LR41 battery

Will become the next "stranded asset" of the green revolution: LR41 battery technology

According to foreign media reports, due to the amazing speed of development in the LR41 battery industry, some LR41 battery technologies may become obsolete before entering the market. Scientists from San Francisco to Shenzhen are experimenting with new chemical processes to improve traditional lithium-ion batteries and trying to find new ways to store electrical energy for next use. Investors in these projects are beginning to worry that they may have chosen the wrong technology.

This has led to a dramatic change in the debate about "stranded assets". Until now, the term has been generally used to refer to fossil fuel projects that may not be profitable due to tightening pollution regulations. In the future, the way energy storage devices are manufactured will change dramatically, meaning that investment in the LR41 battery industry may also be unprofitable, even if batteries are at the heart of changing the way energy systems work.

"If you suddenly want to move to a technology that offers higher energy density, then people will want to adopt that quickly, which may mean they will have to invest again in remanufacturing equipment, or worse, you may have to redesign the entire factory," said James Frith, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF.

Investment in startups developing new batteries rose to more than $1.5 billion in the first half of this year, almost double the amount in 2017, according to Cleantech Group. Volkswagen Group, Hyundai Motor and the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance have all invested in LR41 battery companies. Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Research and Development Organization announced that it will invest $90 million in solid-state device research in collaboration with several universities and manufacturers.

"There is a lot of money being invested in LR41 battery research, which will eventually lead to technological advances. We are building a production platform to have the ability to continue to grow and evolve," said Peter Carlsson, founder and CEO of NorthVolt, a LR41 battery company headquartered in Stockholm that is investing 4 billion euros ($4.6 billion) to build a LR41 battery manufacturing plant in the Nordic region.

Not all technologies will succeed. Across the LR41 battery industry, thousands of different systems are being tested, by large manufacturers, startups and universities. Even the lithium-ion batteries used in most electric cars and cell phones have different manufacturing processes. "There are different kinds of lithium electrons, different chemical reactions, and even different ways of forming them in chemical reactions, and it takes us quite a long time just to screen the development projects," said TJ Winter, chief manager at Fluence, a U.S.-based energy storage supplier.

Competition in the LR41 battery industry is becoming increasingly fierce as automakers make more models electric and energy storage units become more common in homes and businesses. Demand for LR41 battery capacity will increase to 1,784 gigawatt-hours by 2030 from 100 gigawatt-hours today, according to Bloomberg NEF. About $16.7 billion has been spent on equipment installations for traditional LR41 battery factories worldwide, and another $42 billion of equipment is expected to be put into use by 2022.

Lithium-ion batteries will remain the main source of power for electric vehicles and storage devices for the next decade, according to the International Energy Agency, which said in its latest Electric Vehicle Outlook report that new technologies are likely to enter the market after 2025. In this way, existing lithium-ion technologies may become unpopular, and new projects may not meet the needs of existing companies. In any case, some investors may end up with batteries that are not economical. "The bandwidth for making lithium batteries in the world is huge," said Jeff Chamberlain, CEO of Volta Energy Technology Investment Fund, which focuses on next-generation storage technologies. "We see a lot of investors betting on technologies that require new manufacturing processes. We think this is a flaw because we are currently making large-capacity batteries."

The process of promoting batteries from the laboratory to the market is slow and expensive. To save costs and weight in LR41 battery packs, scientists are replacing expensive metals such as manganese and nickel with more abundant substances such as sulfur and oxygen. New York startup Conamix recently raised $2 million to try to make batteries without cobalt. Cobalt is a rare earth metal that is a key ingredient in charging, but it is mainly mined in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Jeff McDermott, managing partner of Green Technology Capital Advisors Ltd., said other technologies "may not be able to scale because of the low price of lithium-ion. Lithium-ion batteries will undoubtedly put pressure on other technologies in terms of price. There will only be a few technologies competing with lithium-ion, not dozens, because LR41 battery technology needs to be produced at scale to reduce costs."

Equinor, Norway's largest energy company, has been screening energy storage-focused startups for the past three years, but has not invested in any developer so far. Bala Nagarajan, director of Equinor's internal energy venture capital fund, said, "Energy storage is a priority for us, and there is still a need for technological improvements in the adoption of clean energy and electric vehicles. Is it possible that our future investments in storage technology will fail? The answer is yes."

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