Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
New battery tech makes advances
A small company called Sila is researching a promising new battery chemistry that can let electric vehicles travel farther with a smaller battery.
The Alameda, California, company began more than a decade ago, and co-founder and CEO Gene Berdichevsky says its chemistry can store more energy than existing batteries.
In current batteries, lithium ions move from anode to cathode, generating electricity by splitting into charged ions and electrons. Graphite stores lithium atoms inside a battery until needed. Instead of graphite, Sila uses silicon, which can store more lithium. Berdichevsky talked with The Associated Press about the future of electric vehicles.
What do you see as the shortcomings of today’s lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, and how can your company change that?
The biggest shortcoming is cost. We’ve demonstrated that incredible vehicles can be made with today’s battery technology, very long range that consumers love and want to buy. The key now is to make every vehicle equally compelling, and that means getting to lower-cost vehicles without sacrificing performance, without making the vehicle have only 100 miles, 200 miles of range. Those are pretty mediocre vehicles that people tend to not want to buy. To do that, you really need to drive down costs. The best way is to increase performance and to store more energy in fewer cells.
I know Sila’s silicon anode batteries are in watches now. How long until they’re in electric vehicles?
We purchased a 160-acre site with a 600,000-square-foot building in Moses Lake, Washington. That’ll start up in late 2024 and go into full production in 2025. And then eventually 150 gigawatt hours, which is about 2 million cars worth of production. You should start to see your first vehicles with our technology toward the end of ’25, early ’26.
You have a contract with Mercedes. Is that the first brand to the battery chemistry? And what other automakers are in line?
The first announced customer is Mercedes. They’ll use our technology in their EQ lineup starting with the G Wagon. We’re working with quite a lot of different automakers and going through the very rigorous testing process to confirm the performance that we can deliver before we can announce that we’re working with them.
When do you think we’ll all be driving electric vehicles?
We won’t all be driving EVs until probably the 2040s because there are so many vehicles on the road that will have to get turned over. Not only do you have to get to 100% of new cars sold being electric, but you have to do that for 10 to 15 years, because people do hold on to their vehicle. Turning the entire fleet over is going to take until probably the middle of the century. I think the more exciting number is going to be when are we at 50%, 60%, 80% market penetration.