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From The Mobilist Inbox This Week
Solid state, the Biden agenda, and congratulations
Each Wednesday, The Mobilist highlights reader articles on Medium, comments, and updates.
Solid state, this decade: Until very recently, dreams of using pure lithium metal in a solid state battery were just that — dreams. But at once, a number of startups have said they will commercialize such a battery by 2025 or so, including QuantumScape, Solid Power, and ProLogium. In a tweet, James Frith, head of energy storage at BloombergNEF, goes along with this forecast and says solid state will be much cheaper than liquid electrolyte cells.
Biden will put EVs and batteries center stage: In a note to clients yesterday, Dan Ives, the technology analyst at Wedbush, wrote that Joe Biden will put the promotion of electric vehicles and batteries at the center of economic policy. In an email, Ives told me there is “a 70% chance” that Biden will extend the $7,500-a-vehicle EV rebate, including for Tesla, for whom it expired when the company sold the maximum number of vehicles. Ives also expects tax incentives for the build-out of a fast-charging network across the U.S.
Department of Congratulations: Jeff Dahn, the Dalhousie professor and co-inventor of the workhorse cathode material NMC, has signed on for another five-year exclusive research relationship with Tesla. It’s not known precisely how Dahn’s work is being incorporated into Teslas, but two of his recent papers — one on the million-mile battery and another arguing for the use of single-crystal particles for cathode stability — were among the most-discussed of the last year or so. The agreement with Tesla adds two new research chairs at Dalhousie, for Chongyin Yang and Michael Metzger.
