By Battery Power Staff
December 17, 2018 | Louisville, Colo.-based Solid Power, a manufacturer of safe, high-energy, and cost competitive all solid-state batteries (ASSB) established in 2012, closed $20 million in a Series A investment round earlier this year. Investors include Hyundai CRADLE, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., Sanoh Industrial Co., Solvay Ventures, and A123 Systems.
ASSB have generated substantial interest for mobile power applications due to their ability to provide greater run-time per charge and excellent overall product reliability and safety. The automotive industry, in its pursuit of vehicle electrification, is particularly interested in ASSB to boost vehicle range, while using an overall safer and simpler energy storage system as compared to current state of the art lithium-ion batteries.
Solid Power’s Series A investment will allow the company to scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be constructed and installed by the end of 2018 in the company’s 21,000 square-foot facility located within the Colorado Technology Center in Louisville, CO, along the front range of the Rocky Mountains. The company expects the facility to be fully operational in 2019.
This production capacity will be used for preliminary qualification of the company’s solid-state cells for multiple markets including automotive, aerospace, and defense. The company’s ultimate objective is to displace lithium-ion as the battery of choice for high performance, mobile power applications.
“We are at the center of the ‘electrification of everything’ with ASSB technology emerging as the clear leader in ‘post lithium-ion’ technologies,” said co-founder and CEO Doug Campbell in a statement. “Solid-state batteries are a game changer for EV, electronics, defense, and medical device markets, and Solid Power’s technology is poised to revolutionize the industry with a competitive product paying special attention to safety, performance, and cost.”
According to the company, Solid Power’s solid-state batteries provide substantially higher energy than conventional lithium-ion while also reducing system-level cost by reducing reliance on many expensive engineering solutions typically deployed in lithium-ion systems to assure safe operation of the battery pack.
The advantages of Solid Power’s solid-state batteries include two to three times higher energy vs. current lithium-ion; substantially improved safety due to the elimination of the volatile, flammable, and corrosive liquid electrolyte as used in lithium-ion; low-cost battery-pack designs; and high manufacturability due to compatibility with automated, industry-standard, and roll-to-roll production.
