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Rivian’s network of DC fast-charging stations, called the Rivian Adventure Network, is slowly but surely expanding with a new station this week. Other automakers should pay attention and possibly follow the same strategy.
Owning a Jeep comes with the perk of being able to drive both on and off-road. To accommodate its drivers who tend to take the road less traveled, Jeep released plans to roll out solar-powered EV chargers across popular off-roading trails. Meanwhile, Rivian, a new favorite in the EV industry and expected competitor in the rugged SUV market, also plans to launch its own charging network for off-road enthusiasts. How do the two compare?
The car that once advertised itself as “The Standard of the World” will go all-electric. Can the US luxury brand reinvent itself for a modern era…and for China?
Among cutting-edge automotive buyers—the glitterati of Los Angeles, the tech millionaires of Silicon Valley, the finance titans of Wall Street—only one Cadillac is widely recognized. It’s a truck, specifically the Escalade SUV, the gussied-up, very successful ultra-luxury version of the Chevy Suburban.
Almost 19 feet long, almost 3 tons in curb weight, the Escalade ESV (most often in black) is a staple of affluent driveways and high-end car services across the country. It seems about as relevant to the electric-vehicle transition as a Caterpillar excavator.
Yet Cadillac is leading the high end of General Motors’ ambitious move into EVs for all its brands. It’ll never sell in the numbers Chevrolet will, but GM has said Cadillac’s lineup will be all-electric by 2030—only one full product cycle away. It’s the first of GM’s brands to dispense with internal combustion engines. In part, this is because Cadillac is hugely important for GM’s continuing presence in China, a market that gets more challenging for the US carmaker every year.
Lyriq launch pulled ahead
The model intended to put US shoppers on notice that Cadillac now offers EVs is the 2023 Lyriq, a mid-size five-seat crossover utility vehicle with an estimated range of up to 312 miles. (The EPA hasn’t yet released its official rating.) It offers a far more elegant interior than Cadillac’s similarly sized XT6 crossover, and the starting price is just above $60,000, though most will likely sell for $10,000 to $20,000 more, given the array of options and available features.
The degree of technology in the car should delight tech aficionados getting tired of their Teslas, with the added benefit that Cadillac has retained hard buttons for some of the most frequently used controls. Unlike in the Rivian, passengers can adjust the air vents manually, rather than having to go through multiple menu levels. Tech features include a syncopated “light show” using the entire front end for a display as a user (er, driver) approaches the Lyriq; a 33-inch curved display facing the driver; and seat adjustment levers mounted on the door, Mercedes-style.
The 2023 Lyriq isn’t initially available with all-wheel drive, though that option will arrive late this year. Its battery capacity is rated at 102 kilowatt-hours, and for early models, a single electric motor estimated at 250 kilowatts (340 horsepower) powers the rear wheels. The rear seats of the Lyriq are spacious—which should help with child-hauling duties in affluent suburbs—though the middle rear seat is the short straw among the three positions.
Cadillac was able to pull the US launch of the Lyriq ahead by nine months—early production units were built in March at its assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and the first customer deliveries took place in June. It’s worth noting that production of 2023 Lyriqs is entirely sold out. Orders for the 2024 models will open up during autumn 2022, for deliveries starting in 2023. Eager shoppers can put down a refundable $100 deposit for a “pre-order” that can be converted into an actual order then.
Limiting factor: battery supply
Production of any electric Cadillac models will remain low for the balance of 2022, due simply to limited availability of the new Ultium battery cells that power them. GM and its joint-venture cell partner LG Energy Solutions plan to build and equip a likely total of five cell production plants in North America, but the first of those—in Lordstown, Ohio—won’t start producing cells in the necessary volumes until the end of this year.
Meanwhile, cells for the small number of Ultium-based EVs GM builds this year, including not only the Cadillac Lyriq but the GMC Hummer EV, will come from a low-volume pilot production line set up at GM’s Tech Center in Warren, Michigan. (That leaves the small Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV as the company’s only high-volume EVs this year—their batteries use an older LG Chem cell from established production lines.)
Ultimately, GM will build Ultium-based EVs in North America for its four existing brands (Cadillac, GMC, Buick and Chevrolet) plus one model each for Honda and Acura. They will be supplied by cell plants not only in Lordstown but also in Spring Hill, Tennessee; Lansing, Michigan; and likely two further locations to be announced.
The US Department of Energy will loan the company $2.5 billion to build those plants, it said in July, under its Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) low-interest loan program. Dormant for a decade, that Obama-era program initially loaned money to Ford, Nissan, and Tesla (which all paid back their loans) and Fisker, which declared bankruptcy and lost the department more than $100 million.
