LG Chem energizing innovation
Chemical giant sponsors electric vehicle battery contest for students
South Korean chemical giant LG Chem Ltd has sponsored the first electric vehicle battery innovation contest for Chinese undergraduates in a bid to cultivate talented individuals and empower them to unleash the next wave of innovation in the industry.
The competition, which kicked off last November, has attracted teams from prestigious institutes. Contestants from Peking University, Tsinghua University and Tongji University received Best Innovation awards this month in Beijing.
“College students shoulder the responsibility of fueling innovation in China, and the future of the entire industry lies within their spirit of creativity,” said Park Hyun-shik, president of LG Chem China.
“LG Chem will always adhere to openness and innovation, and commit itself to cultivating young talents for electric vehicle batteries, and share the innovations rooted in China with the rest of the world,” he said at the award ceremony.
Positioned as a global leader in the battery industry, LG Chem has actively developed new products based on its proprietary technologies and has secured the battery production capacity as a global player to raise the dominance in the next-generation energy market.
According to the company, 41 percent of its research and development expenditure goes to batteries. It has formed two joint ventures with Huayou Cobalt in China to secure stable supplies of cobalt for making electric batteries.
Experts said this electric vehicle battery competition laid a good foundation for college students to engage in future pioneering work, which could inject vitality into the battery industry.
“Development of new energy vehicles is one of China’s national strategies. Making vehicles cleaner is an important way to help improve the environment,” said Wang Binggang, a senior
College students shoulder the responsibility of fueling innovation in China, and the future of the entire industry lies within their spirit of creativity.”
Park Hyun-shik,
expert on China’s national new energy car initiatives. “In the long term, electric vehicles will be the mainstream and their development will rely on battery quality.”
Qiu Xinping, a professor at Tsinghua University, said: “Some contestants’ proposals on improving the energy density of batteries are wise. Battery performance can be doubled without increasing material costs.” A high energy density system can store a vast amount of energy in a small space.
“It can be imagined that if their proposals are put into mass production, the cost of producing batteries could drop drastically while the driving range of electric vehicles would be increased substantially,” Qiu said.
China is the world’s largest car market, and stepped up efforts to develop new energy vehicles with the aim of shifting consumers away from combustion engines. Industry data shows the battery segment in China registered a hefty growth of 324 percent year-on-year in 2016, and climbed 78.6 percent in 2017. After years of market stimulation, the country has been cutting financial incentives for new energy cars. Subsidies will cease altogether by the end of 2020, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.