Energetica India Magazine October-November 2021

ELECTRIC VEHICLES CEEW-CEF in its report “Financing In - dia’s Transition to EVs” has forecast that India’s EV battery demand would reach 158 GWh by FY30 and the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) in its India En - ergy Outlook 2021 projects that India could have 140-200GW of utility-scale standalone battery storage by 2040, potentially a third of world’s storage ca - pacity by then. Such a massive ramp up in demand around the world will call for global co-operation and efforts to meet the many manufacturing challenges in scaling up production to Terra Watt (TW) levels in the coming years. The modern EV industry is just a two decades old and is being put on an extraordinarily “fast pace” to displace the ICE industry. The mature ICE indus - try developed a robust system driven manufacturing process, quality systems across the industry, common standards, customer focus and more, over the cen - tury of its dominance. For the infant EV industry, the battery, key to its success is still evolving. Inno - vations around cathode and anode ma - terials, electrolyte and even separators keep inundating the EV landscape with ever greater promise. The current effort at dispensing Cobalt, a material scarcer than Lithium and restricted to few geog - raphies and moving from liquid to solid electrolyte are some examples. In this context, the observation of Chris Berry, an independent battery metals analyst and president of House Mountain Part - ner cannot be more succinct: “The evo - lution of battery chemistry is the biggest unknown in many ways”. Among the other hurdles in ramping up LIB production is the fast emerging sce - nario of global LIB raw material shortage especially Lithium and Cobalt and the consequent rise in prices. Supply chains will be another major bottleneck with most of them located in China. According to Bench Mark Mineral Intelligence, 80% of chemical refining, 66% of cathodes and anodes and 73% of Lithium ion battery cells are based in China. (Chart below) China’s share of production 2019 Any supply disruption could have det - rimental impact on not just ramping up battery manufacturing in existing facil - ities but in adding new capacities. The current semiconductor chip shortage that is hitting hard car production in mil - lions and the mobile electronic devices in tens of millions is a wakeup call to pre - pare for any such unexpected circum - stances in battery manufacturing. Battery quality and its ability to deliver on all the parameters critically depend on the quality of cathodes, anodes and other critical components. With very little entry barrier, many of the components available in the market cannot be trusted for its quality. Sourcing components from tier-1 suppliers amidst rising demand would pose serious procurement chal - lenges. Even in a fully commissioned plant, there are many manufacturing challenges. For example a typical EV cars has about 5000 to 6000 LIB cells and there would be twice as many welds interconnecting them. Damage to even a single cell out of the 12000 odd welds, will impact the range and life of the battery. With so many subsytems, each one presenting its own manufacturing challenges, the process quality has to be stringent. With the stiff delivery deadlines and yet to evolve quality systems, ensuring high reliability would be a major challenge. Expensive recalls of cars in hundreds of thousands to fix defective batteries would need to be avoided, as the nascent EV industry would be hit hard. Bridging the gap between the shifting demands of the OEMs and the con - straints in accommodating them in bat - tery design will consume significant time. Every change effected has to be tested and validated and many feedback cy - cles may be needed to arrive at an ac - ceptable solution which could be fitted into a flexible factory automation system for mass manufacture. Cars, expensive investments as they are, are built to have a service life of about 15 years. With the battery industry prone to discarding inefficient and no longer via - ble technologies assuring EV customers of easy replacement of batteries over the car’s life would need to be handled in an efficient manner. The transportation storage industry is indeed faced with many challenges and is on the learning curve and the answer to the question if there would be enough batteries is more than obvious. It is very likely that EVs would end up having the same flexibility in the achiev - ing the targets as GHG, its parent. The battery storage industry in the mean - while will move on, trying to meet the demands, all the while bringing in ever more refinements and finding solutions to all the challenges. It will attain matu - rity levels surpassing the ICE industry at a fraction of the time and be capable of delivering high performance EV batteries in scale sufficient to meet the demand. 53 energetica INDIA- Oct-Nov_2021