has really been defined

by how we harness and capture energy.

You know, initially starting

with us leveraging things like fire

and then later coal and petroleum fuel sources

for our energy needs.

And really the great opportunity going forward is this idea

that we can capture renewable energy sources,

store that energy in batteries

and then use that to power our lives.

Advances in battery design over the past few decades

have made modern technology possible, but it's not enough.

We need better, cheaper, more energy dense batteries

if we're going to make electric cars ubiquitous

and save the planet.

Now companies are on the verge of battery breakthroughs

that could change the world.

The battery industry

has been kind of stuck making batteries one way

for like 50 years and we think

it's just time for that to change.

A battery looks like a black box quite literally sometimes

but inside it is a very complex mixture of chemicals.

There are four components.

There are two electrodes, cathode and anode,

there's a separator

and then there's a liquid electrolyte typically.

And the electrolyte's job is to be able

to shuttle irons between the two electrodes.

And that's what charges the battery

and that's what allows the battery to be then discharged

and produce power.

Among the everyday technologies,

batteries are perhaps one of the oldest

because batteries were invented even

before electricity was invented

which is to say there was no way to generate electricity

until somebody made a battery and that was back in 1799

by an Italian scientist named Volta.

And what he created was actually called a voltaic pile.

It wasn't even called a battery back then.

And it was called a pile because

it was literally a pile of two different types of metal

in this case, copper and zinc separated

by typically a piece of cardboard that was dipped in vinegar

To get a feel for how a battery works,

we decided to build our own.

I got a copper sheet, I got a couple zinc sheets.

I cut them into one by one squares

and I also got a coffee filter

that I cut into one inch squares too.

Right, just to start off, keep a simple aluminum foil

at the bottom.

Okay. So that you're able to test

whether the battery is working or not.

On top of you put a copper sheet.

And so now you have to dip the coffee filter

into a solution of salt and water.

Okay.

Then you put your coffee filter.

Done. Then you place

the zinc sheet on top.

You also have a voltmeter which basically

will be able to measure the voltage

that this battery will have.

Okay so we're getting 0.74 volts.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Yeah.

Now you can connect a copper cable on either ends

and you could solider that on

then you can connect it to say an LED light

and that should light up.

The more cells you pile on the higher the voltage.

We piled on 10 layers of zinc and copper

to see if we could power up an LED light.

So let's test it with an LED light.

Okay, it's the moment of truth here.

There we go.

And that's electricity.

Cool.

Batteries have come a long way since the voltaic pile

but they're still made up of the full basic components,

anode, cathode, separator, and electrolyte.

The current state of the art lithium-ion battery

is small, light and relatively powerful

making everything from mobile devices

to electric cars possible.

But in order to make de-carbonization a reality,

batteries need to get much better.

We are quite far away from the limits

of what a battery can do.

Among the different things about batteries

that still need to be improved

is not just the amount of energy they can store

but they also have to do it safely.

Batteries also need to be charged more quickly

and finally batteries still aren't cheap enough.

They probably need to be half the price

to be able to compete with the gasoline powered engine.

To accomplish all that, a number of companies

are going inside the black box

and tinkering with those four basic components,

hoping to jumpstart the next generation of batteries.

Batteries have a long history of pretty slow improvement

on the order of four to 5% a year.

Think we're one of the few companies

that are actually trying

to do something pretty revolutionary in this space.

Harold Rust company, Enovix,

based just South of San Francisco

is making one seemingly small tweak

to the lithium-ion battery.

Replacing the anode typically made of carbon with silicon.

So the major advantage of silicon

is it has three times the energy density of carbon

which it replaces so that allows you to pack more stuff

in your battery and drive up energy density.

But silicon well, it's a great anode

suffers from a bunch of problems

and the biggest of which is the fact that it expands 300%.

Easy way to think about it is when you're charging a cell

the silicon tends to expand and when you discharge it,

it compresses or contracts.

That's a potentially battery busting problem.

But in Enovix claims to have found a solution.