Under the Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Joe Biden in mid-August, automakers will soon have to source increasing proportions of their battery components from North America in order to qualify for federal tax credits. The three GM-LG plants now under constructions should neatly meet those requirements.
Celestiq: a true Standard of the World?
In March 2020, just a week before the global Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down businesses and travel, GM held an “EV Day” in Michigan for invited auto media. No photos were allowed, but the company showed a dozen future EVs it said it intended to build. All but the pair of Chevy Bolt models were based on the new Ultium architecture.
Perhaps the most startling were two Cadillacs in addition to the Lyriq—since a midsize luxury electric SUV wasn’t a surprise even then. The first was a massive, square, Escalade-like three-row SUV (unnamed), about which we’ve heard nothing more since.
The other was a large, low, sleek fastback sedan called the Celestiq. Very long, very wide, the Celestiq is to serve as a new flagship and halo vehicle for GM’s global luxury brand. It will be hand-built, with a degree of customization Cadillac has never offered. According to GM Product Chief Mark Reuss, it will also be the first vehicle fitted with Ultra Cruise, GM’s next generation of autonomous driving system following its current hands-off Super Cruise highway system.
In July, GM unveiled the Celestiq concept to the world—and confirmed very low-volume production to start in model year 2025. It features a 55-inch dashboard display that lets a front passenger view video content that’s not visible to the driver. There’s also a glass roof with four individual quadrants that each passenger can customize to let in more or less light, as they wish. The car will be hand-built at GM’s Global Technical Center starting late next year—in volumes of just 400 per year.
The Celestiq is an audacious bid to take Cadillac back into the highest end of the ultra-luxury vehicle market. It will be priced at $300,000 and above, putting it above top-end models from Audi, BMW, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz, and up against more rarified marques: Bentley, Rolls-Royce, and perhaps Mercedes-Maybach. The US brand hasn’t played in the highest end of luxury in many decades. Its hand-built Eldorado models of the late 1950s may have been the last truly ultra-luxury models it offered—and that was at least three generations of car shoppers ago.
The Celestiq is not a make-or-break car for Cadillac. You could view it as an experiment, a low-volume attempt to see whether the brand can reach customers for whom money is truly no impediment, but who value rarity, exclusivity and features found in no other vehicle driven by their peers.
China likely has more of those buyers than does North America, and they may be less resistant to a very, very high-end Cadillac. This is a market in which the brand has the advantage of novelty, and a chance to build a new image from the ground up, unencumbered by previous decades of missteps and multiple reinventions.
The China Syndrome
It’s China that may determine Cadillac’s future more than North America. The Lyriq is designed as much for that market as for US buyers. Deliveries of locally-built Lyriqs in China will start in late September or early October for the rear-wheel drive version, said Mike Albano, Executive Director of Cadillac Communications. The all-wheel-drive version will follow by the end of the year.
How important is China to Cadillac’s future? The brand’s best year in the US this century was 2005, when it sold 235,000 vehicles. But Cadillac sales in China surpassed those in its home market back in 2017, and the numbers have been steadily diverging ever since. That year, it sold 173,000 vehicles in China, versus 156,000 in the US.
From 2018 through 2021, the disparity between sales in the world’s two largest auto markets grew. In 2018, Cadillac sold 228,000 vehicles in China against 155,000 in the US. For 2019, it was 214,000 vs 156,000. In the two Covid years that followed, China sales were 231,000 and 233,000, versus 129,000 and 118,000 at home.
China is by far the most aggressive global market in promoting electric vehicles. It intends to capture the world’s biggest share of EV sales and EV battery production, and government policy is oriented toward that goal—just as it has already captured the world’s biggest share of solar photovoltaic cell production. In 2021, 31 percent of vehicles sold in China had plugs—versus 19 percent in Europe and just 5.2 percent in the US.
So, you can view the new electric Cadillacs as largely aimed at young, affluent, entrepreneurial Chinese buyers seeking the cachet of a Western luxury brand that differs from the same old German brands their friends drive. A couple of hundred ultra-pricey Celestiqs provide a halo effect to the Lyriq crossover they are more likely to end up buying. If, that is, all goes right for Cadillac in China—which is always an uncertain prospect.
Meanwhile, US consumers who can overlook Cadillac’s recent history will be offered some very advanced electric luxury cars—that aren’t the same old Teslas their friends drive. We look forward to driving them.
A global renewable energy employment report released today by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) reveals which countries are leading the world in wind and solar manufacturing and installation.
