The Exchanges

Q do you turn it? Where do you turn into cells and how and packs and all that? What does that look like in the early days of sodium ion? Is it an entire, at least in the initial construct, is it like an entirely internal China structure? Supply chain. Because I know one thing that's different is that their, the resource, the, the base resource is differentiated versus lithium ion.

A Yeah, yeah. So, so, um, I think if you take the bomb, uh, for lithium ion, you take the bomb for sodium ion with a few small caveats, they are exactly, uh, like you can use the exact same supply chain for sodium ion that you can use for lithium ion, except for active material. So cathode active material and anode active material. Obviously salts for, for electrolyte. And then as you get to more specialized architectures, we see a lot of opportunity to, To customize stuff like separators and solvents and stuff like that, which we are doing. But in general, that's like one of the really nice characteristics of this is that you have a scaled supply chain that you can already draw on for most of the BOM. Uh, now for the active materials, um, on the, uh, let's talk about cathode first. Uh, for what we're doing is, is, uh, uh, NFPP, and, and that's, um, pretty simple. It's, it's very similar, uh, To LFP, uh, and, uh, the, the lithium carbonate sort of equivalent for NFPP is sodium, uh, sodium bicarbonate. Uh, um, so, uh, and, and, you know, you can make that synthetically. It's, it's like relatively cheap to make synthetically. You can also mine it from Trona reserves. The U S has the world's largest natural, naturally exploitable proven Trona reserves. We have like Uh, but you can also make it synthetically, and a lot of countries do that, so it's really not a constrained resource i…

AI assessment note: “you can use the exact same supply chain for sodium ion that you can use for lithium ion”

Q Interestingly, that implies that the large Korean, uh, battery companies like the LGs and SKs and Samsungs are not yet big players in sodium ion world. Is that true?

A Yeah, I think the large Korean players are, um, You know, they saw the, they saw the writing on the wall with LFP a few years ago and decided to go straight at that, uh, at that, and I think they're pretty, they got their hands full with that. That's a really tough thing to try to catch up to the, the Chinese, uh, on that pathway. We're starting to see some interest there, um, from smaller players in Korea, but also for some, from some of the bigger ones, uh, but I think it's going to be a journey for them. They're, they're, they're already kind of pot committed on LFP to a large extent, and they're going to have to go through that process.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think the large Korean players are... already kind of pot committed on LFP”

Q Right, so then that, that leads to Deployment question on the energy storage side. So for stationary energy storage, are we seeing within China deployments at, you know, at hundred megawatt scale, 10 megawatt scale, megawatt scale? Like, what do we see so far?

A You saw the first announcements kind of, uh, late last year, early this year with, uh, first sort of demonstrator projects, and those are in the, like, tens of megawatt hour scale. Um, and we know there are multiple other in the pipeline. Some of this is driven by some policy in China that, That provided projects that, that do, um, non-lithium storage with some, uh, uh, preference in, like, interconnect queue speed and stuff like that, or the equivalent of whatever the interconnect queue is in China. Um, and so you're starting to see that get deployed there. There's also some safety benefits on the NFPP side, which I can talk about, where they're, like, you know, if you're looking at deploying energy storage for fast charging at gas stations, the safety requirement's really high there.

AI assessment note: “demonstrator projects, and those are in the, like, tens of megawatt hour scale.”

Q There is manufacturing capacity that is at meaningful scale. I mean, not compared to, to LFP or whatever, but, but tens of gigawatt hours, basically all in China. Deployments are starting to happen. It seems more initially in the mobility world than in stationary storage, but they're initially as well, but we're very early innings. Like, This is just the past year or two this is happening, is that right?

A You know, exactly, and, and I think go back a year ago, you, you saw, when, when we were over in China, I mean, you heard a little bit about, uh, NFPP and, and, um, and energy storage for sodium, but it was, it was usually, like, almost everybody was, uh, doing it as a side project against layered oxide and higher energy density sodium ion. Uh, today we're starting to see that Flip. There's increasing interest in NFVP as an energy storage, uh, like a really great technology for energy storage, and you're seeing even, I mean, even some of the, the, uh, other applications are getting interested into this, because the, you know, we can go into the, the benefits, but it's, it's got a lot of, uh, system level, uh, goodness that, that just make, uh, especially in energy storage, a better product that's, that's easier to make, and, And easier to de-risk, but they probably translate to other spaces as well. So I think we're, like, we're early innings on sodium ion, but we're even earlier innings, uh, on the scale up of NFPP, and I think we're going to see a lot, a lot, lot more of that soon.

