summary
At present, investment in the field of power batteries, combined with the industrial background, is still in a complex stage.
From an investment point of view, as the trend of electrification continues to move forward, the development of battery technology is no longer controlled by a single battery company and upstream. Do vehicle companies want to enter battery production and battery design? With Tesla being the first to give a positive reply, most vehicle companies are either actively or passively throwing money at the frontier battery.
Figure 1. The financing situation of major frontier battery companies in Europe and the United States and the relationship between car companies
01
The investment route of the vehicle company
As shown in Table 1 below, the overall logic of this round of investment in cutting-edge batteries is mainly a large investment in the direction of electrification by vehicle companies. Including: continuous investment in the development of electric vehicle platforms, development of models, while the transformation of factories; in the continuous production of electric vehicles also need to consider the needs of batteries.
From the current point of view, European OEMs (starting with Volkswagen) and U.S. OEMs (GM, Ford and Stellantis) are mainly laid out by building battery companies.
(1) European automobile companies
At present, it is mainly divided into three camps:
Volkswagen Group and Quantum Scape are bound, and through the logic of investment and capital increase, they plan to continuously help Quantum Scape develop production capacity and mass production of solid-state batteries in 2025. Subsequent joint ventures in solid-state batteries will also be packaged into volkswagen's battery group and eventually listed as a whole.
Daimler is currently mainly exploring super battery factories in Stellantis, and has started construction of power battery factories (Pack) in Germany, and after investing in ACC, a subsidiary of Stellantis, this time it has also invested in Huineng with Stellantis. Previously, with the Development of Solid-State Batteries with The Quebec Hydro Company of Canada, the overall progress is not satisfactory.
BMW is the only European car company that has not expressed its position to build a battery factory, and has previously talked about deepening the cooperation with SolidPower by investing in SolidPower, planning to install tests in 2022, launch solid-state battery prototypes by 2025, and use them for mass production vehicles by 2030.
(2) American automobile enterprises
Ford is currently bound to SK, and has also invested in Solid Power, an American solid-state battery company, and pulled SKI to invest $30 million in Solid Power, and through Solid Power's solid-state battery-related technology and production process, the right to use.
On the one hand, GM developed its own solid-state battery research and development project, invested heavily in SES, and then pulled Honda to develop it.
(3) Asian car companies
Toyota basically put a pigeon at the Olympic Games, and currently positioned the first step of the solid-state battery on the HEV, and the gap between this progress and everyone's imagination is relatively large.
South Korea's Hyundai has successively invested in solid-state battery companies Solid Power and Solid Energy System (SES) in the United States, plus the previous investments of Huineng and Ionic Material, Hyundai is the most comprehensive investment car company.
In the current situation of RNM, the pace of unified investment is also different, on the one hand, Nissan itself is also developing its own solid state, on the other hand, the previous investment in Ionic Material is also continuing.
Table 1. Investments by major vehicle companies, battery plants and chemical systems evolved
From the point of view of time, the development of solid-state batteries is still in its infancy, and most solid-state battery startups, although they have already gone public, plan to commercialize batteries by 2025. From the perspective of cooperative car companies, the commercial preparation of solid-state batteries will begin in 2025 (the price is still very high at this point in time), and in the period from 2025 to 2030, mainly small batches of testing and iteration, optimistically, cars equipped with solid-state batteries will begin large-scale mass production around 2030.
In terms of quantity, Yole estimates that the demand for solid-state batteries in 2027 will be less than 2.5 GWh, and the traditional power lithium will iterate from batteries to advanced batteries, and will not "convert" to solid-state batteries in large quantities.
Figure 2. The mature steps of the cutting-edge battery from a rational point of view
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How to look at these investments
From the current point of view, the development of frontier and solid-state batteries, in addition to these investments, also need systematic cooperation. See Table 2.
Table 2. Solid-state battery R&D organization
In Europe, the German government invested 1 billion euros to support the research and development and production of solid-state battery technology, and supported the establishment of a power battery research and development alliance to focus on solid-state battery technology development. Valtameco Battery AG, BASF, Ford Deutschland AG, Volkswagen Group and others have all joined the alliance voluntarily. The EU has also approved a special european solid-state battery investment plan, which will be jointly funded by 3.2 billion euros (about 23 billion yuan) by many EU countries, while raising 5 billion euros (about 36 billion yuan) from private investors for the development of solid-state batteries.
The U.S. Department of Energy has provided $209 million in funding for 26 lab projects to develop solid-state batteries and fast-charging technologies. The Japanese government plans to provide hundreds of billions of yen in R&D subsidies for solid-state batteries and develop alliance technologies with NEDO. The South Korean government has decided to invest KRW 30 billion over the next five years to support the development of all-solid-state batteries.
Table 3. Solid-state battery R&D project in Europe
Summary: The current investment in the field of power batteries, combined with the industrial background, is still in a complex stage. With the improvement of the capacity of the existing power battery, the investment in the frontier is a bit of a dilemma compared with the current production capacity background - if there is not much economy in the calculation, how to consider this investment?