electric vehicles will not replace combustion driven cars, but a fundamental breakthrough in energy storage. first started thinking about this problem in 2004, I was employee number seven and Tesla leading the battery system development for the Tesla Roadster. It was apparent even then that the performance of the vehicle would be defined by the performance of the battery. So the range the acceleration, most importantly, the cost was also apparent that the chemistry of those cells was not going to be sufficient to allow electric vehicles to enter all markets, and drive mass adoption quickly. And so it's with that challenge in mind that I left have to pursue this fundamental breakthrough in energy storage. There are only been four commercially successful rechargeable battery chemistries in history. And it's sila nano, we're delivering the fifth conversion type lithium ion. Conversion type lithium uses different set of elements and compounds to store energy and charge much denser volume allowing you to store more energy in every cell. by storing more energy in every cell, you can make a pack for the same range of a vehicle with many fewer cells, and therefore reduce the cost of that pack pretty significantly. And the vehicle as well. We're starting with silicon anodes. And our were developed, we've developed a new class of materials that compensate for the principal challenge of these conversion materials, which is a swelling and shrinking that happens with every single charge and discharge in the battery. And materials work today. And we're most importantly, the drop into existing battery manufacturing. So a factory that produces conventional lithium ion can adopt our materials use those and produce cells with this new chemistry that store more energy, and materials are manufacturable and scale. And we're working with consumer device companies as well as cell partners to launch in their product or technology in their products next year. We're also working with automakers to bring this technology to market a few years down the road. You will experience this in almost every aspect of your life. First, you'll see more featured smaller, better designed electronics that you use every day. You'll see electric vehicles with longer range, faster, recharge time, better acceleration, but again, most importantly, a lower cost will start to hybridize and electrify flight, something that requires much lighter batteries, and will enable 100% renewable grid by firming up the intermittency created from wind and solar. I want to leave you with one parting thought. There's a billion vehicles on the road today. And we travel some 13 trillion miles annually. Energy constitutes 10% of global GDP. And almost 87% of that comes from oil, coal and gas. So it's not an overstatement to say that the 20th century belongs to combustion. I believe the 21st will belong to electrification. I'm Jean Britta chesky, CEO of sila nano, thank you for your attention.
Imagine a world where all electricity comes from the most sustainable and abundant energy source in our solar system, the sun. Imagine a planet that is entirely powered by solar cells. 1% one, one hour of sunlight received globally is already sufficient to power the entire planet for one year, a relatively small area that would cover Death Valley, for example, would already go a long way towards sustainability. It is truly the challenge of our time to dramatically increase the fraction of solar energy that we're producing at the moment. As I started my Korean science, I wondered how can we achieve this. And we need new materials for new future here. We need a miracle, a miracle in the form of a mineral as I started my Korean science. Five years ago, during my PhD at Oxford University, we discovered such a new mineral. It's called perovskite. And it has the potential to change the world. You can see it in this video here in an inexpensive fashion. Without any fancy cleanroom techniques. You can make a fully functioning high quality semiconductor that is similar to silicon. This black film here that you're seeing is a fully working solar cell, rivaling silicon, it's as easy as that anybody can do it with the right equipment here. And it's been quite a breathtaking story. perovskites within five years have caught up with silicon that took almost 50 years to develop. It's unprecedented what happened here. It's a material revolution that was triggered and perovskites are very special in that they can be produced so lightly, they can be suspended on a soap bubble, for example, enabling flexible solar cell technology. You can print them, like newspapers, for example. You can use these flexible solar solar panels to power a flying drone, or a parked car. Or you can have a portable solar panel with you as well. A lot of you have like, mobiles on them. So that would be good. If that's inconvenient. However, you can also have them as variable fabrics. Imagine that fashion designers turned into taxis. Let's not hope for the opposite. But the story doesn't end here. perovskites can be processed on top of silicon as well. They can be combined in a so called perovskite silicon tandem, boosting the underlying silicon solar cell almost by double. Imagine that one additional item on the assembly line of a solar panel manufacturing company can already boosted almost by double. This is the kind of disruptive technology that we're looking for in order to trigger a solar energy revolution. I'm Michael Saliba. I'm a scientist that if you fail Switzerland.
So thank you guys, both for being here. So far, in this energy session. We've mostly talked to folks on the academic side, Professor Keith has as a startup. But beyond that. So I'm curious to talking to you. You know, I'm curious about your perspective on these issues as an entrepreneur, how hard or easy is it at this point, to push technology advances from the lab, into manufacturing and ultimately into into commercial production? What's kind of the ecosystem feel like for clean a clean energy startup in 2017?
I think it's, it's, it's still a challenge, I think a useful rule of thumb to think about is, it takes seven to 10 years for something to kind of make it out of the university lab and actually get deployed commercial in products we we started about six years ago. And you know, we'll be commercial next year. So on the shorter end of that, and the challenges, there's a lot of changes in the in, in the funding climate over that time and in the political landscape over that time. So it's sort of up and down when we started, it was really bad. But fundraising right now is a lot better. There's a lot more dialogue around electric vehicles, Wall Street's taking an interest in in all of a sudden, because it's starting to have a really meaningful impact on on the economy, you can see every car company, and many of them turning over their CEOs because of that. And so it goes up and down. And what you really need is steady investors. And that's probably the hardest thing to find. So, but it's today is probably better than it's been in the last five years, I would say, Great.