To someone who isn’t involved in power electronics design, it might seem unreal that the amount of power a component can handle depends more on how effectively waste heat can be removed from it than it does on the specific electrical ratings. Sure, the voltage and current ratings are important (especially the voltage rating), but the most important specs concern the thermal performance and limits. More specifically, it is the maximum allowed junction temperature and the thermal resistances that really dictate power rating.
For example, a few key specs from the datasheet for a modern Silicon Carbide (SiC) MOSFET in a standard TO-247 package will illustrate the point:
Maximum junction temperature: TJ[max] – 175° C
Maximum continuous drain current (with case @ 25° C): Id – 115 A
Drain-source on-resistance: RDS[on] – 16 mΩ typical; 28.8 mΩ max
Thermal resistance, junction to case: Rth[j-c] – 0.27° C / W
From this we can infer that the maximum allowed power dissipation with the case at 25° C is 555.5 W (from a 150° C rise in junction temp divided by the junction-to-case thermal resistance of 0.27° C / W). The power dissipated at 115 A can be found from Ohm’s law (W = I2 * R), which comes out to a range of 211.6 W at 16 mΩ to 380.8 W at 28.8 mΩ, for the typical and maximum values of drain-source on-resistance, respectively. So far, so good, as the junction temperature should only rise by 57.1 to 102.8° C over ambient, and we have 150° C of rise available. This is forgetting one very crucial detail, however: that thermal resistance spec assumes that the proverbial “infinite heatsink” is being used to keep the case at 25° C. In the real world, the thermal resistances of case to heatsink, and heatsink to ambient, can’t be ignored. Granted, these latter thermal resistances are totally outside the control of the component manufacturer, but when working backwards from the known parameters, it will be seen that the maximum allowed thermal resistance for the entire journey from junction to ambient is 0.394° C / W to maintain a 150° C rise in junction temperature at a possible 380.8 W of dissipation, and with 0.27° C / W of that already consumed by the junction-to-case thermal resistance, that leaves a paltry 0.124° C / W for both the thermal interface to the heatsink and the heatsink itself.
Parts in the TO-247 package often need an electrical insulator between their case and heatsink, and, unfortunately, good electrical insulators are often good thermal insulators. (To be fair, there are plenty of exceptions…like diamond, for example…what, that’s not practical?) One example of a high-performance electrically-insulating thermal interface pad material for this TO-247 package will add about 0.043° C / W of thermal resistance (given a pad thickness of 0.051 mm, a contact area of 2.1 cm2 and a material thermal resistance of 0.90° C – cm2 / W). This now leaves us with a mere 0.081° C / W of thermal resistance budget left over for the heatsink itself, and a quick perusal of the typical finned aluminum jobs available off the shelf—even when cooled by a gale-force wind—aren’t going to come within an order of magnitude of achieving that thermal resistance rating! There are some alternatives to the traditional finned heatsink that can achieve such a low thermal resistance from case to ambient, however, and we’ll discuss them following a quick detour to cover the ways in which heat causes failure (either eventually or suddenly).
Most electronics engineers are familiar with the rule of thumb that the lifespan of an electronic component is halved for every 10° C increase in its temperature. It is perhaps less well-known that this rule—which comes from the Arrhenius equation, named after the Swedish physicist/chemist and Nobel laureate—is the same one that describes how the rate of a chemical reaction changes with temperature. Of course, the Arrhenius equation only tells part of the story here: above a certain temperature, things will fail immediately, rather than just at a faster pace. For example, once the plastic dielectric in a film capacitor gets hot enough to melt, it’s game over (and spectacularly so). Similarly, semiconductors will fail to turn off (or remain off) above a certain temperature due to charge carriers (electrons and holes) acquiring enough energy to jump atomic valence bands, which then dislodges more carriers from other atoms until “avalanche conduction” occurs. Since the semiconductor device is supposed to be off, failure invariably occurs within a few nanoseconds from uncontrolled current flow. This is the same failure mechanism as when an excessive reverse voltage is applied to a semiconductor device, except in that case it is the electric field across the depletion region in the semiconductor junction that accelerates the charge carriers, rather than thermal energy. So: different proximate cause; same ultimate result.
