Since the CATL era announced the start of research and development of sodium batteries, it is considered to have pulled sodium batteries into the public eye.
In fact, the field of sodium batteries has already accommodated many giants, such as Huawei, which is a technology company. Huawei's Hubble Investment Company has completed investments in dozens of start-ups last year, and the company's investment areas also represent Huawei's future development direction. Recently, in a sodium battery start-up A+ round of financing, There has been a figure of Hubble, and not long ago, lithium battery start-up Weilan New Energy also received investment from Hubble.
Huawei began to quietly layout the new energy battery industry, or the downstream industry, what is The situation that Huawei has laid out?
Huawei, which does not build cars, why is the battery layout?
For the time being, it can be clear that Huawei currently only sells the whole vehicle solution and provides core components, so the power battery of the new energy vehicle is a parts industry with high cost and profit. However, the layout of the whole industry chain of new energy vehicles is also what many enterprises are doing, starting from the vertical integration of BYD's resources, the layout benefits of the whole industry chain have begun to appear.
Most of Huawei's investment is done through its Hubble Investment Company, and Hubble's positioning is not to make money, but to serve the Huawei ecosystem. At present, the fields of investment include chips, software development, intelligent driving, battery core components and other industries.
Today's main talk is Huawei's layout of the battery industry, and the layout of other industries is not specifically expanded.
Before talking about the layout of downstream industries in the battery field, it needs to be clear that Huawei Energy has its own photovoltaic power generation projects, and it is already an industry with several years of development and mature technology. With the most basic power generation capacity, but also with more than 190 power companies in-depth cooperation, can provide smart grid, smart power plants and other solutions, and can also provide cloud platform construction technology and solutions; with its own power generation projects, power consumption channels, it will also face the situation that the power generation cannot be digested, either to transmit the power out or store it, so Huawei needs to solve the big problem of energy storage.
Now Huawei has received the world's largest energy storage order, which is the 1300MWh energy storage scale of the Saudi Red Sea project. 1MWh = 1000kWh, equivalent to 1000 kWh, now some electric vehicles' power battery pack is relatively large about 100 kWh, 1300 MWh is about equal to 13,000 large electric vehicles storage capacity. What is the commercial value of 1300MWh? It is not clear the specific price of Huawei's energy storage equipment, but after reading the following, everyone should have a preliminary concept.
With the carbon neutrality plan of many countries, renewable electric energy has become one of the main energy sources in the future, and the energy storage business has gradually become the general direction of development in the battery field in the future. In addition to super-large-scale energy storage projects, Huawei also began to send large-scale 2MWh energy storage projects to the Japanese market this year, but at present Huawei has not announced the battery cell supplier of such large-scale energy storage equipment.
Who else is doing this kind of similar energy storage project? Tesla's Powerwall focuses on the maximum capacity of household energy storage of 13.5kWh, priced at 3000 US dollars; Tesla's Megapack large-scale energy storage equipment, with a capacity of 3MWh, can meet the electricity of 3600 households for one hour. At present, there have been successful business cases in the US and Australian markets, the price of Tesla Megapack last year was about $1.2 million, and now due to the rise in raw material prices, the price of Megapack is about $1.53 million.
The energy storage industry has a huge incremental market, and if the self-developed downstream industry is not well controlled, then the profit will go to the third-party supplier. Under the premise of Huawei's ability and financial resources, it is not difficult to understand the layout of the sodium battery industry. Sodium battery raw materials are easy to obtain, the production cost is lower than lithium batteries, and the chemistry is more suitable for energy storage (most of the current Tesla energy storage equipment is still used for lithium batteries, and the price is high).
Huawei, which has made a battery, how to apply it in the automotive field?
The investment information that can be seen, Huawei has invested in two battery startups, a sodium battery, and a lithium battery (Xiaomi investment, Weilai cooperation). Based on these investments, we can conclude that Huawei has several possibilities in the field of new energy vehicle batteries after that?
My personal opinion: launch of the power exchange business, the launch of high-end solid-state battery packs.
First of all, to explain the first possibility, now in addition to what Weilai is doing in the field of power exchange, Ningde times and BYD are planning their own power exchange business. What is the incremental space in this market? Last year, the mainland produced a total of 3.54 million new energy vehicles, but the charging is still based on ground charging piles as the main source, and the charging time is slow and inefficient; and the subsequent development direction is that the penetration rate and penetration rate of new energy vehicles will become higher and higher, which will bring about a new development direction in the field of energy replenishment.
Then a replacement power station needs to open up channels such as the construction of the local power grid, and more or less will use the energy storage system to ensure the large-scale charging and use of power batteries. The above two prerequisites, Huawei has ready-made resources to use, if there is a breakthrough in the field of invested sodium batteries, it is equivalent to taking a key link in the electric vehicle replacement ecological chain, the rest will be studied whether it is 2C or 2B, like the Ningde era to take the low-priced (8-120,000 yuan) range model replacement program, it may not be certain.
Regarding the second possibility, Weilan New Energy is a transformation project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and browsing the company's homepage found that its core products are solid-state batteries and solid-state battery modules. Under the premise that battery products such as ternary lithium batteries and lithium iron phosphate batteries cannot break through the performance bottleneck, in order to further improve the performance of batteries, the development direction of the industry has gradually begun to favor the technical field of solid-state batteries. At present, the layout of solid-state batteries includes Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, BMW, Toyota and Ningde Era, and these car companies and suppliers have begun to build their own "solid-state battery technology barriers".
The two possibilities for Huawei to lay out the battery field in the new energy vehicle market are not empty, but a conclusion drawn from the combination of market demand and the development direction of the battery industry (personal view).
summary
Combined with reality, although Huawei does not build cars, it has set a sales target of 300,000 vehicles in 2022, selling a complete set of new energy vehicle solutions; new energy vehicles that are in line with Huawei include Brands such as Arctic ARCFOX (Beiqi Blue Valley), Changan Automobile, Avita (Ningde Era), and Xilis (Xiaokang Shares).
Only selling the whole vehicle is certainly not profitable, Huawei's business model is to sell its own vehicle solutions. Then in addition to the Hongmeng OS system and the high-end driving ADS system, there is also a core component missing - the battery.