A complex method of arranging the batteries components

that keeps the silicon under pressure.

This 3D architecture allows us to constrain that expansion

in a very uniform way within the cell

that allows us to maintain a very long cycle life.

It allows us to basically manage that swelling

without any macroscopic growth of the battery.

A silicon anode battery could store about 50% more energy

than what's currently on the market.

Which could mean we'll be seeing lighter electronics

with longer battery life in the near future.

We've been actively sampling batteries

over the last two years to customers.

We're sitting in a room now where we're starting

to assemble our first production line.

And right now we're targeting first deliveries

towards the end of this year.

But we're focused on consumer electronics to start.

With the technology it's definitely applicable

to larger battery applications

like EVs potentially grid storage.

And so that's on our roadmap.

Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, another company

is working on an even more ambitious battery design.

We started with the mission

of trying to narrow the gap that we

in combustion engine based vehicles and EVs.

And we recognized that the key there

was to build a better battery.

We could usher in a new era of transportation.

15 minute charge times, better life performance

and even lower costs.

It turns out all those problems can be addressed

if you just switch from a carbon or carbon silicon anode

not to a lithium metal anode.

Usually the lithium in lithium-ion batteries only refers

to the molecule was shuttling between the cathode and anode.

Making the anode itself out of lithium

could double the energy density of the battery.

A much bigger leap than a silicon anode battery,

like in Enovix's.

We didn't invent the idea of a lithium metal battery.

That idea has been around for a very long time

even before lithium-ion lithium metal batteries.

There's just one small problem.

Unfortunately, they're not safe.

So typically inside a battery, the electrolyte is liquid

but an liquid electrolyte for a lithium metal battery

causes the lithium metal to degrade

and sometimes even short and catch fire.

QuantumScape's main goal was to try and replace

what is a liquid electrolyte inside the battery

with a solid electrolyte.

The problem is that no one has been able to make one

that conducts well enough to compete with the liquid.

It wasn't clear that even the material existed in nature

that could meet these requirements.

So we had to explore a wide range of materials,

but luckily nature had a material

that meets the requirements

and our team was able to find it.

It's literally a solid material, it's a ceramic material,

but it's kind of a very special material

because lithium-ions can just zip right through it

like they're on a highway.

This single powered cell is all QuantumScape

was able to show us of they're solid state battery.

Ultimately they'll stack 100 of these together

to make a complete battery pack.

The company is still a few years

from selling a commercial product,

but the performance improvements they're predicting

would be revolutionary.

We've shown that we can charge faster.

We can get 80% charge at 15 minutes,

which is gonna be really important

if you're on the road trip

or if you don't have a garage to plug your car in

and charge overnight.

You can get longer range

by improving the energy density of the battery.

What we've said is we're aiming

to have cars driving with these cells in 2024.

So the next few years will be

about increasing the scale of production.

We formed a partnership with Volkswagen in 2012

and they've announced that they would partner with us

and make a joint venture to commercialize the cells

and go into manufacturing together.

We think that with these batteries,

you're gonna be able to get EVs

that compete more effectively

with combustion engine-based vehicles.

You get more energy density,

you have lower costs and longer life.

So our mission right now

is to get these batteries on the road,

try to really transform the automotive sector

and in the process really make a dent on CO2 emissions.

Companies like QuantumScape and Enovix

are imagining a future in which clean, affordable EVs

dominate the roads.

But the implications go much further than that.

Better batteries are key to almost every technology

that could slow down climate change.

Batteries are what are known as an enabling technology

which is that you can use a battery to make an impact

across different sectors of the economy

and across different types of technologies.

So currently our batteries can go in electric cars

but there's still a battery that needs to go in a truck.

Then there needs to be a battery that goes in a ship

and then there needs to be a battery

that can go in a plane.

There are now bigger and bigger batteries

being put on the grid that help us increase

the amount of renewables

And all those things get a boost

with every little innovation that happens in batteries.

And so the impact that batteries can have is immense.