it, and it’s pretty innocuous stuff. In its metallic form, that’s the case. In my lab, we have these materials, safety data sheets, these MSDSs, and nickel when it’s out of a rock, but before it’s in a metal, is very scary stuff. And what I mean by scary, everything, all of these MSDSs give some cancer risk or some carcinogen. Nickel chloride is a mutagen. So nickel chloride doesn’t just give you cancer, but if you have nickel poisoning and then have kids, it changes your DNA. So your kids inherit whatever mutation that nickel caused. It is seriously nasty stuff. So we haven’t processed it because typically we have to smelt it, which means this pyrometallurgical application, that just means getting it real hot and burning stuff off. And the nickel damage to the environment is substantial as a result.
(25:43):
And so this doesn’t necessarily happen in the United States. Alan, and I will shamelessly plug Alan’s research because it’s fantastic. Alan has a really exciting technology that enables the safe and closed-loop reduction of nickel ores to a nickel compound where internally the nickel is in this dangerous state, but it never is exposed to the environment. So these type of tech innovations on the processing make nickel a less rare resource, not because nickel doesn’t have some abundance. Nickel is pretty abundant, but it’s because it’s so hard to process. So we have to separate the processing question from the abundance question. Cobalt is both hard to process, but it also has an abundance issue. And the easy way for your listeners just to track this is just to look at the London metals exchange price or the equivalent of these different components. The future’s markets are exceptional at pricing in scarcity versus processing challenge versus demand challenges.
(26:46):
So if we want to use higher nickel batteries, and there are plenty of excellent scientists and battery engineers who say, “Yeah, we should find ways of using nickel because even though iron phosphate is so available, the performance improvements you get with a nickel-based cathode are useful enough to merit this.” And that’s what drives Alan’s process research because there’s this demand. Alan says, “Well, there’s plenty of nickel. Let me come up with a better way of processing it.” And thankfully he has. So one has to play this multifaceted game with everything on a periodic table to look at scarcity, processability, and then what its effective functionality is.
Bill Loveless (27:24):
So I mean, just given the concerns there are over where the minerals come from and where they’re processed, whether it’s Democratic Republic of Congo, China, I mean, that’s been a big issue. It’s a big political issue these days, the extent to which we rely on insecure sources of materials or processing to make batteries, for example, what I think I’m hearing you say is there are enough options, enough alternatives in terms of supply and processing to effectively address these issues without presenting any sort of impediments to the supply of, say, the batteries or the cost of the batteries.
Dan Steingart (27:59):
That’s right. The problem isn’t that it’s too rare. The problem is that it’s too cheap. It is too cheap to get refined high purity sources of metals and mineral downstream products from friend-shored to not so friend-shored countries than to produce it in the United States. These are not necessarily easy plants to run. They’re capital expensive and they’re very low margin. And so it’s more a question of, are we going to create incentives in the United States capital markets to support these low margin efforts? And they have to be low margin. If they’re not low margin, batteries will become more expensive and then you won’t want to use them in your car or in your home. We need to push them. This is the dilemma of all process engineering. You basically take something that was once very expensive and work to make it cheaper and cheaper by following Wright’s law, by basically saying demand drives manufacturing costs down as much as possible.
(29:04):
And in basically every administration, every federal administration before the current era, the alignment with capital markets has been: Find the cheapest place in the world to do that and do it there and pour the value gear. And so it’s not a question of rarity. It’s a question of, do we want to take on this low margin product? I think we should, but it’s very hard.
Bill Loveless (29:29):
Is the US genuinely building a competitive battery manufacturing base or are we still behind Asia in terms of know- how? I mean, I read where China plans to double its battery storage capacity by next year. And that could have massive implications in the world’s energy transition.
Dan Steingart (29:47):
Yeah. I’m going to answer your question in two parts because the second part’s easy. Yeah, we’re behind. And in particular, it’s important to recognize that Chinese know- how is exceptional and there’s a lot of debate and controversy over how China got to be exceptional. And I’m not going to engage in that, but what I will say is that it is exceptional. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting multiple different battery facilities in China and they’re just taking it much more seriously than we are. And the question in the US is how seriously do we want to take this? The beauty of this is that any technology moves around the world like a paper airplane. It sort of gets pushed up and pulled down and different gusts and macroeconomic conditions push it around. And I have been doing this long enough that I have been to Asia many times in the last 20 years.
