235: The State of Solid State Batteries - QuantumScape Interview

https://youtu.be/HpMmMvg1IxU

Matt spoke to Dr. Tim Holme, Co-Founder and CTO of QuantumScape, about solid state batteries and some interesting news coming out of QuantumScape. Does this sound like a good step forward for solid state batteries’ path to the market?

For more information on the QuantumScape and PowerCo deal: https://undecided.link/QuantumScapePowerCoDeal

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Solid State Batteries are Closer Than You Think https://youtu.be/gG2_5GMWf1E?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Incredible Battery Breakthroughs to Watch https://youtu.be/EbFRp7K1z2o?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi6ObB8Ao0IpRhOgYO27wbSd

YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/stilltbdpodcast

Get in touch: https://undecidedmf.com/podcast-feedback

Support the show: https://pod.fan/still-to-be-determined

Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf

Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf

★ Support this podcast ★

Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Still To Be Determined?

Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.

Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined, the follow up show to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Today, we're going to be talking about why Matt is making so many puns with the phrase ION. Ion, I on, get it? Ions.

That's my favorite joke. I'm never not going to make that joke.

Listeners and viewers. I'm not pleased either.

He was raised better than that. Actually. No, he wasn't. I just remembered. No, that's pretty, you were right there with me, Sean. I was right there with it. Dodging the same puns. So today we are going to be talking about. Well, I guess, no, we're not, we're not going to be talking, are we Matt? We're going to be sharing.

That's right, everybody. You came here expecting a bunch of talking, but instead you're going to get a lot of sharing and how terrible for you. We are going to be sharing the long form interview that Matt conducted with Tim Holme, who is the co founder and chief technology officer of QuantumScape. Matt, in the show notes, ended up pasting in Dr.

Tim Holme's bio, and I won't go into in depth, but I will let you know that I was suddenly intimidated thinking I would have to read this whole thing. Let me just say this as a hint to the complexity of this, the word quantum appears, which is intimidating.

So Dr. Tim Holme, co founder and CTO of QuantumScape and what they are building is solid state batteries and they have some interesting new news that is coming out. They've recently inked a deal with PowerCo, which is VW's battery manufacturing company. They are licensing QuantumScape's technology to build out their production lines.

And it's a major milestone in bringing solid state batteries to the EV market. It is a big change. It's, I mean, you and I have talked about, and it's been in the comments and we've talked about the commenter saying, all you ever do is say that this is coming and it never comes and therefore liar. Liar!

And this time you're talking to a gentleman who's literally like, yeah, VW is going to be making these things for us. So that's great. Yes. So this is a pretty big change and we are very excited to share the long form interview that Matt conducted with Dr. Holme now. And I hope you enjoy it.

One of the questions I always like to ask.

is more about you personally. Um, I'm curious about your journey in becoming the CTO and co founder of QuantumScape. Uh, like what drew you into the field of battery and energy storage?

Yeah, I got interested in energy because I was doing my physics, uh, degree in undergrad, and I see all, uh, I felt that doing something technical was really fun, but I wanted to do something that was going to be applied to solving real world problems.

And when I saw somebody doing a survey of the top 10 biggest problems in the world, things like hunger, poverty, lack of clean water, it seemed that energy was a key to unlocking many of those top 10 problems. And so I wanted to have a career in energy because it's something where I could apply my technical skills, but also have a big impact in real world problems.

So just to take one example. Clean water is an issue. If you had abundant, cheap, clean electricity, you could desalinate water and solve that problem basically. So in so many ways, clean, abundant, cheap energy is an unlock to life's problems.

It almost sounds like you're taking a first principles approach to assessing how you ended up where you are.

It was like going to the root of the problem, where can we start to have the most impact? That's kind of fascinating.

Yeah. That's right. First principles thinking, I guess I'm not the first champion of that.

Well, to kind of get started before we get into like the nuts and bolts of the latest news of QuantumScape, I was hoping we could kind of do a kind of a level set for all the people that are watching this, because I know some people are not completely up to speed as to like what solid state batteries are.

Could you kind of walk through at a high level? It's not QuantumScape specifically, but like what is a solid state battery and what makes it different from a traditional lithium ion battery?

