I made a point to follow Solid Energy Systems many years ago, to see how one such battery technology panned out. They went dark in public media for a while. But they’ve recently gotten more publicity again.
Turns out they got some industrial customers for their battery cells in some demanding niche. Since they didn’t need to attract investors anymore, and I guess they had enough customers to fill the capacity they had in that period, they had no reason to publicise their activities.
Now they’re out there again with interviews and such. I suppose they’re looking to scale up.
Feels like there’s a lot of companies like that these days. Ones that you might heard about as a breakthrough 5-10 years ago and then nothing.. while they’re busy using the investments they got figuring out manufacturing at scale. That’s just the time it takes. Many of them now seem to have pilot/demonstration manufacturing plants up and running now.
In another 3-6 years I think we’ll start to see several of these chemistries in consumer products.
Its just academic research papers that get brief press coverage. Its very hard to actually commercialize these and compete (performance and economics) with the incumbent technologies. Some stuff makes it in specialized applications (satellites, earbuds, etc).
You could also find your way into automotive and never achieve more than 40% of the battery market. What works in cars and flashlights is different, and by the time you got automotive penetration, grid storage would also be at volume, sucking up as much production as vehicles, and without having to worry about power density and max charge rate.
Some anecdotal evidence to support what you're saying.
I remember friends telling that gallium nitride was the future a few years ago. 2022 came and went and *poof* I haven't heard a peep out of any tech trade resources (magazines, podcasts, blogs, etc) since then about it
Like you said, these technologies came out when tons of flash and circumstance and within a few months get memory holed out of existence.
Gallium nitride is a replacement for silicon in transistors, and you haven't heard anything because they've won. Any USB-C PD charger you see that provides more than 50W or so and isn't a gigantic brick is a GaN charger. Take a look at any reputable manufacturer's site and you'll find a section about how their chargers use gallium nitride transistors, e.g. https://www.belkin.com/products/product-resources/gan-charge..., https://www.anker.com/ganprime, etc.
The funny thing about big innovations like GaN is that they become mundane and invisible after the hype, but end up in a lot of places without most people realising it (like for Apple users, it's not GaN chargers, it's just the MacBook charger).
Even graphene has a lot of real-world applications that are far removed from the sci-fi marketing of speculators, but offer a great advance over past technology.
Turns out they got some industrial customers for their battery cells in some demanding niche. Since they didn’t need to attract investors anymore, and I guess they had enough customers to fill the capacity they had in that period, they had no reason to publicise their activities.
Now they’re out there again with interviews and such. I suppose they’re looking to scale up.
Feels like there’s a lot of companies like that these days. Ones that you might heard about as a breakthrough 5-10 years ago and then nothing.. while they’re busy using the investments they got figuring out manufacturing at scale. That’s just the time it takes. Many of them now seem to have pilot/demonstration manufacturing plants up and running now.
In another 3-6 years I think we’ll start to see several of these chemistries in consumer products.