(30:40):
I’ve followed the improvements of lithium-ion battery factories. I’ve seen my own prejudices proven wrong again and again. And it only took 20 years. And so if we really wanted to do this, we totally could. We totally could because the proof point is there. China did it. And we educated many of the engineers who went back to China to do it. And the flow of information between the two countries means that we could totally do it here. Now, will geopolitical tensions make it harder or easier? I don’t know. But so to your first point, I’m not sure we’re taking it here seriously enough. And I want to be clear, I don’t think this is a Biden versus Trump issue. I think this is, is there the cultural and capital willpower to make this go? I’ve been working very hard on it. I know I want it to happen and I’ve spun a bunch of companies off in the battery-metrology space that are trying to make it happen.
(31:42):
But it requires a real dedicated effort, not just to batteries in particular, but manufacturing overall.
Bill Loveless (31:49):
You’re a chemist, not a political scientist, but nevertheless, I’d like to ask you, we had this One Big, Beautiful Bill that was signed into law by President Trump, and it cuts many forms of federal government support for battery and clean energy deployment, but it preserves and restructures some support for domestic battery manufacturing. All in all, is battery development in the US any worse or better off because of these changes?
Dan Steingart (32:12):
I mean, look, in the short term, hard to say it’s better because many of my friends who were building factories that were subsidized by the IRA got their funding cut very suddenly in the last few months. There’s a harder question though. And the harder question is that was the IRA spent on the right things? And would those factories have been successful anyway? It is very difficult to say. Some of them would’ve been, others would’ve not been. Let’s look at the way China does it versus the way the US does it. And I think there’s more similarity than most people would recognize even if the implementation here is a bit more chaotic or open to the whim and the will of the voter. China got to where it got today with PV and batteries via these five-year plans. And I’m going to really screw up the nuances of it.
(33:06):
So David Sandalow, if you’re listening, I apologize in advance. But basically in the first five years, the CCP says, “I want this technology to exist.” And very specific: I want nickel, metal, manganese, cobalt 811 to exist, and I want you to hit these price targets. And I’m going to encourage as many people as possible to try to hit these price targets by buying. I will ensure that you have complete offtake. Every unit you produce as long as it hits the specification will be bought. So let a thousand flowers bloom type of stuff. And that creates this incredible growth. In the second five years, the guaranteed offtake is eliminated, but downstream subsidies exist. Now we’re going to make EVs. Now we’re going to have batteries in your homes. Now we’re going to encourage use of this incredible capacity we created. And when you get to year 15 and year 20, then you turn the spigot off completely and you say, “Okay, now you guys got to figure it out.
(34:14):
Now, we sort of did the same thing. You have the IRA. The IRA said, “Okay, let’s let a bunch of things bloom.” And then Trump said, “Stop wasting money on these factories that may or may not work. We’re cutting it off. This is waste fraud and abuse. And if you can’t see me, I’m putting that in air quotes. But we effectively did the same thing. We said, “Okay, now let the market figure it out. ” So when I’m bummed that a battery factory that I was helping that had funding from the IRA lost that funding and that means that my lab loses a little bit of funding? Yeah, that smarts a little bit. But I led off our conversation saying this is an exciting time for products because lithium iron phosphate is very, very good at what it does. And my hope and my thesis is that with more batteries in the United States making people’s lives better, it will encourage better upstream manufacturing in the US because we just think it’s important.
(35:07):
We just think it’s worthwhile. We’ll think about it the same way we think about oil refining, which is what we should do. So I’m hoping in this moment of reduced direct government subsidy on battery manufacturing, manufacturers take advantage of the capacity that does exist in the United States to make wonderful products that make people’s lives better that encourage the use of batteries. I mentioned standard potential. There’s a much bigger effort called Base Power out of Texas, which is basically like a power wall type effort on steroids, trying to increase the amount of storage in everyone’s home. In New York City, there are these ovens. We have Local Law 97. I don’t know if you’ve ever covered this. So Local Law 97 basically promotes the decarbonization of buildings in the five boroughs by mandating/encouraging the use of electric ovens and heat pumps. A standard 110 volt outlet cannot provide enough power for an induction stove to do its thing.
(36:14):
So this company Copper hybridized their stove by putting an LFP pack in the stove so that it acts as a power booster, making the induction stove boil your water as fast as it needs to, and then it charges when you’re not doing it. And it’s a genius product because your stove is off most of the time, so it has all day to recharge. So there are all these fun products that can be made in and around LFP and NMC cells. And I’m encouraging everyone to do as much of it as possible because I think, and I hope that in the current administration, when those products prevail, then the culture will change to incentivize more upstream production. The IRA was a little hopey changey, in my opinion. I think its intent was good, but having been involved in a few of the deals around it, there was not enough firm offtake to justify a lot of these factories.