Yeah, well, I have a lot of empathy with people who are confused because there isn't a definition that everyone subscribes to of what is a solid state battery.

And to make it worse, there are companies talking about quasi solid state batteries, hybrid solid state batteries, condensed state batteries, throwing out a whole bunch of terms that are never even defined as to what they are, which just further muddies the picture. So to me, a solid state battery is a battery that at least one of the major components is a solid state electrolyte.

There's an all solid state battery where all of the electrolytes are solid, that is not liquid, not gas, not plasma, but solid. That's an all solid state battery. And then I think a solid state battery would be a battery where at least a major component is solid state. There are solid polymers that conduct lithium.

So there are batteries that are made with all solid polymer conductors that would be solid state. There are also batteries that use sulfides, oxides, various different classes of more inorganic solid materials. And those all could be called solid state batteries.

So that kind of, I guess the root of the issue that I've been seeing more recently, which is, There seems to be no unified definition or agreement on what it is.

Um, so some people are like, if there's any liquid at all, it's not solid state. Other people have a view of there's a little bit of liquid or gel of some kind. It's, it's still, and it's got, still got a mostly solid electrolyte. It is solid state. So it's, it's, it's kind of interesting that there's this kind of disagreement around that kind of energy storage community about this.

Exactly. This is where the confusion comes from. There isn't like an IUPAC standard definition of what is solid state battery. Um, to me, a gel would not be a solid because a gel is defined as a material where the storage modulus exceeds the loss modulus. So, that is not a solid. Um, but there are solid polymers, there are solid inorganic materials, and to me, a solid state battery would be any of those.

I do think there's a distinction between an all solid state battery that has no liquids versus if you say solid state battery maybe isn't an all solid state.

And solid state does not mean a specific chemistry for your cathode or anode. It's there's a lot of variability there too, right?

That's right. So cathodes and the active material in a cathode and anode are solid materials and in lithium ion batteries

uh, or lithium metal batteries. This is silicon, or graphite, or the active material in an anode. You would have an iron based or a nickel based material in the cathode. Those are the most common chemistries. Those are solid. And then what's up for grabs is what is conducting the ions in between those materials. And in a lithium ion battery today, that would be a liquid material that serves as an electrolyte.

It's a little bit like Gatorade, it's the electrolyte in your body that moves the salt around. So these liquid electrolytes and lithium ion batteries move the lithium salt around between the positive and negative electrodes. And in a solid state battery, some or all of those electrolytes are replaced by a solid state.

Well that leads me into QuantumScape's approach. And you're using lithium metal, and you have an anode-less design. for your battery. Could you kind of walk through the basics of how it works?

Yeah, sure. So it's good to actually maybe untether ourselves from the debate about what's solid state because what's important is does what battery range does it enable in a car?

What, um, charge rate? What is the cost? Those are the things that really matter. To us, solid state is a vehicle to get the benefits that a lithium metal anode offers in a battery. So if you, the biggest change you could make to a lithium ion battery is swapping out the host material in the anode, which is carbon, sometimes mixed with a little bit of silicon, for a lithium metal.

Lithium metal is lighter and more dense than if you have to include carbon or silicon as the host. So a lithium metal anode battery could be faster charging, uh, lighter and smaller than a lithium ion battery. And in my, in our opinion, the solid state separator electrolyte is the thing that enables a lithium metal battery.

There are companies that are trying to make lithium metal batteries with liquid electrolytes. And the problem there is one of dendrite formation. A dendrite is an internal short circuit in the battery. That is, in the best case, loss of function in the battery, and in the worst case, a safety issue. So our approach is to use a solid state separator to try and enable a lithium metal anode.

Now you mentioned the anode free design, that's another key part of our approach which took years of development to enable. It was very hard, a very difficult problem to solve, and that is, we don't supply any extra lithium metal on the anode side. In our battery, all of the lithium is contained in the cathode particle, just in a lithium battery when you make the battery, the lithium is contained in the cathode.

And it's that lithium that cycles back and forth as you charge and discharge the battery. So when we construct our battery, there's no lithium and no other host material in the anode. All the lithium comes from the cathode and then forms on the first time you charge the battery.

