Q&A with Group 14’s CEO
- Silicon-anode batteries, like those produced by Group 14, offer significantly higher energy density and extremely fast charging times compared to traditional graphite-based lithium-ion batteries, promising to fundamentally change EV technology.
- Scaling silicon battery production is the main hurdle—although silicon is abundantly available, expanding the manufacturing infrastructure to meet global demand will take years or even decades.
- Fast-charging capabilities (with charging speeds potentially under 10 minutes or even as quick as 90 seconds) could eliminate “charge anxiety,” transforming the EV market by enabling smaller, cheaper batteries and dramatically accelerating EV adoption.
- Global EV adoption dynamics highlight China’s rapid advancement in EV technology and adoption, contrasting sharply with slower, politically complicated adoption processes in markets like the US and Europe.
As EV makers continue to grapple with the challenges of using traditional lithium-ion batteries, including alleviating concerns about range anxiety, safety and raw material sourcing, battery material manufacturers are exploring alternative chemistries.
There has been talk about using silicon anodes to replace graphite anodes in lithium-ion batteries for several years. But there has been a jump forward—Group 14, NanoGraf, NEO Battery Materials and Nexeon are all moving from the pilot production stage to large-scale commercial manufacturing of silicon anode batteries.
Group 14 is manufacturing silicon battery material that it says provides up to 50% higher energy density than lithium-ion batteries at scale. Its SCC55 technology is designed for a range of sectors from EV to consumer electronics, eVTOL aircraft, enterprise/data centers and more.
The company is delivering material to customers from its 10 GWh facility in South Korea, and its BAM-2 factory in Moses Lake, Washington, currently under construction, will house an initial annual capacity of 2,000 tons of SCC55 or 10 GWh of silicon battery material. Group 14 takes a modular approach to manufacturing, allowing it to quickly set up production facilities anywhere in the world and begin delivering SCC55 while building additional manufacturing modules. The company’s manufacturing process consists of two main steps: creating a carbon scaffold and exposing that scaffold to silane for silicon deposition. This, it says, makes it easier to scale up than more complex manufacturing methods.
Charged recently spoke with Group 14’s CEO, Rick Luebbe, about how silicon anode batteries will shape the future of EVs, improving range, charging speed and performance.
Charged: Why are silicon anode batteries going into commercial-scale production now?
Rick Luebbe: We think silicon battery technology is going to obsolesce, already has obsolesced, graphite-based batteries, and the only constraint is how fast companies can scale and get silicon anode materials out in the marketplace.
We are extremely excited about the silicon battery age, both for more energy density, but more importantly, for extremely fast charging, which we think is critical in the battery space.
It is all about the pace of scaling. We demonstrated the technology many years ago and got the performance necessary for commercialization. But scaling a large material technology takes a long time. Our first commercial factory is on the smaller side; that’s been in production for about three years now and that material is in a variety of cell phones in China.
I don’t think range anxiety is really the problem. I think the problem is charge anxiety.
The most known is Honor’s high-end cell phones, enabling the power requirements being driven by AI-enabled chips in those phones, because they really need a more energy-dense battery. That has caused a realization in consumer electronics that silicon is here, silicon is better and silicon is a requirement for advanced phones. These AI-enabled phones require a lot more power, but from a user experience perspective, nobody is willing to accept shorter battery life to get that extra functionality.
From an EV perspective, the industry is waiting for the first EV-scale material to be available, and I think we’ll see it adopted as quickly as those plants can come online.
As far as I know, we are the largest and the farthest along, and our BAM-2 factory in Washington should be in production later this year. EV technology adoption has a bit of a delay once the factory comes online, because of the qualification process and then program scheduling and a few other hoops to jump through. But we expect to be driving fast charging and extended vehicle range as early as the first part of next year, after the factory comes online in the second half of this year. Call it a six-to-eight-month qualification adoption cycle, scheduling into ramp and then off and running. As fast as we can scale, we think EVs will be transitioning to silicon-based systems.
There is some capability coming that is mind-boggling. One of our customers is building a cell that they can charge from zero to 100% in 90 seconds.
Charged: Silicon metal pricing is relatively stable compared to some other raw materials. But is the supply of silicon available enough and stable enough to ramp up?