AI assessment note: “exactly, and, and I think go back a year ago”

Q solar panels, right? Like, the less efficient you are, the only reason you really care is that your balance of system Scales up more, because you need more, more stuff. Wiring, and more steel, and more, right, all that kind of stuff. Um, but on the other hand, there's also some things in the full system that I think you can spend less on, and so do you mind, right?

A Yeah, yeah, so that's, so walk me through that trade. So, like, now it's probably, the way to explain this is to maybe back up and tell you a little bit about our system, because otherwise, these trades don't really make sense, but, um, so, so, uh, NFPP, uh, Uh, hard carbon has a couple properties that make it really, uh, interesting for energy storage. Um, the most important property here is that it is much more comfortable at higher temperatures than LFP. So, um, we're talking like, like temperatures in, in a range between 45 degrees Celsius and 60 degrees Celsius where this, this cell is pretty comfortable and shows similar degradation performance At those temperatures that LFP does at 25 degrees C. This is really important in an energy storage context, and it hasn't historically gotten that much attention because mostly in things like vehicles, you don't care about this because it's easy to cool a pack. You have to do that anyway. Uh, and, uh, and what they care more about is cold weather, right? Because the car's off, and then it's going to get cold, right? So everyone's focused down there. For energy storage, though, it's really much more important at At, uh, at the high end of the range, because managing heat becomes one of the hardest things you have to do with these technologies. You're just pushing so much, um, so much power in and out of the pack. Uh, that's one piec…

AI assessment note: “most important property here is that it is much more comfortable at higher temperatures than LFP”

Q We've got, we've got LG and Panasonic Tesla and so on. What do you think happens with sodium ion, and what's, what is your plan, right? Like, right now you're buying cells from China, because that's where they're produced. Um, are you eventually going to have to stand up a cell line in, assuming you stick with sodium ion in, in the U.S., and what's that going to look like?

A We're definitely going to build, uh, cell manufacturing here, uh, in, in the States. Uh, we're also going to continue to work with partners all over the world. Uh, obviously we have some, some good partners in China right now. Uh, we're in the process of, of, um, uh, of basically getting, The, the, the plan of the company is kind of like a multi-phase plan, right? Where the first phase is, is get the technology in the hand of customers, get them comfortable with the technology so that they'll give us off takes to make, uh, enough, a good bankability case to build the cell factory. And we've done a, like, I think we're at the tail end of that part right now. So we'll be coming out in, um, fairly soon with some, some pretty big customer announcements around this. Uh, but we see tons of traction, uh, Based on these OpEx benefits and better reliability, better safety characteristics that make this thing really great for all existing kind of IPP applications, but also really attractive for data centers who really care about reliability, you know, stuff like that. Um, and on the back of that, we have the bank ability to set up the, the, the factories here, uh, and invest in the supply chain to, to get this going. But you can't do that, like, it's, it's, I mean, you've had, you've, you've, you've talked a lot on prior podcasts about, like, Uh, folk financing and all that stuff, it's t…

AI assessment note: “We're definitely going to build, uh, cell manufacturing here, uh, in, in the States.”

Q of sodium ion, let's say over the next couple of years, not 10 years from now and not today. Um, but what you see is realistic in the sort of, you know, if somebody is developing a project, if they're developing a Greenfield project today, um, What does that kind of look like? And then you can tell me sort of how these, how these stack up against each other.

A Yeah, happy to do. And I, I think maybe to reframe kind of where, like a little bit about how to think about peak energy. I mean, we are building our first technology on sodium ion, uh, but I would not necessarily think of us as a sodium ion company. Uh, we're, we're a vertically integrated energy storage company. Uh, we want to work from the cell up to the system and Pick the best technology there. So it's not necessarily that we want to beat LFP. We want to just pick the right technology for this application, and, and if that's, we think that's NFPP, hard carbon, sodium ion right now. Uh, there are some really interesting things that might be interesting to talk about later with LFP, high temperature LFP and stuff like that, that we are working on. But we're not dogmatic about LFP versus sodium ion. We just want the right technology there.

AI assessment note: “maybe to reframe kind of where, like a little bit about how to think”