It literally like Expands and contracts as you're charging it and discharging it, correct?

That's right. Our battery expands and contracts by around 15 percent from fully discharged to fully charged. A lithium ion battery will expand and contracts by a couple of percent, but ours expands and contracts more because the lithium has to go somewhere as you charge it up and you form lithium metal.

And so we did have to invent a new design for our battery packaging to allow that 15 percent expansion and contraction.

What was the biggest challenge to get to that point? Was it designing that, that structure that would expand and contract or were there other aspects of bringing it to that point that were more challenging?

Right. Designing the package was one challenge, but not the major challenge. The major challenge was how to make lithium behave. I have a co worker here who refers to lithium like a caged tiger. It just, it's angry and it wants to get out. It doesn't behave nicely. If you've seen any animations of lithium plating as a nice solid chunk of metal on the anode side.

It doesn't want to do that. And so we had to learn a lot about the science and then therefore the engineering. How can you coerce lithium to behave nicely like that? And so it really came down to understanding why lithium doesn't want to behave like that. Or what are all the other failure modes where lithium could play in what's called a mossy or It, it might look like coral and a coral reef as lithium plates in a badly behaved system.

And so understanding why it wants to do that and how to avoid that was really the big challenge that took us several years.

Wow. I mean, there, this is kind of a quick tangent, but a lot of people are super excited for solid state batteries and we've been hearing about it for so long and they're always like, well, where are they?

They always feel like they're five years away. What you just described is why it's taken a long time to get to where we are, because it, they're very complex and there's a lot that we had to learn and decipher. So it's going to take some time to bring this stuff to market.

That's right. It's complicated and complex.

It's inside a battery. You have very highly reactive constituents in a battery at the fundamental level. You want it to store a lot of energy and be light and small. Therefore you want to work with reactive materials. And then the problem is that these highly reactive materials in small, confined spaces are touching other things and have what are called side reactions.

They'll react with other components of this battery, like the electrolyte. And so a lot of the challenge in battery design and the science and art and engineering of making batteries is to work with these highly reactive materials and get them to execute only the reaction that you want, the one that releases energy from them.

And not undergo these other side reactions.

And to do it safely, which is one of the other kind of sales pitches of solid state in general is that it's safer than a liquid because liquids are, the liquid electrolytes are flammable and can cause problems. How, how safe are the QuantumScape batteries that you're designing?

So great question. A gas tank isn't fundamentally safe.

If you have to drive a car, that's something that requires a lot of energy. So a lot of energy needs to be stored on board the vehicle. It's my opinion that there's nothing that's going to power a vehicle that's inherently safe. There's a lot of energy there. And what's important is to make it engineering safe.

Make it safe enough that you can contain any problems if they arise. So a lithium ion battery, like you said, contains a flammable and combustible electrolyte inside it that contains quite a bit of energy that can get released if the car is in an accident. There's solid state batteries that are on a large spectrum of safety.

It's not the case that All solid state batteries are uniformly safe. Um, for example, there are solid state batteries that still have combustible polymers inside them, but they're solid polymer batteries. That polymer is a combustible material. Batteries that use a lithium metal anode have lithium in the anode, and the more lithium that's there, uh, lithium is a reactive material.

It can melt at 180 degrees. It can react, if the battery's exposed, it can react with air, oxygen, water, nitrogen, and release energy as well. Our battery, we're pretty happy to say we've, we've been doing the safety testing and it's been quite safe in all the tests that we've done so far. We've done tests like nail penetration, like thermal stability, tests that are quite harsh that are designed to probe all the failure modes of a battery that, that it might encounter in manufacturing or in operation in a car.

So the thermal stability is a good simulation of what would happen if one cell fails. If one cell fails, it's gonna be next to other cells in a battery pack, and so the adjacent cell is gonna get hot. What you would like to see is that the adjacent cell doesn't then go into its own thermal runaway and get very hot or catch on fire and ignite a chain reaction of adjacent cells.

So the thermal stability test is one where you heat a battery up, let it sit hot for 60 or 90 minutes. And then see if it catches on fire or releases its energy. And so we've recently released a little bit of our own safety testing where we can take our batteries up to 200 degrees and above without going into thermal runaway.

