Something BIG Turned into Something Gigantic!

Something BIG

In August of 2018, I published an article, “How I Stumbled Into Something BIG: the Founding of the Soteria Battery Innovation Group .” The article described how I invented metallized polymer current collectors (MPCC).? And then, because of their function and the structure of the industry, how the broad-based licensing business model naturally followed.? Let me summarize here.

MPCCs

For those who don’t know, MPCC are current collectors formed by a sheet of plastic that has a very thin layer of metal on each side—enough to run the battery, but little enough that when a current is too large in a section, the metal overheats and burns out like a fuse.? While trying to make a lightweight current collector, I discovered this property, and realized that in a battery it could improve safety against short circuits dramatically, which it does.

MPCCs are useful in almost every battery, regardless of the electrode or electrolyte materials used.? And we and others have shown that the fires due to damage, abuse or manufacturing defects are reduced by more than 90%.? And when you read below, you will find that they are a net cost down, even after our royalties, primarily due to the reduction in the amount of copper (80% less).

Business Model & Educating the Industry

These three facts—dramatic improvement in safety, lower cost and universal compatibility—lead to the moral imperative of making the material available for every battery. ?This became the mission of the company—to make batteries safer by making the technology available for all.

I argued in the article that this could not come from Soteria building a film-metallizing factory and selling the material to the whole industry.? We might make a lot of money doing that, but the use of the material would grow more slowly based on both our own economics and execution.? Rather, we would need a business model that allowed a broad supply chain.? Licensing, supported by standards to drive adoption, was determined to be the best way to get broad adoption quickly.

So, we started the Soteria Battery Innovation Group Consortium and set about working with the industry to advance MPCC technology. We provided samples broadly, worked with metallizers to help develop the right products, worked with equipment producers to teach what product to make and how to make it, worked with battery producers to build batteries in dozens of form factors, chemistries and other designs.? We worked with private labs, national labs and universities for building prototype batteries, for testing, for new processing techniques, for understanding how the material works and where it could produce the most safety.? In all, we averaged about 100 active projects at any given time for the last six years and have finished hundreds of projects.? Each “project” is a new material, a new battery, or a new device.? Hundreds of companies have learned through working with the consortium.

Along the way, we have also built a formidable patent portfolio, consisting of 30 issued patents and almost twice that many pending applications.? And more are coming.?

Heart of the Company

When we founded the company, we asked ourselves an important question:? “How many people are we willing to hurt in order to make more money?”? The answer was, “Not even one.” This is the heart of the company, and it is embodied in our business model and everything we do.? Are we willing to sell the company?? Every startup is, of course, but for us it will only be to someone who will pick up that torch.? Our preference, though is to build a durable company that will follow this goal to its completion.?

Need for Investment

From the beginning, we knew that to succeed, other companies would need to make massive investments in equipment, in materials, in marketing and prototypes and testing.? We used our moral imperative to motivate them, and also the money that could be made selling materials and products.? The industry has responded in spades, with most of the costs of those 100s of projects being paid for by companies other than Soteria.? The scale needed, though, is massive.? Roughly 10 m2 is needed to make a kWh of batteries (or about 2 e-bikes or 100 cellphones), which means 10 million m2 will make a GWh.? With the market approaching 1 TWh, that means 10 billion m2 are needed for ubiquitous adoption, and this is increasing annually by about 20%. One metallization machine, which for simplicity might cost $10 million, can output about 20 million square meters.? This means that ubiquitous adoption requires an investment of about $5 billion for 500 machines to make 10 billion m2—a massive investment that could never be justified.? Or so I thought.? But we need these machines to be built, and we have always known that this was the magnitude of the investment.? Thus, Battery Innovation Group—“BIG.”

Something Gigantic

Two months ago, some friends visited the China International Battery Fair, CIBF, in ChongQing, China.? We knew some companies in China were beginning to use our technology for R&D, so our friends looked around to see if anything was in production.? In fact, several companies are making MPCC, and we received presentations from most of them. ?Looking them over, we realized that what we had taught the industry had made it to China in a Gigantic way.? Below is a table which lists the MPCC factories that are either built or under construction today—for a total of over 8 billion square meters, from an investment north of $3 billion.

The companies making MPCC and their websites are:

·???????? Yangzhou Nanopore Innovative Technology: www.jynanopore.com

·???????? Jiujiang Defu Technology: www.jjdefu.com

·???????? Jimat New Material Technology: www.jimat-tech.com

·???????? Jian Enpack Composite Current Collectors: www.enpackcorp.com.cn

·???????? Allright Technology (Amtech): www.advmater.tech

·???????? Jiangxi Guangteng Micro-Nano Materials: www.gntnano.com

·???????? Zhixin Boyuan New Materials: www.i-broad.com

Those are all Chinese companies.? In addition, in the US and Germany, there is:

·???????? Steinerfilm USA: https://www.steinerfilm.com/

·???????? Steinerfillm GmbH (Germany): https://www.steinerfilm.de/en/home

There are many others who are working on MPCC production, but these are the ones who have products? for sale with high volume supply.

Use in EVs

While unconfirmed, magazines are reporting the use of composite current collectors in the ZEEKR 009ME and the ZEEKR 001 which uses the CATL Qilin battery.? CATL has said that select versions of the Qilin battery for high-end cars will use MPCC.? In addition. GAC’s Aion brand has said that their Magazine 2.0 battery also contains MPCC, to be used in the GAC Aion Hyper .

Soteria Response & Positioning

When I first heard this news, and realized the scale of what was going on, it was a massive shock.? I hadn’t met these people, and didn’t know whether to climb under the couch and cry, or buy a plane ticket to China to give them all a big hug.? After significant thought, advice and prayer I realized this is what we wanted all along, and so the hug was in order.

Soteria is going to stay the course, growing our consortium, focusing on safety in all aspects, acting as a conduit to help the industry learn about best practices for battery safety and the use of safe product strategies.? We are patenting other technologies and will continue to mature the MPCC and our Dreamweaver separator.? We will soon be launching a new way of sharing safety technology broadly that will be open to other companies, both who have technology and who need it.? We will continue to develop safety standards and rating systems.?

Our patents will be licensed to the cell producers and end users, and those same patents will be used to enable every battery producer to have access to this technology--so the material producers are our allies in our quest to have this technology in every lithium-ion battery.

We welcome our friends in China to the industry of battery safety, and will do what we can to help promote their products in the US and Europe, while also educating their customers about our patent coverage and our business-friendly, low-royalty business model.? We want this technology in every battery, and will not let even one person get hurt in order for us to make more money.? The investments that these companies have made have brought us much closer to the original goals of ubiquitous adoption, and we will aid the transition to that end.

For many startups, the questions of whether the technology works, whether anyone will care if it does, and whether they will be willing to pay for it present significant risks to overcome. For Soteria, those trains have left the station, and we are grateful for the many hundreds of people and companies who have worked both diligently and creatively to make it happen.

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