Rick Luebbe: Absolutely—our silicon comes in the form of silane gas, which is a gaseous form of silicon. Effectively, silane is made by gasifying metallurgical-grade silicon. Silicon is the number-one or number-two most ubiquitous element on earth. You can even make silane out of sand; it is not the most efficient process, but it is possible. There is not really a shortage of silicon. There is silicon everywhere, so it is pretty easy to access the raw materials. In that respect, it is a fantastic battery material, as there are not any real supply chain concerns.
Charged: What kind of timescale do you see, and how much of a market share do you expect for silicon-anode versus traditional graphite-anode lithium batteries?
Rick Luebbe: I think that silicon will completely replace graphite-based batteries as soon as there is enough capacity. Think about the evolution of rechargeable batteries. Nickel-cadmium batteries from 30 or 40 years ago got replaced by nickel-metal-hydride batteries. And fairly quickly, nickel-metal-hydride got replaced by traditional lithium-ion batteries. I do think that lithium-based systems are advantaged, because lithium is the smallest and lightest element that can move a single ion back and forth. But in terms of silicon replacing graphite and getting all those performance improvements we get with silicon batteries, it obsolesces traditional lithium-ion that uses a graphite anode, and so I don’t see a use case in the long term for graphite-based batteries. It is really a supply chain constraint. How quickly can the industry build and grow silicon production infrastructure?
Charged: How quickly do you think that is?
Rick Luebbe: Right now, we assess the market to be about five terawatts’ worth of batteries supplied annually on a global basis. Each one of our production modules can do 10 gigawatts, so the current market is equivalent to about 500 of these buildings. We can build maybe two, three or four per year at Group 14. If the market today is 500 and growing at 15% a year, that means the market is growing at 75 modules per year. The market is growing faster than the silicon anode industry is growing because we’re starting off so small. So, the good news is that the market opportunity is enormous for silicon battery companies, but the trick is securing enough capital to grow this manufacturing base fast enough to take sizeable market share. That is going to be a multi-decade process. We will see graphite batteries for 20 years, but by that point we will see graphite more or less replaceable.
Currently 80% of the graphite for batteries comes from China. And if that becomes problematic, then the rest of the world is going to work harder to replace that anode supply, and it makes more sense to build silicon infrastructure than to build something that is being obsolesced. So, politics may accelerate that, depending on what happens here in the next couple years.
Charged: What does the use of silicon battery technology mean for EV range and charging capability?
Rick Luebbe: The magic of silicon batteries is related to the volume of the cell taken up by graphite today. About 60% of the volume of the battery is taken up by the graphite anode, but the cathode brings the lithium. And the lithium determines the energy density. The industry said, if we can find a way to shrink that anode, we can put in more cathode and get an improvement in energy density. Silicon, by itself, has about 10 times the capacity by weight of graphite, about three times by volume, and so it is a more energy-dense material to use.
Now that we’ve solved the challenges with cycle life we can make silicon work. We can put in a silicon anode that’s a fraction of the size of a graphite anode, which means we are going to put in much more cathode material. What we are seeing in our customers is up to a 50% increase in energy density, or a 50% increase in range for the same size cell, same weight, which is amazing.
But there has been so much focus on range because people talk about range anxiety. I don’t think range anxiety is really the problem. I think the problem is charge anxiety.
If we can get batteries to the same convenience from a chargeability perspective as gasoline cars, we don’t need a 400- or 600-kilometer-range pack. We are okay with even a 200-kilometer-range pack because we are charging at home in a lot of cases anyway. That is the secret and if you think about the ripple effect of being able to do that extreme fast charging and making it really convenient, packs are smaller, which means they’re cheaper. Now EVs are going to be cheaper than internal combustion vehicles, and it becomes an accelerating effect as we resolve charge anxiety.
Silicon batteries today can charge in well under 10 minutes and that’s less than it takes to refuel gasoline-based vehicles. When that charging infrastructure comes online, combined with the fact that you can refuel your EV at home, which you cannot do with your gasoline-powered car, I think we’re going to see a dramatic acceleration in electrification, and we’ll see a wider range of vehicles and size capabilities, much more customized for individual use case. Tremendous opportunity is going to be unlocked by the promise of extreme fast charging.
Charged: As you say, it’s the charging, rather than the range, that’s the issue, especially in cities.