And that was a very impressive result, I think. Many of the other benchmark cells that we've tested or that you could read about do go into thermal runaway somewhere between 100 and 200 degrees Celsius.

So that kind of leads me into the latest news, the big news that's coming out recently from QuantumScape, which is that you've partnered with PowerCo, which is Volkswagen's battery manufacturing division, for them to manufacture QuantumScape batteries, uh, directly.

Um, can you talk a little bit about what the deal is and what it means?

So we're really excited about this licensing deal we have with PowerCo. It means that, first of all, it's a validation of our technology. They've been testing many generations of our samples over time. They've got a really deep understanding of our technology, the stage it's at, and the maturity.

And then second of all, because they're putting real engineering, real time to work. Subject to us meeting some milestones in the future, they'll be paying us for the technology, and they'll be investing in the scale up, buying the capital equipment, and, and, Paying for a lot of the learnings that we're going to go through as we scale up.

So initially we'll have a co located team from engineers of QuantumScape and PowerCo working to design the scale up equipment so that it can slide into their Gigafactories, into their production processes as quickly as possible. So we're really excited about a validation of our technical approach from people who are really deep battery experts and have sampled our generations of technology over time.

And second, the fact that they're going to be putting real engineers, real time, real dollars to work to commercialize our technology.

So it sounds like the immediate next steps are kind of forming that team that will start that joint process.

Exactly. And so we are in conversations with them constantly, uh, right now, in fact, other, others are in con conversations with them.

About forming the joint team, what are the first steps that we need to take?

I'm assuming it's way too early to ask about timelines, like, when you think they might be up and manufacturing their first batteries or not.

Well, of course, we're both aiming to accelerate as quickly as we can to market. I think they're going to be dictating a lot of the timelines, not only when it goes into production into their factories, but also into the vehicles, which is what you're going to ultimately care about.

So they'll have to design vehicle programs that take into account the battery timelines. And so that's really probably a better question for Volkswagen and PowerCo. How do you foresee that this partnership

and going into licensing is going to influence the solid state battery market at large?

Well, we're hoping that this deal is a template that we could execute with others as well.

Um, so this is a non exclusive deal and we have, have plans to be talking with other car makers about executing something along these lines so that we can use this deal as a way to, to basically pave the road for our future deployments. We're hoping that this first deployment will demonstrate the promise of the technology and do a lot of the de risking, solve the problems of scale up so that we can then follow on later with, with others.

And there's a giant market out there for electric vehicles. I think, A big appetite for better electric vehicles, ones with longer range, faster charge time, better safety, lower cost, and we're hoping to address all.

Is the licensing approach changing the direction of what QuantumScape was originally planning to do?

Or was this always kind of like in the cards for what you guys were going to do? I'm kind of curious, like, did you have plans for ramping up your own manufacturing plants and do you still have that on your agenda?

Yeah. Good question. So we've been open to this licensing business models in the past, but also thought that we might have to stand up our own manufacturing facility as a first step.

To do the de risking ourselves before other companies would feel like it was sufficiently mature that they could jump on that. I think this is a really interesting data point suggesting that at least one major company thinks that the technology has already been de risked enough and is promising enough

that they're ready to bet on it now. So at this point, our main focus is let's make this successful. And then in parallel, let's, let's line up a pipeline of deals after this.

So one of the follow up questions I have to the licensing is what, do you know what the biggest challenges ahead of you guys might be in Collaboration from like a, I guess the question I'm asking is from like a VW point of view, like what's the biggest challenges from their perspective in licensing a battery technology?

And from your perspective, what are the biggest challenges that you're going to have to try to overcome in giving somebody else that technology?

Yeah. The challenges are really around scale. Every time you step up in scale, there are going to be a new set of challenges to learn. And a lot of them are going to be challenges you'd never anticipate.

The first time one makes a battery inside a lab, it might be a, what's called a coin cell, about a, the, the thing that powers a watch, right? A watch battery. That's about a milliwatt hour device, and a Gigafactory makes on the order of 10 gigawatt hours of batteries per year. There are 13 orders of magnitude difference between that first lab scale device and a Gigafactory scale.

