According to Kurt Kelty, vice chairman of battery, propulsion and sustainability at General Motors (GM), advances in battery innovation are transforming each mobility and energy systems. At the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Fall Colloquium, Kelty examined how GM is taking next-generation battery technologies from the lab to commercialization, advancing American battery innovation. The colloquium is a component of the continued speaker series MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition.
At GM, Kelty's team is targeted on three things: First, improving affordability to get more electric vehicles (EVs) on the road. “How do you reduce costs?” Kelty asked the audience. “It's the batteries. The batteries make up about 30 percent of the vehicle cost.” Second, his team is committed to improving battery performance, including charging speed and energy density. Third, they’re working on supply chain localization. “We have to strengthen our resilience and independence here in North America, so we don’t depend on materials from China,” Kelty said.
To support their efforts, resources are being put into the virtualization space, significantly reducing the time spent on research and development. Now Kelty's team can do the modeling up front using artificial intelligence, reducing what would have previously taken months to just a few days.
“If you must … change the nickel content even barely, we are able to model in a short time: 'OK, how is that this going to affect the energy density? The safety? How is that this going to affect the charging capability?'” Kelty said. “We can take a look at this on the cell level, then on the package level, after which on the vehicle level.”
Kelty announced that they’ve found an answer that takes affordability, accessibility and commercialization into consideration: lithium-manganese-rich (LMR) batteries. Previously, the industry tried to scale back costs by reducing the cobalt content in batteries by adding larger amounts of nickel. Because of their long range, these high nickel batteries are present in most cars within the United States. However, LMR batteries go one step further by reducing the nickel content and adding more manganese, reducing the fee of the batteries even further while maintaining the identical range.
Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are the chemistry of selection in China and are known for his or her low price, long life and high safety. LMR batteries are comparable in cost to LFP, with the range more in step with the high nickel content range. “This is really a breakthrough,” Kelty said.
Kelty says LMR batteries should not latest, but their introduction has presented challenges. “People knew about it, but they didn't know methods to commercialize it. They didn't know methods to make it work in an electrical vehicle,” he explained. Now that GM has commercialization discovered, they might be the primary to commercialize these batteries of their electric vehicles in 2028.
Kelty also expressed excitement concerning the future use of vehicle-to-grid technologies. With a bi-directional charger with bi-directional energy flow, electric vehicles could charge but in addition send power from their batteries back to the grid. This would allow customers to “charge their vehicles at night when electricity prices are really low and discharge them through the day when electricity prices are really high,” he said.
In addition to being energetic within the transportation sector, GM can also be exploring opportunities to expand its battery expertise into grid-scale energy storage applications. “It's a giant market at once, nevertheless it's growing in a short time due to growth of knowledge centers,” Kelty said.
Looking to the longer term of battery manufacturing and electric vehicles within the United States, Kelty stays optimistic: “We have the technology here to make this occur. We've all the time had the innovation here. Now we're getting increasingly more manufacturing share. We're getting all of it together. We just have tremendous opportunity here that I hope we are able to reap the benefits of and really construct an enormous battery industry here.”
This speaker series features energy experts and leaders who’re on the forefront of the scientific, technological and policy solutions needed to remodel our energy systems. Visit MITEI's events page Further details about this and other events will be found here.