Bill Loveless (37:09):
Interesting. You started the conversation mentioning the grid and the opportunities for the grid for batteries and storage generally. EV batteries get the headlines, right? But grid storage has different needs. Where do you see long-term storage heading? Are batteries on track to deliver the scale of storage needed to meet demands for grid reliability and decarbonization. Do we still need breakthroughs?
Dan Steingart (37:35):
I think we need breakthroughs, but I think we need breakthroughs in what I call the internet of energy more than the battery itself. So the internet created a drive from better processors, more RAM, and most importantly, more storage. Having a few hundred megabytes seem like an ocean when I was a kid and now I’m looking at my desk and I have at least 10 terabytes sitting in front of me. And we don’t think about storage anymore, but we think about how the storage is connected all the time. We need to better think about how the storage is connected to itself so the grid becomes better or connected between nodes so the grid becomes truly bidirectional. And when that happens, we can then figure out how much storage you really need because it’s kind of an open question. Optimistically, I can say eight to 10 hours of storage on the grid would do a world of good for grid reliability and demand charge reduction.
(38:31):
It would actually reduce load on wires enormously, making ConEd’s job much easier. But it’s hard to sell eight hours of storage now because no one knows what to do with it. So I can run what we call a spherical cow model where we say, if everything works out just right, eight hours is perfect, but that assumes perfect communication between all parties and I’m distributing the energy around just so. So the guy who sits on the other side of this wall, my colleague here in Earth Environmental Engineering, Professor Bolun Xu works on exactly this. And this is why we hired him five years ago. He thinks about grid interconnectivity with increasing amounts of storage as an asset and how you handle the finickiness of some storage and then what you do to benefit from that. So I think that, again, with lithium iron phosphate, one can justify somewhere between three and eight hours of storage in 2025.
(39:31):
And what I mean by that is if you and I had a private equity fund and we were deciding whether or not to invest in a peaker plant or to invest in a series of lithium ion batteries, it would be a hard decision. And notice in the words that I haven’t used this farm in this conversation. I haven’t said carbon credits, I haven’t said climate, I haven’t said green, I haven’t said any of that stuff. On an energy for energy basis, it is difficult to choose between a peaker plant and a lithium-ion battery. It is remarkable, at least conservatively to two or three hours if I’m being aggressive to eight hours. Once we get to eight hours, then lithium ion’s economics begin to break down a little bit. We can squeeze them harder and harder, and then we have to look into radically different designs.
(40:18):
But I think we can get a lot of decarbonization done with eight hours, and decarbonization is a more controversial word than I would like to be these days. So let’s just put it aside, the grid will be more robust and more reliable and less expensive with these assets in place.
Bill Loveless (40:33):
Yeah. Well, there’s greater recognition of that in the utility sector these days. I read where Petter Skantze, senior VP with NextEra, which is one of the largest electric power companies in North America and a leader in wind and solar power, says battery storage is now the “cheapest form of new capacity” in the US with order of magnitude faster deployment than gas and other advantages.
Dan Steingart (40:56):
That’s right. And I’ve never met him and he has never been in my kitchen. So I could not have telegraphed a better thing for him to say, and I couldn’t agree more.
Bill Loveless (41:08):
Yeah. And I read too where I’m learning, Dan, about battery energy storage systems, right? BESS, B-E-S-S, and saw a report from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence saying, as of October, global grid connected battery energy storage system installations are up 38% year on year compared with the same period in 2024. I mean, so they are getting a lot of attention. They are being installed. It’s not pie in the sky.
Dan Steingart (41:35):
It’s not pine in the sky, but what’s missing, right? So I overuse this analogy. It’s 1998. We all have maybe a gigabyte of storage on our computers, but they’re not connected yet. And then Sean, whatever his name is, invents Napster, and we all start stealing music and sharing that with one another. The music industry goes crazy, but it changes the way information is shared. And so we’re approaching this moment with energy where we all have these pockets of storage, but it’s capability. So this 38% near improvement, and I hope that increases, it will be greatly amplified when we figure out how to leverage this asset as a virtual power plant or something similar. And it will encourage even more battery deployment because right now what I see is hesitation in some more conservative buyers into how they best valorize this pack. And if there was clearer market strategy and better interconnect technology, it would be easier for them to decide how to fully valorize that battery and reduce the return on investment.
