Next-gen battery strategies 2027+: Potentials and challenges for future battery designs and diversification in product portfolios to serve a large bandwidth of market applications 2024-01-3018

The pace of innovations in battery development is revolutionizing the landscape and opportunities for energy storage applications leading to a stronger market segmentation enabling a better suitability to fulfill specific application requirements. For automotive applications, several approaches to increase energy densities, to improve fast charging performance, and to reduce cost on a pack level are considered. Among them, a promising example is the direct integration of battery cells into the battery pack (Cell-to-pack; CTP) or vehicle (Cell-to-chassis, CTC) to increase energy densities and to reduce costs, as already commercialized by Tesla, CATL and others. In the pack development, especially Asian players are one of the frontrunners, where e.g., hybrid cell battery systems with a mixture of cells with different cathode chemistries as introduced by NIO, are experiencing a high interest of the market. Furthermore, the implementation of battery swapping concepts is gaining stronger market attention. On cell level, a segmentation between high-performance and low-cost applications is realized in the technology developments. Hereby, a diversification of the cell manufacturer’s product portfolio, to also serve a broader range of market applications such as e.g., Bus, Truck, Off-Highway or ESS in addition to their standard EV business, can be observed. As a strong demand for NMC and LFP-based battery cells is leading to fluctuating raw material prices (especially for Lithium), especially sodium-ion batteries (SiB) are gaining increased attention further pushed with the announcements and achievements of CATL and Northvolt to be considered especially for ESS, but also potentially automotive applications. On the other hand, developments to improve cell performance are achieving higher maturity, especially on the anode side with the implementation of engineered silicon materials, but also for (semi-)solid-state technology. As a compromise, mixed cell chemistry concepts are also considered as alternative solutions. Overall, the presentation aims to analyze battery development strategies for implementation beyond 2027, shedding light on the significance of market segmentation addressing the variety of needs for different applications.