And so, the first few orders of magnitude are pretty easy. The last few orders of magnitude get large and big and expensive, really big equipment. So each time one scales up in an order of magnitude of production, that's usually using new equipment. That new equipment has to be designed, built, and qualified.

And day one, when you turn on a piece of new equipment, usually it produces scrap, junk basically. And then you have to learn how to operate the equipment, how do you set all the knobs and dials. So that you can increase the yield. And so the big challenges, the big set of learning for them and for us is going to be designing and building the new equipment and then qualifying it.

That is getting yields from low to high manufacturable level of yields. If you look at a lithium ion plant, that's basically a copy exact. So you're a mature lithium ion producer and you're just copying your plant. It can still take three or four years before that plant is profitable, before it has high enough throughput, utilization, and yield

to be turning a profit and this is not going to be a copy exact, this is going to be a first of a kind technology. So it does take time to learn.

It's funny because I hear that no matter what the industry is, batteries or not, every person talks about how ramping up manufacturing is one of the biggest challenges because there's this constant learning and retooling and learning and retooling.

They kind of really perfect it to make it a profitable endeavor to manufacture whatever you're doing. On that. I did have a question for you, like for your internal manufacturing and your testing and retooling and figuring all this out, what stage are you at right now with how your manufacturing process is working?

What are you capable of doing right now?

Okay. Yeah. So in the automotive industry, they have this series of samples called A sample, B sample, C sample. An A sample is a prototype that demonstrates the main proof of operation, but it might be, for example, handmade or not scalably made. A B sample is then used using the actual production processes and a C sample comes off of the production line.

So we've now done a couple generations of A sample that we've provided to customers. The first one was in 2022. Since then, we've made improvements to the A sample, and our targets by the end of this year are to be doing our final A samples and initial B samples, and then to be, next year, scaling B sample production.

And so that's the maturity that we're at. Um, we have had to make, I think, some pretty exciting improvements in our production process, which we've called Raptor and Cobra. So the main part of our, our technology is the solid state separator, that we've had to invent the way to make it. in a high quality fashion.

Um, and we've done that in three different steps. There's the generation we're on now, which I think produced world firsts in many ways. As far as I know, it's got this amazing ability to work with a lithium free anode at low pressure, at low temperature, at high rates, all of the most challenging use conditions.

But then we've had to improve that process to make it more scalable, low cost, higher throughput. We've done that in two steps. The first that we call Raptor, which is being deployed this year to make our first B samples. And then the second that we call Cobra, which is the most scalable version of the process that we can imagine at this point.

And that we intend to start deploying initially at the end of this year and get into our production process next year. And this is a, this is a really exciting development that has been several years in R& D here. That's allowing us to make our separators in a very scalable process that would, would be what we think is required to meet our commercial cost targets.

Yeah. I had been reading about that a while back about Raptor and Cobra and the changes and what it meant. Um, and it sounded like a really kind of, I don't want to use the term breakthrough too much, but it felt like kind of a big leap for you guys, uh, going up the way you can. Yeah.

Exactly. I think it really is.

We had to really go back again to first principles and rethink what are we trying to accomplish. We're trying to make a solid state separator that's very cheap. So how can you redo the entire process flow so that there's as little wasted components as possible, as little electricity uses as possible, um, that all of the value add we're putting in ends up in the final product.

And that, that took a lot of research.

One question about the kind of final product from a customer perspective. When they go to buy their VW that has the QuantumScape battery pack inside of it, that technology, what is it from a customer point of view that they're going to see? Like, is there a faster charging rate they're going to be seeing?

Is there a better range that they'll be seeing? Like what are the benefits that this will bring to the customer?

So we're hoping both. We're hoping for a longer range and faster charge. Lithium ion batteries or all batteries have a fundamental energy versus power trade off. Where if you design the battery differently, you can get more power and less energy.

A simple way to explain that is if you build a battery with very thick anode and cathode electrodes, you're putting a lot of energy into the battery, but it's slower to charge because the lithium ion has to move the whole way from the bottom of the cathode to the top of the anode as you charge up the battery.

