Christina Lampe-Onnerud lives in motion. Whether she’s whisking visitors through her beige offices and “dry room” laboratories, scribbling an impromptu industry analysis on a whiteboard, or just grabbing the nearest can of Coke to help a visitor visualize her company’s technology, the founder and CEO of Cadenza Innovation exudes energy, even in the most prosaic settings.
Which is entirely appropriate for someone in the business of power–lithium-ion battery power, in her case. “I feel really passionate about being part of the solution for future generations,” says Lampe-Onnerud, a bubbly, musical Swede with sunglasses often perched atop her auburn-blond curls–and two decades of starting and running battery companies under her stylish belt. “Energy is something I know something about.”
Lampe-Onnerud invokes the threats of climate change and the increasing role that batteries can play in supplanting fossil fuels. But she’s also addressing a daily, and increasingly urgent, modern problem pinned to some very old technology. Created in the late 1970s, lithium-ion batteries are providing energy for much more recent innovations, like smartphones, laptops, Teslas, smart homes, and green buildings. Our very way of life, not to mention our businesses, is increasingly dependent on battery power and storage with every passing recharge.
So the companies that can figure out how to boost power stand to turbocharge their own fortunes. The global lithium-ion battery market is nearing $60 billion, according to Global Market Insights, and demand for rechargeable batteries will grow as industries from personal electronics to automaking become increasingly reliant on their power.
The electric-vehicle market demonstrates some of the problems that battery makers have yet to solve. Today, most EVs still can’t go as far on a single battery charge as a traditional vehicle can on a tank of gas. But that EV is more expensive to make and to buy–in part because the batteries that power it are big, inefficient, and expensive. They’re the same, after all, as the batteries in your fast-draining iPhone, except that “there are about 10,000 times more cells in a car than in a smartphone,” says Carnegie Mellon mechanical engineering professor Venkat Viswanathan. “What we need for the mass-market electric car is some more reduction in battery cost and some increase in energy density.” Fewer than one million vehicles sold in 2016 were powered solely by batteries; but by 2025, that number will increase to eight million and another 25 million hybrids will be on the road, which combined will account for 31 percent of the global automotive market, according to JPMorgan predictions.
All of this is dependent on making exponential improvements in a technology that has mostly been inching along. Each lithium-ion battery has an anode and a cathode, and creates an electrical current by sending electrolytes containing the ions between the two. As the anode collects lithium ions, the battery charges; then, when called into action, it starts sending the ions back to the cathode, discharging electricity into whatever device it’s powering.
The big problem: The ions’ voyage between the nodes creates resistance, mostly in the form of heat, as the chemical electric current interacts with the battery’s materials. The faster the charge, the more resistance, which is why a battery that heats up too quickly can catch fire or explode.
Today, traditional electronics makers, car companies, and tech giants including Panasonic, Samsung, LG Chem, Toshiba, Google, BMW, and Dyson are just a few of the household names working to make lithium-ion batteries store more energy and discharge it more quickly–and safely. “It’s the right technology; we just need to make it do a little bit more,” says Rick Fioravanti, an energy-industry consultant with Quanta Technology. “To get a battery to be denser, it introduces new challenges.”
Cadenza is one of a slew of startups, including Fisker, QuantumScape, Solid Power, and Romeo Power, that are attacking various aspects of battery tech. BMW supplier Sila Nanotechnologies is another, and one of several companies tinkering with the materials within battery cells to increase energy storage by 20 percent or more.
Lampe-Onnerud is addressing the heat issue by focusing on the outside of the power cell. In 2013, after selling her previous battery company, she filed a patent for a safer and more energy-efficient packaging for lithium-ion cells, one that can theoretically increase a battery’s energy output by 30 to 100 percent. “If you want to have an impact on energy markets globally, you have to be on par with fossil fuels or cheaper,” Lampe-Onnerud explains. “But you don’t have to solve all the problems at the same time.”
Cadenza’s product resembles an egg carton, or a case for hair curlers. It’s made of fire-retardant ceramic that houses and insulates each fat, cylindrical “jelly roll,” which contains the anode, cathode, and electrolytes. The rolls themselves are protected by thin cold-finger aluminum sleeves; the whole thing is covered by an aluminum casing and a device to release pressure and prevent explosion–much like the tabs on the omnipresent soda cans floating around the Cadenza offices.
The aluminum casing and fire-insulated ceramic are supposed to help contain the heat from discharging or dysfunctional lithium-ion power cells and prevent them from exploding. This means the cells can be safely stacked more closely, thus increasing the energy output and decreasing the space needed for the power source of any large vehicle or commercial grid using this system. “We basically say that Cadenza delivers a box of all the safety and everything inside,” Lampe-Onnerud says. “I will always be smaller and cheaper–and I will never explode.”
It’s a technology that Lampe-Onnerud has spent more than two decades working toward–and one that she’s still trying to bring broadly to market–without trying to take on manufacturing at scale herself. “We’re tiny,” she readily acknowledges of her 30-person outfit headquartered in sleepy offices below Duracell’s Bethel, Connecticut, headquarters, where she has access to lab space. “If we cannot inspire some really big players, we’ll have no impact.”
Who’s Also in the Battery Pack
Some of the other key players trying to crack the code of making denser, more efficient batteries.
Fisker (Los Angeles)
EV designer Henrik Fisker hired Sakti3’s co-founder to develop solid-state batteries with faster recharge times and lower resistance than those with the wet chemistry of traditional lithium-ion cells.
Panasonic (Tokyo)
The Japanese consumer electronics firm is currently the world’s largest supplier of lithium-ion batteries. It operates Gigafactories in a joint venture with Tesla.
Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) (Ningde, China)
Another industry powerhouse, and supplier to many carmakers, the company is on track to overtake Panasonic.
Dyson (Malmesbury, England)
The appliance maker has lots of experience in batteries. Sir James Dyson now wants to produce an EV. He bought Sakti3 to help that effort–but recently wrote off the investment.
QuantumScape (San Jose, California)
Another entrant in the solid-state sweepstakes, the company recently got a $100 million investment from Volkswagen.
Romeo Power (Los Angeles)
Co-founded by a former SpaceX energy storage engineer, the firm is designing packaging that it says can achieve 25 percent more energy density than existing lithium-ion battery packs.