Rick Lubbe: There is some capability coming that is mind-boggling. One of our customers is building a cell that they can charge from zero to 100% in 90 seconds. And now you can think about flash charging, not fast charging. You pull up at a stop light and in 10 seconds, you’re getting 20% more range. We cannot even imagine where the technology might go and what capabilities it unlocks. But we may never even think about charging. It may just happen in parking lots with inductive charging, or at stop lights or as you’re driving through a rest area, your car gets topped off. There are so many possibilities that folks have not even thought about that could be enabled by these extreme fast charging technologies.
Charged: If you can charge that quickly, what effect does that have on infrastructure and urban planning?
Rick Luebbe: At the end of the day, you are delivering the same amount of power. Whatever the cars are using to drive around, that amount of power is fixed whether you charge those cars faster or slowly, so you still deliver the same number of kilowatts. But at least in the US, a Tesla supercharger station typically has up to 12 chargers, because each car might be sitting at that charger for 40-60 minutes. If you can turn those cars through in five minutes or seven minutes, now you do not need 12 chargers, you only need two or three, because there is not that backlog. You use the same amount of power, the grid infrastructure requirements do not change, but you reduce the amount of charging infrastructure you need, because drivers are not sitting on the chargers as long as they do today. So, it will enable faster charger capability deployment. Maybe fewer chargers, but you will be able to charge more EVs with this faster charging technology.
Silicon batteries are fundamentally going to change the way we think about transportation.
Silicon batteries are changing the way we think about electrification, using EVs, charging EVs and enabling other technologies, whether it is electrification of aviation, silicon batteries are fundamentally going to change the way we think about transportation. We are just beginning to see that momentum. And two or three years from now, we will be amazed at how much transformation we will see.
The iPhone came out less than 20 years ago, which is not a long time. So, 20 years from now, what is going to be radically different that we are not seeing today is the electrification of aviation. The concept makes great technical sense and convenient sense. Car traffic is two-dimensional and very hard to manage. Aviation is three-dimensional. Now you have got an exponentially larger number of options for moving things around, taking advantage of all that space. The technology is here. The adoption is happening. In 20 years, it is going be like the Jetsons. We might not be driving, we might be flying to the airport, or the movie theater. We are going to see ubiquitous electrified aviation coming sooner than most people expect.
Frankly, the rest of the world is asleep at the switch, missing the rate of what China is doing from a technology advancement perspective
Charged: Thinking about the global market, how can countries apply lessons from other markets to accelerate EV adoption?
Rick Luebbe: China is crushing the world because it is not afraid to push EV adoption fast. It has embraced the benefits, both from a government perspective and from a consumer perspective, and they’re adopting EVs so fast it is blowing everybody’s mind. The EVs they are making are extremely high-quality, very low-cost, and really putting a lot of pressure on non-Chinese automakers.
Frankly, the rest of the world is asleep at the switch, missing the rate of what China is doing from a technology advancement perspective, while the rest of the world debates hybrid versus EV versus internal combustion, climate rules, all these other complexities we’ve layered on to EVs. For example, in the United States somehow EVs have become a political conversation. Phones are not political, why are EVs political? But other markets have just layered so much unnecessary complexity on the question of EV versus internal combustion, that it is inhibiting a natural process. The world is going to electrify. EVs are fundamentally technologically advanced over internal combustion. They are better vehicles. They are lower-maintenance, they are lower-cost in many respects, depending on what features you want and so forth. But there is this resistance to change that in some markets seems to not be consumer-driven, and almost seems to be politically driven, which is bizarre.
But the lesson for the rest of the world is, watch China, because China is moving at a pace of technological advancement that we have never seen before. Western nations are used to leading technological change, and so there is a bit of arrogance about it. “We’re Europe, we’re America, we have been everything,” it is not happening anymore, because we are not paying attention to what the rest of the world is doing. There is going to be a lot of catching up to do over the next 10 years.
India is an awesome potential market, not just for selling vehicles but producing vehicles. India has a lot of the advantages that China had a couple decades ago, without a lot of the political concerns that currently are challenging China to be a global player. India has its own challenges from an infrastructure perspective that it needs to overcome. But if it can make progress on being a manufacturing country, then it has a tremendous opportunity to develop its economy, become a world leader in manufacturing and then through that same process, becoming a large world market. The potential is there, but there is a lot of work to do.