Obviously, your presentation, you're talking a lot about improving efficiencies from solar energy. One of the critical challenges we face today with solar is the lack of affordable storage. We have days in California and Arizona, I believe, where prices go to zero because there's just there's more being produced than can be used at that moment, but no real effective way for storing it for later. We you and I talked about that a little bit last night. I'm kind of curious about are there ways that your technology can be coupled with others, including you were talking about, I think water splitting as a way of finding different ways to use that energy over over different periods of time. Yeah,
that's a great point. I mean, intermittency is always an issue for solar PV. Of course, they could be coupled, for example, to an electrolysis system as well. And that's been done in the past as well. And hopefully, once we create enough solar energy that will be done more and more as well. Jean here, for example, has batteries that we can hopefully use as well. And earlier people also talked about a smart grid that will be like enhanced in the future as well. So I hope in a way that if we build it, they will come let's say my hope is once we have enough solar energy the other technologies will adapt towards it as well.
Yeah, it's actually great that we have a battery person and a solar person because obviously these are going to be strongly complimentary technologies in the in the years ahead and even today, Jean I know you're I don't believe you're in cars yet. But that's that's one of the goals here. So I'm curious what are your thoughts on there have been some there's some promise in the idea of Evie to G this idea that we could use the fleet of growing fleet of consumer electric cars as a massive distributor Good battery to help balance out loads in the grid. I'm curious what your thoughts are there.
Yeah, so that has been around for a while. And even even back into the early Tesla days, we looked at whether to do v to G or not. And, you know, the challenge really has to do with what is a kilowatt hour of energy storage worth in your car versus on the grid. And it turns out, it's worth a lot more in your vehicle. And so as the lifetime of, of these battery systems are only sort of long enough for let's say, 100 or 200,000 miles, it doesn't make sense to use up some of that light lifetime on the grid. But one of the things that we're doing with next generation materials, and we hope to do is push the lifetimes to be, you know, 10,000, full, usable cycles. And at that point, the incremental charge discharge is nearly free. And so you do want to take advantage of that, it's another way to get value out of the same battery pack. And that drives down the cost upfront costs for user.
So I can't afford a Tesla yet, but maybe someday, maybe a model 3am, I going to want to attach my car with my expensive battery to a grid that's going to be constantly draining, or is it I've kind of read mixed data on whether that over the time, that's going to be, you know, decreased my total life's life cycles of those patterns. Yeah,
I think you're probably not going to want to make that decision by yourself over time, you're going to have the battery pack financed. And at that point, you know, you're going to be paying some per mile charge, and someone else is going to have an algorithm software that figures out when it when it's worth doing and when it's not worth doing. And so I think that day is coming, it's probably you know, going to be a few years beyond major penetration of V's, but I think we're gonna get there. Okay.
And sorry, is there anyone from the audience have a question for either of them? see someone here? Hi,
Steve, we're from our university. This I think the innovation for alternative energy is great. Thank you for the work in that area, of course, to be environmentally viable. There's the full lifecycle to consider. What do you say to detractors to talk about what what about all those dead batteries? Where do they go?
Yeah, so with regards to batteries, you know, a lot of a lot of the key components are recyclable and are recycled. So they're metals, copper, aluminum, in more expensive batteries, and cobalt, nickel, those, those all get recycled. And so, you know, you don't have to, I think, look at the whole lifecycle and how much embodied energy is there. But when you do that, you know, I think it comes out pretty favorable, just volume wise, kind of 118 650 that you use all the time about this big is comparable to sort of a few gallons of gasoline. So just that mental image, you think about how much resources in the battery compared to that, again, there's you have to go through more sophisticated process, but I think that the numbers are incredibly favorable, if you recycle.
Anyone else? Gentlemen, up here.
Questions for Michael Michael? How, how scalable is the technology today? And what do you think it's going to take to you know, commercialize? And second question is, from a cost perspective, what what is the comparison between current technology or technology?
So on the first question, we would use techniques that have been used for related TV technology, such as organic TV, for example, slot dye coating is something that is already well established, you saw one of the images where you can print them like newspapers. So there is ways to upscale it at the moment. And there's very intense research activities, and also commercial activities for that matter, that are trying very hard to go towards that. The first results for larger modules are very promising. And I'm pretty confident that this is a technological issue that can be resolved in the long run. In terms of the second question, in terms of costs, as well, I mean, the components, some form of this perovskite materials are relatively abundant and relatively inexpensive as well, especially compared in terms of processing silicon, which needs like a cleanroom environment, and so on and so forth. The problem is a little bit, it's hard to compare, because you have the economy of scales apply to silicon, but you don't have it for this new technology, which is only five years old. So I would say even if it's the same cost, it's kind of a breakthrough compared to that. Thanks. Great question.
What do you think about timelines when when do you what's sort of a realistic expectation for when we actually might start seeing this and scaled up in the marketplace. So
there's already like, first startups that promise by the end of this decade, which I think is pretty optimistic. My feeling is, especially in terms of durability that we need to still go quite a long way. silicon solar panels are good for 20 or 25 years, this technology is only five years old. So we need to extrapolate in terms of like long term stability as well. So hopefully, by 2025, we can really like have a breakthrough here as well, especially processing them on top of established silicon that would be a real breakthrough.
With that, I think that is our time. Thank you guys, so much for coming.