Bill Loveless (42:37):
How much potential is there for old batteries, for used batteries, second life applications for batteries that are lying around? I read the other day where a solar plant in California is using 1,300 used batteries. Is there a business case to be made there?
Dan Steingart (42:55):
It’s hard. It’s hard. It looks great on paper. It’s very hard in practice for a few reasons. If the battery is still good enough to use in an application that you have to warranty and you have to guarantee uptime, why are you really taking it out of the first-life application? There are good answers to that question, but you have to have a very clear answer to that question. So for example, if my car went 300 miles and it goes 250 miles now, do I really care? Can I just charge it more? Or do I then put it into the second-life application? Because if I degrade the battery more and take it down to 220, it’s also less reliable in that second life application. And so when I say enough from first life and decide second life is not at all clear, so that determination has to be made.
(43:46):
The second is that batteries, and this is like the bread and butter of what my actual research is in the lab. Batteries don’t all age in the same way. They age like human populations do, and that’s what makes them so fascinating. Even if they’re all made the same, how they’re used has massive impact in how they end up. And people drive very differently. People treat their batteries very differently. And so understanding these population distributions is difficult and finding the right sorting mechanism is difficult. Again, not to say impossible. Redwood Materials is doing something very clever. They’re taking packs out of old Chevy Bolts, I think, and using them in these applications that you’re speaking of, and they’re doing, as I understand it, very minimal modifications to them to make it go. And you need to have the right statistics to be able to bet and you have to have the right applications to do it.
(44:40):
So the long story short is that if you can figure it out and you can make the economics work, it’s great, but I think it’s harder than most of your listeners might imagine to make those economics work because in your car, your battery has a duty cycle, duty cycle, you use it 10% of the time. Most of the time it’s sitting in your garage or your parking lot or sitting on the street. Even for an Uber, it’s a duty cycle of somewhere between 20% and 25%. When the battery is used on the grid, it’s going to be used all the time. So the second life application might actually be more brutal. And if it’s more brutal and the battery’s already aged, how do I warranty it? How do I make sure it’s going to deliver power because I’m paying the premium right now for the battery of power quality?
So these are all very hard questions. If you can figure out how to solve them, yeah, there’s a very nice economic picture, but you have to address them.
Bill Loveless (45:32):
Interesting. Well, before we go, I’d like to ask you to look ahead, take out your crystal ball and there’s always some risk in asking a person to do that. But if we look back a decade from now, what battery idea today will turn out to have been overhyped and what will have been underestimated?
Dan Steingart (45:51):
Well, I think that solid state will be overhyped. I think solid state will hit targets, but it will be in an evolutionary fashion. I think we won’t see this overnight increase by 100%. We’re not going to go from a 200 mile car to a 400 mile car overnight, but it’ll be rolled in in a reasonable fashion. And I think that liquid electrolytes will still be present as well because they’re very good at what they do. But that’s my exceptional bias. And I hear a lot of snipers coming from me with that. I think that the LFP battery is underappreciated and we’ve already sort of done this, but we could have done this with LFP 10 years ago. The story around LFP could be a whole podcast. It was a technology that was invented and first commercialized in the United States, and then we thought it wasn’t good enough.
(46:45):
So we just stopped working on it and China said, “Yeah, we’ll take this, thank you. ” And basically CATL became CATL because of that and a lot of other things.
Bill Loveless (46:55):
The big Chinese battery maker.
Dan Steingart (46:57):
Yeah, the largest in the world or second largest in the world, depending on how you count it. Yeah. So I think that we will underestimate all of the things that we can do now and we’ll see all the ways in which batteries are implemented in our lives and say, “We could have done this in 2025. Why did it take so long? Because a lot of the core tech was done in 2016 or 2017. What were you guys waiting for?
Bill Loveless (47:20):
So interesting. Dan, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thanks for joining us on Columbia Energy Exchange.
Dan Steingart (47:26):
Yeah, I really enjoyed it and thank you for letting me rant for an hour. It’s been a blast.
Bill Loveless (47:36):
That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Dan Steingart, and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by Jason Bordorf and me, Bill Loveless. Mary Catherine O’Connor produced the show. Greg Vilfranc engineered the show. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy Policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media at ColumbiaUnergy.
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