So there's a trade off where you could make everything thinner and then have a battery that charges faster but has less energy. Our batteries will have the same trade off, but we're hoping, and have shown in our initial prototypes, that it can have both higher energy and higher power. So we're targeting the 10 to 80 percent charge in 15 minutes, while having a higher energy density, which would enable a longer range if the carmaker puts in more of our batteries.

Now the other important metrics for batteries would be safety, cost, and lifetime. We're also hoping to improve on those as well. Now, in batteries, improvements on a lot of metrics simultaneously is extremely hard to do. We call it the AND problem. AND cost, AND lifetime, AND power, AND energy. It's very hard to do all simultaneously.

You can trade one for the other. But I think it was not since the lithium ion battery was introduced in 1991 that a battery improved on all five metrics simultaneously. And that's what we're hoping to do.

Right. Is it the kind of thing that we can expect to start to see, again, this is timetables, so this is very, you may not be able to answer this, but like five years from now, 10 years from now, we're seeing more cars on the streets with this kind of a battery pack in it?

Yeah, I think so. So if you look at EV adoption, uh, it's been fast and accelerating in the last few years. And then in the last couple of months, there's been talk about, oh, is it slowing down? Um, so if you're bullish on EV adoption, you would think, well, electric vehicles have a lot of benefits to offer consumers.

If growth continues as it has in the past, there'll be a lot of electric vehicles out there, and therefore, our product would have a giant market. If you're more bearish on EV adoption and you think there is something behind the recent slowdown, well, if you look at, uh, surveys of consumers, The reasons that people aren't buying EVs today, they would cite things like range anxiety, costs, charge time, charging infrastructure.

And those, aside from the charging infrastructure, those other three are issues that our battery is designed to address. We're hoping to enable faster charge, and cheaper, and longer range all at once. So even in the bear case, we think that our product is there for enabling of more rapid adoption of electrification.

So, yeah, I do think that if, if you're bullish or bearish on EVs, there are, there are going to be a lot of EVs in the future. And, um, I think our technology hopefully can address it. That, that was one of the main motivations for me when I got into working in this space is Let's try and accelerate the electrification of transportation.

Which is why this licensing deal is such a big deal because it's, it's, it's going to accelerate getting your battery technology out there.

Exactly. Yeah. Thanks, Matt. We'll now have a partner that's really incentivized to work as quickly as possible to get it into market and to get it into their vehicle. There was not going to be an extra handoff from battery maker to car maker.

I do have a couple of final questions for you that kind of broaden out a little bit.

It's not QuantumScape specifically, but are there any other emerging technologies or trends that you're seeing in the energy sector or the kind of this, this realm that you currently work in that are getting you kind of excited? Are there any other trends that you're starting to see kind of bubble up?

Yeah, well, I guess the trend that's on many people's minds, especially here in Silicon Valley is AI. And I've been thinking for many years about how we could use AI in our products. And it's not that your battery will have AI in it necessarily, but in our manufacturing process, we do use a lot of machine learning models, computer vision models to improve the quality and accelerate our learnings internally.

So we measure the components in all the ways that we can as we're building them to create the battery and we monitor their quality. A lot of that monitoring does happen using AI or machine learning tools. Some of which we develop in house and some of which we've done with a partner that is really specialized in developing AI and manufacturing environments.

They're called Landing AI. We're happy to work with them, but that is one of the trends that that's happening. You know, in the, not just the energy industry, but, but across the board. And I think we're pretty well positioned to, to ride that wave.

Oh, that's really cool to kind of keep refining the manufacturing process, get more precise about how everything works.

That's that's really, really cool. Um, one of the other questions I had for you is, I like to ask this of innovators like yourself. What advice would you give to a young engineer or scientist who's passionate about joining the energy storage industry or just sustainable technologies? What advice would you give them?

Well, first of all, I think it's a great field to pick. I think energy is going to be pivotal to humanity for the foreseeable future as it has been in the past. If you look at correlations of GDP or human wellbeing, human thriving with energy usage. There's a very tight correlation over time, where as we went through the industrial revolution and

adoption of fossil fuels, we've used a lot more energy per capita, but also derived a lot of benefits. Of course, fossil fuel use has presented a lot of problems that we're now here to solve. So there are no shortage of problems to, to dive into. And it's really important to improve the lot of humidity for us to develop cheaper, cleaner sources of energy that are also hopefully sustainable and renewable.

