The pace of innovations in battery development is revolutionizing the landscape and opportunities for energy storage applications leading to a stronger market segmentation enabling a better suitability to fulfill specific application requirements.
For automotive applications, several approaches to increase energy densities, to improve fast charging performance, and to reduce cost on a pack level are considered. Among them, a promising example is the direct integration of battery cells into the battery pack (Cell-to-pack; CTP) or vehicle (Cell-to-chassis, CTC) to increase energy densities and to reduce costs, as already commercialized by Tesla, CATL and others.
On cell level, a segmentation between high-performance and low-cost applications is realized in the technology developments. Hereby, a diversification of the cell manufacturer’s product portfolio can be observed. As a strong demand for NMC and LFP-based battery cells is leading to fluctuating raw material prices (especially for Lithium), especially sodium-ion batteries (SiB) are gaining increased attention further pushed with the announcements and achievements of CATL and Northvolt to be considered primarily for ESS, but also potentially automotive applications. On the other hand, developments to improve cell performance are achieving higher maturity, especially on the anode side with the implementation of engineered silicon materials, but also for (semi-)solid-state technology. As a compromise, mixed LF(M)P/NMC cell chemistry concepts are also considered as alternative solutions.