Former Tesla Engineer Aims To Build Next Generation Electric Battery Material Plant In The US By 2024
Former Tesla Engineer Aims To Build Next Generation Electric Battery Material Plant In The US By 2024
by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), May 6, 2022
Sila Nanotechnologies, a battery
startup founded in 2011 by a former Tesla engineer, announced
on May 3 plans for a new plant based in the United States that will
mass-produce material for low-cost next-generation batteries with a longer
range and is not dependent on manufacturing in China.
“In a commitment to ensure America retains global leadership in
the world’s transition to the new energy storage era, Sila, a next-generation
battery materials company, today announced the purchase of a facility with more
than 600,000 square feet of space located in Moses Lake, WA to be used to
manufacture Sila’s breakthrough lithium-ion anode materials at automotive
volumes and quality,” announced the company in a May
3 press release.
“Powered with hydropower, the facility is located on
160-acres of land close to rail lines for convenient and efficient shipping,”
said Sila.
Sila’s CEO Gene Berdichevsky told Reuters that the company will
invest a few hundred million dollars to build the new factory in
Washington state, which is set to open in the second half of 2024, with full
production beginning in early 2025.
The cost of electric car
batteries has yet to fall to a more affordable price as was earlier
anticipated, when Tesla jump-started the demand for batteries after its
founding in 2003, due to material situations, explained the CEO to Reuters.
Berdichevsky said that his
materials could be used to build up to 500,000 chips, which would help lower
the cost to consumers, making electric vehicles less expensive.
The
battery company had raised an additional $590 million in 2021, raising its
valuation to an estimated $3.3 billion.
“The U.S. has always excelled at
innovation. Now we must also excel at manufacturing that innovation,” said
Berdichevsky, who said that his company “is delivering proven next-generation
anode materials today.”
“Our new Washington state plant
builds on that momentum offering the manufacturing capacity to meet the needs
of our auto partners on their way to a fully electric future. We’ve been
working towards automotive quality standards and scale since our start to
ensure longer range, faster charge times, and lower battery cost.”
“With this scale-up, we have a
pivotal piece to realize the full potential of next-generation materials at the
volumes required to make a global impact,” Berdichevsky concluded.
The battery CEO said that Sila’s new plant in Moses Lake would
make silicon-based anode materials, which he claims can store 20 percent more
energy than anodes that typically use graphite, of which 70 percent comes from
an increasingly unreliable China.
Graphite is considered by the U.S. government to be a strategic
mineral, but not silicon, which can be found largely domestically.
The Biden
administration has said it aims to reduce American reliance on China in the
battery supply chain.
Sila claims that its silicon anode allows more lithium ions to
be stored in batteries, thus increasing energy density and creating a battery
that is cheaper and contains more energy in the same space.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced a plan in 2020 to use
silicon-based anodes in its new batteries, but it is not certain whether it has
taken advantage of the new technology.
Sila is currently operating a
test production facility at its headquarters in Alameda, California, that can
produce battery materials for about 1,000 cars a year, but it is currently
limited to making materials used in fitness watches.
Berdichevsky said the company’s
new facility aims to deliver annual silicon-based anode production sufficient
to power 10 gigawatt hours of batteries in 100,000 electric vehicles, with a
goal to increase the capacity of “150 GWh of cells when used as a full graphite
replacement or 750 GWh as a partial replacement—enough to power two to ten
million electric vehicles per year.”
He said that Sila
will address the immediate issue of rapidly expanding production to meet the
needs of automakers.
German automaker Daimler AG, meanwhile, has put a minority
equity stake in Sila, which also has a contract to produce electric battery
materials with its rival, BMW.
Reuters
has contributed to this report.
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