At present, new energy battery technology mainly includes solar cells, wind energy batteries, hydroelectric batteries, liquid flow batteries, lithium batteries, and other types. Among them, lithium batteries are the most widely used and have become the representative of new energy battery technology.
At present, China has a leading advantage in the battery industry, according to statistics, the global power battery installed capacity will reach 517.9GWh in 2022, a year-on-year growth of 71.8%. Among the top ten companies in terms of installed capacity, Chinese power battery companies occupy six seats, with a combined market share of 60.4%. Among them, Ningde Times and BYD are ranked among the top two in the world. 2023, the global power battery market may continue to grow, and Chinese battery manufacturers such as Ningde Times, BYD, and China Innovation Hangzhou will start to accelerate the pace of going out of the Chinese market and realizing the leap to the global market. The influence of China’s power battery industry on the world is gradually strengthening.
However the U.S. has taken governmental means to interfere, and the U.S. government and members of Congress have called for increased scrutiny of technological cooperation with China in some areas, including battery production, as the U.S. cracks down on China’s battery industry with increasing frequency. Under heavy government pressure, Tesla will buy equipment from Ningde Times to build a new battery factory in the U.S. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the Q4 2023 earnings call, “I’ve been predicting for years that [Tesla’s] energy storage business would grow much faster than the car business. It’s coming true.”
The lithium-ion battery is a new type of green secondary battery developed in the 1990s, which has developed rapidly in the past decade and has become the most competitive battery in the field of chemical power application. Compared with lead-acid batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries, nickel-metal hydride batteries, and other secondary batteries, lithium-ion batteries have the outstanding advantages of high energy density, long cycle life, small self-discharge rate, no memory effect, and green environmental protection. As society’s requirements for environmental protection, energy saving, and consumption reduction are getting higher and higher, the advantages of lithium-ion batteries in terms of long cycle life, environmental protection, and energy saving are becoming more and more prominent, and the fields of application will continue to broaden.
At present, the downstream of lithium-ion batteries can be mainly categorized into three major fields: power, consumption and energy storage. In recent years, benefiting from the strong growth of the global new energy vehicle market, the global lithium-ion battery industry is also in a rapid development stage. According to GaoGong Li-power data, global lithium battery shipments reached 920GWh in 2022, a sharp increase of 69.4% year-on-year, of which power battery shipments reached 685GWh.
The advantages of lithium batteries are small size, high energy density, long life and low internal resistance of the battery. Therefore, lithium batteries have been successfully used in various mobile devices and electric vehicles. However, lithium batteries also have some problems, the most prominent is the safety issue. Once this kind of battery is overheated or damaged, it is easy to explode.
Therefore, in the application of lithium batteries, scientists have been trying to explore new solutions. For example, lithium cobalt acid batteries, ternary material batteries, lithium titanate batteries and so on, all of which are improvements and upgrades to traditional lithium-ion batteries.
At present, automotive batteries mainly include lead-acid batteries, nickel-metal hydride batteries, lithium batteries and fuel cells. Lead-acid batteries have been very mature, in the field of electric bicycles have been widely used, nickel-metal hydride batteries have just entered the maturity period, lithium batteries have entered the industrialization stage, due to the lithium battery performance more superior, more in line with the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and pure electric vehicles, from the medium and long term, lithium batteries will gradually realize the replacement of lead-acid batteries and nickel-metal hydride batteries.
Musk says 2024 will be the year of the 4680. According to Musk’s plan, all of Tesla’s future electric models, including the Model Y, Semi Semi Truck, Cyber Electric Truck, and Roadster 2 Electric Roadster, will use 4680 large cylindrical batteries. Musk has said, “Our long-term goal is to produce more than 1,000GWh of batteries inside Tesla.”
In September 2020, Tesla first released a large cylindrical battery with a diameter of 46 millimeters and a height of 80 millimeters.
Tesla promises a revolutionary lithium-ion battery with improved chemistry and manufacturing process that will deliver 5x more energy, 6x more power, and a 16% increase in range compared to the original 2170 battery, and will reduce production costs by more than 50%. The manufacturing process utilizes all-electrode technology and dry electrode technology.
A lithium-ion battery includes four major materials such as cathode, anode, diaphragm, and electrolyte. The anode material is the most critical raw material in lithium-ion batteries, which directly determines the safety performance of the battery and whether the battery can be large-scale, and accounts for about 10%-20% of the cost of lithium-ion battery core material. At present, there are three commonly used cathode materials: lithium cobaltate, lithium manganate and lithium iron phosphate.
At present, the development of new energy battery technology can be said to be rapidly changing. Among them, lithium-ion batteries are one of the most widely used new energy batteries at present. With high energy density and long life, lithium-ion batteries have been widely used in mobile devices such as cell phones and tablet computers. However, because lithium-ion batteries have problems such as long charging time and limited battery life, scientists have been continuously researching to improve their performance. For example, in recent years, the discovery and application of graphene materials have led to a significant increase in the capacity of lithium-ion batteries, overcoming the problem of rapid battery discharge.
Another new energy battery technology that has received a lot of attention is the sodium-ion battery. Sodium-ion batteries are similar to lithium-ion batteries, but sodium-ion batteries offer higher electron storage capacity and lower cost. However, the development of sodium-ion batteries currently faces some challenges, such as relatively short battery life and poor stability. Nonetheless, scientists are confident about the prospects for the application of sodium-ion batteries and are continuously working to find solutions.
In addition to lithium-ion batteries and sodium-ion batteries, fuel cells are also a hot spot in new energy battery technology. The fuel cell converts chemical energy directly into electricity, which has the advantages of high efficiency, zero emission and no pollution. One of the most common fuel cells is the hydrogen fuel cell. Hydrogen fuel cells use hydrogen to react with oxygen to generate electrical energy and produce only water vapor as a by-product. However, the production and storage of hydrogen has been a bottleneck in the development of hydrogen fuel cells. Therefore, scientists are working on the development of more efficient and reliable hydrogen preparation technologies to promote the application of hydrogen fuel cells.
In the future, new energy battery technology will show more development trends. First of all, as scientists continue to research and discover new materials, the energy density and life of new energy batteries will be further improved. For example, in recent years, the emergence of new materials such as organic batteries and solid-state electrolyte materials has greatly improved battery performance. Secondly, new energy battery technology will tend to diversify. Different types of battery technology have complementary advantages to each other, so in different fields and applications, there will be a variety of new energy battery coexistence patterns.
In addition, the sustainability of new energy batteries will also become a focus of development. As global energy consumption continues to increase, the development of renewable energy sources and the improvement of energy utilization efficiency have become an urgent issue. Therefore, the development of new energy battery technology will pay more attention to the sustainable use of resources and the concept of circular economy. For example, solar batteries, wind energy batteries, etc. will become the future development trend.
