Solid-state battery start-ups in the United States have risen by more than 30%. The commanding heights of the next generation lithium battery technology are now that these Chinese companies have caught up.

SMM: us solid-state battery innovator QuantumScape rose 31.08% on Tuesday (8th), hitting an intraday high of $59.99 per share, up 145% from its opening price on its first day of trading.

On the news side, the company released its latest solid-state battery research results on the same day. Its battery can charge 80% in 15 minutes and can be carried on a vehicle with a range of 300 miles or more. The normal service life will reach about 12 years. At the same time, tests showed that the battery did not decay after 800 cycles, equivalent to 240000 miles (380000 km) of driving range.

In this technological breakthrough, the flexible ceramic electrolyte is considered to play a key role. The separator enables the battery to withstand the high temperature and high pressure environment caused by the automobile current load without failure, and even work normally at the sub-zero temperature.

In response, Paul Albertus (Paul Albertus) of the University of Maryland said QuantumScape "hit a home run", but also pointed out that "they eventually need to achieve a result similar to a Grand Slam in order to bring the technology to market."

The safety of solid-state battery as the commanding height of the next generation lithium battery technology has attracted the most attention.

Although it has been on the market for less than half a month, QuantumScape has long been a "hot cake" in the eyes of some investors. The company raised $380 million from Volkswagen before going public and received additional funding from technology investors such as Bill Gates (Bill Gates), Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures and KPCB.

On this basis, the company's core research team is also "star-studded", including Jugen Leohold, a former head of Volkswagen's (Volkswagen) research department and professor Jugen Leohold, and J.B., co-founder of Tesla (Tesla). J.B. Straubel and Stan Whitingham (Stan Whittingham), who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on lithium-ion batteries.

It is understood that solid-state battery is considered to be the commanding height of the next generation of lithium battery technology, and its working principle is no different from that of traditional lithium battery. The main difference between the two is that the electrolyte of the solid-state battery is solid, which is equivalent to the transfer of lithium ion to the solid-state electrolyte.

Compared with traditional lithium batteries, the most prominent advantage of all-solid-state batteries is safety. Solid-state battery has the characteristics of non-flammability, high temperature resistance, non-corrosion and non-volatilization. Solid-state electrolyte is the core of solid-state battery. Electrolyte materials largely determine the performance parameters of solid-state lithium battery, such as power density, cycle stability, safety performance, high and low temperature performance and service life.

In addition, the electrochemical window of the solid-state battery can reach more than 5V, allowing the matching of high-energy positive electrodes, and the negative electrode of the battery can use metal lithium to increase the theoretical energy density, which is expected to solve the problem of mileage anxiety of new energy vehicles; at the same time, the packaging and cooling system can be simplified, and the internal structure of the battery is in series, which further reduces the weight of the battery in limited space, and the volume energy density can be increased by more than 70% compared with the liquid lithium-ion battery (graphite negative electrode).

Domestic enterprises have caught up at the beginning of the global "arms race" phase.

At present, the field of solid-state battery has entered the stage of "arms race", which is mainly divided into three camps: Europe and the United States, Japan, South Korea and China. European and American car companies pay more attention to solid-state battery start-ups. Car companies acquire technology reserves by acquiring and investing in start-ups derived from American universities in the field of solid-state batteries, such as Solid Power, SolidEnergy Systems, Ionic Materials, Quantum Scape and so on.

Japanese automakers started their research and development on solid-state batteries relatively early, with Toyota, the earliest entrant, partnering with solid-state battery startup Erica (Ilika) in 2008 and announcing a partnership with Panasonic in early 2019. Mitsubishi, Nissan, Panasonic and other enterprises have accelerated the layout of the solid-state battery industry, and strive to achieve mass production as soon as possible.

In China, although it started relatively late, more and more enterprises have participated in it. Participants include research institutions such as Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao Institute of Energy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ningbo Institute of Materials of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, battery enterprises such as Ganfeng Lithium Industry and Ningde Times, and other enterprises are optimistic about cross-border investment in solid batteries. Such as Wanxiang Group, which is mainly composed of auto parts, BYD of new energy vehicles, and so on.

It should be pointed out that although solid-state batteries have not been commercialized on a large scale, it is expected that quasi-solid-state lithium batteries will be industrialized in 2020 and all-solid-state lithium batteries will eventually be industrialized by 2025. According to the estimates of Bank of China International, the global demand for solid-state lithium batteries is expected to reach 1.7GWh, 44.2GWh and 494.9GWH respectively in 2020, 2025 and 2030, and the global solid-state battery market space is expected to reach more than 150 billion yuan in 2030.

Specifically in China, the shipments of solid-state batteries in China are closely related to the demand for lithium batteries in the three fields of power batteries, consumer batteries and energy storage batteries and the permeability of solid-state batteries in these three areas. Based on this logic, the forward-looking Industrial Research Institute forecasts China's solid-state battery shipments from 2020 to 2030 in the 2020 China solid-State Battery Industry Research report. It is expected that China's solid-state battery shipments will grow rapidly from 2020 to 2030 and may exceed 250GWh by 2030.

The above report further points out that with the continuous progress of solid-state battery technology, the cost and price of solid-state battery will continue to decline, according to SNE Research's forecast of the cost and price of solid-state battery and the above forecast of solid-state battery shipments, it can be preliminarily speculated that by 2030, China's solid-state battery market space may reach 20 billion yuan, a hundredfold increase compared with 2020.