Podcasts · WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

The Battery Everyone Uses Is The One They'd Never Build | EnerVenue x HiNa | WTF are Batteries?

· 1 h 10 min

Episode The Battery Everyone Uses Is The One They'd Never Build | EnerVenue x HiNa | WTF are Batteries?

0:00 1:10:09

I went to Dalian with a selfish question. I run a fund that invests in energy transition, and I've come to think energy isn't the problem moving it and storing it is. So I sat down with Henning Rath, who runs EnerVenue out of Silicon Valley and is building his first gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, who runs HiNa Battery, a sodium-ion company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's now ten years old with 600 people and a gigawatt line. I told them I don't know anything about batteries and asked them to teach me. We started at what a cell even is, went through why the entire industry standardised on LFP and what a thermal runaway actually does, and then Henning told me something I hadn't heard: the world had over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone. I asked whether I should start an electric car company or a battery company when I get home. Both said battery and Henning was blunt about it: don't build anything that needs rare earth. Fifty million dollars to start. We got into nickel-hydrogen at 30,000 cycles, sodium carbonate at a tenth of what lithium carbonate costs, why solid state is still at level four out of nine, and the idea I keep coming back to that your car sits idle 98% of the time with a battery and a stack of chips doing nothing, and there's a version of this where every parked car is a micro data center.

00:00 Introduction

06:45 China's bet on chemistries beyond lithium

12:14 Cell chemistry and the trade-offs it forces

17:15 Thermal runaway and the limits of LFP

22:44 Production quality and how long a battery lasts

27:07 Why China won the electric car

33:54 Decoupling a battery business from lithium and rare earths

38:50 Sodium's cost advantage and its energy density ceiling

43:51 Recycling nickel and renting the metal

48:17 Where generation, storage and demand should sit

54:05 Decentralization and the car as a grid battery

1:00:19 Three super cycles and AI's power demand

1:05:30 Automation, jobs and China's social contract

Footage Courtesy: World Economic Forum (WEF) CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/amnc26_summer_davos_highlights/

Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henning-rath/

• Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa Battery

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/

Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas

Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast

• Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/ • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/ • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/

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#WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos

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