So it's a great field to pick. And then I guess the other advice would be pick a specialty area that you're passionate about and dive in deeply. So whatever, whatever that is, whether it's material science, which I think is very applicable in AI or engineering, uh, the electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, all of these fields will have a lot of applications to energy.

So dive in deep, build up a lot of expertise, make yourself indispensable. Uh, to, to summon a player and go for it.

That's awesome. Yeah. There's a, there's plenty of opportunity out there. You just kind of reach out and grab it. Yeah. Um, is there anything else that you'd like, uh, my viewers to know about what's going on with QuantumScape, your technology and the future of what you're doing?

Is there anything we haven't touched on that you'd want to touch on?

What we're doing here is very challenging. So, the, the criticism that, Oh, solid state batteries have been five years in the future for, for the last five years, or they will be for the next five years. I think people who have that point of view, um, It's, it's well to have a healthy skepticism and look for data to underlie any claims that are reported.

Um, but that said, I do think that there's been an exponentially increasing interest in lithium metal anodes and solid state batteries. In fact, if you look at number of publications in those fields, they literally have been rising exponentially. So there's a lot of interest in better batteries. So a healthy amount of skepticism is, is appropriate.

However, with so many brilliant minds, so many dollars now going into this space, I think it is reasonable to expect an accelerating rate of progress. And commercialization at, at some point in the near future, we'll all be excited to see that. I think no matter which company is the first to commercialize the technology, it will, I think, change the world.

That's a really good call out. I like that call out because I, I, I am always battling that. I, I, I understand the skepticism, but at the same time, it's like, it's going to happen. It's just a matter of when it's not an if, and you're, as you pointed out, it's accelerating a lot. So yeah, that's a really good call out.

And to the point of when. I think a lot of people think of this as like a race to the solid state battery, and the first company to achieve it is, is a winner. I think a race is not really the right metaphor in business in general. You know, if you think about who, who made the first solid state memory device on a laptop, it's not like that company became the dominant company that supplied memory for all laptops in the future.

No, they still have to win every product cycle. Uh, same is true in, in almost every competitive business domain, so, uh, a race might not be the right metaphor. Now, that's not saying that I'm not motivated to move as quickly as we can, but just maybe as you think about this field, try and adopt a different mental construct.

There's not, I say this a lot in some of my videos, it's like, there's not one battery to rule them all. There's not one technology to rule them all. There can be multiple and they'll find their spaces and their niches and they'll figure out what works for them and they'll come out with new products that may dominate another market but not another one.

So it's, it's, I think you're another good call out. It's not a race. It's, it's kind of a group effort of figuring this out.

Yeah. And in a future that has terawatt hours of batteries for all sorts of different applications, whether it's Stationary grid storage over months or weeks or hours or minutes, whether it's electric vehicles, drones, eVTOL, electronic devices.

I think you're right. There's a giant market, many different markets that have different requirements. And it's not necessarily the case that there will be one battery that suits all those needs.

Exactly. I really appreciate your time that you've given me today. It's been great catching up and talking about this.

And I'm very excited about this news with your deal with Volkswagen. It's really exciting to see you guys getting batteries out there into cars, eventually on the road. I'm super excited to see that coming to fruition.

Great. Well, Matt, thanks a lot for your support and it's great talking with you. It's always good to nerd out about batteries.

Always.

So Matt, send my thanks to Dr. Holme for taking the time to sit down and talk to Matt and viewers, listeners. What do you think about this? Please jump into the comments and let us know. And of course we will visit your comments next time when Matt and I sit down to talk about this and his more recent episode on Undecided.

Your comments really do drive the content of both programs. We appreciate your taking the time to do so. And if you want to support us in other ways, there is of course subscribing, there is leaving a review, and there is sharing this with your friends. Those are three easy and affordable ways for you to support us.

And if you want to more directly support us, i. e. use some of your money, you can click the join button on YouTube, or you can go to still tbd. fm and click the button there. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the business of me embarrassing my younger brother.

Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen. And we'll talk to you next time.