Excessive temperature is an unsurprising cause of device failure, but perhaps less appreciated is the fact that cycling the temperature back and forth between, say, 30° C and 90° C, can cause device failure even more quickly than simply leaving it at 90° C continuously, due to thermal fatigue. In this failure mode, it is the difference in the coefficients of thermal expansion between each material in a device—such as between the silicon die and the die attach solder, or between the metallization on a film capacitor and the dielectric film itself—that sets up stresses at each interface that can cause tiny cracks to form. Typically these cracks afflict the least-compliant material first (e.g. the silicon die in a semiconductor device or the metallization in a film capacitor), but even more compliant materials like the die-attach solder are not immune to this failure mechanism. In the latter case, thermal cycling can open up any existing voids in the solder from imperfect application or wetting during the manufacturing process, which then leads to hot spots in the semiconductor. Hot spots are especially a problem for bipolar devices like IGBTs and pn-junction (or conventional) rectifiers, because in them the voltage drop across the junction declines with temperature. If a hot spot develops, then more current will get steered towards it, heating that spot up even more, and so on, until device destruction occurs. Unipolar devices like MOSFETs and Schottky rectifiers are largely immune to this failure mode because their on-resistance increases with temperature, so current is steered away from any hot spots that might develop.
Minimizing the temperature swings in the key power-handling devices is a noble objective, but it’s not something that’s entirely under the control of the engineering design team. For example, the designers can’t control how much power will be demanded from the traction inverter at any given moment—they can only restrict the available power if the temperature climbs too high. Consequently, the most practical objective is simply to try to move the heat from the components generating it to the ambient as efficiently as possible, and as might be expected, the ways of doing this range from the mundane—like the natural convection heatsink—to the exotic—like immersion in a refrigerant. And as also might be expected, the complexity and/or cost of the more exotic schemes will often exceed the cost of simply adding more components in parallel (to both increase the raw power handling capability and spread the heat out over more area). It also bears mentioning that both the risk of failure, and the consequences thereof, go up with increasing complexity.
The natural convection heatsink is usually a plate of material with high thermal conductivity (e.g. copper, aluminum, aluminum nitride, etc) with many fins, pins, etc protruding from it to give it a high surface-area-to-volume ratio. The higher the thermal conductivity of the heatsink material, the farther heat will travel along it for a given temperature difference (i.e. between case and ambient). Since pure copper has a thermal conductivity of around twice1 that of the aluminum alloy most commonly used for heatsinks (6061-T6), it would seem to be the superior choice overall in this application, but copper is much more dense than it is thermally conductive, so the heatsink ends up being a lot heavier anyway, and furthermore, using copper is much more costly per unit weight than, say, simply adding a fan to a cheaper and lighter aluminum heatsink of the same size.
This segues nicely into the next step up in effectiveness, which is to blow air across the fins with a fan—aka forced convection—as even a little bit of airflow2 will dramatically reduce the thermal resistance (i.e. the reciprocal of thermal conductivity) of a given heatsink design (10x or better is easily achieved). As might be expected, the reliability is greatly reduced, both because a fan will fail much sooner than the chunk of aluminum it’s cooling, and because dust will accumulate on the heatsink fins/pins much more rapidly, leading to a progressive increase in thermal resistance unless regularly cleaned.
The heat-removal method most likely to be employed when a lot of heat is produced in a small volume (such as the traction inverter) is the “cold plate.” This is simply a block of aluminum, copper or other thermally-conductive material through which a liquid coolant is circulated (usually along a serpentine or multiply-parallel path) which conveys heat to a fan-cooled radiator located some distance away. This scheme combines forced conduction (via the pumped coolant) and forced convection (via the fan on the radiator) so it is far more expensive and a lot more prone to failure than the fan-cooled heatsink solution, but it can reduce thermal resistance by about another 10x, which is necessary if trying to remove more than about 50-75 W of heat per TO-247 size package (i.e. – approximately 200 mm2 of contact area), and there are a whole bunch of them to cool, for example.
Finally, there is the most exotic scheme—though not necessarily the most complex, as we’ll soon see—which is to use a coolant (or refrigerant, to be more precise) with a boiling point that is above the highest expected ambient temperature, but sufficiently below the maximum junction temperature to account for the thermal resistance from junction to case. This is called phase-change or vapor-state cooling, and it relies on the principle that most liquids require considerably more heat energy to change from a liquid to a gas at their boiling point (aka their latent heat of vaporization) than it takes to raise the temperature of the liquid by one degree (aka their specific heat). For example, water requires about 500x more energy to vaporize at 100° C than it does to go from, say, 99° C to 100° C! While a full-blown mechanical refrigeration system (e.g. using a compressor, etc) would be a very complicated way of implementing phase-change cooling, you can get all of the benefits without the hit to reliability by using heat pipes, which are sealed copper tubes with a roughened interior surface, and which most commonly contain a small amount of water under a partial vacuum so it will boil at less than 100° C.
When heat is applied to one end of a heat pipe, the water inside boils, and this vapor travels to the other end of the tube to which is attached a natural- or forced-convection heatsink, where it condenses. The roughened interior surface then conveys the liquid back to the hot end via capillary action (and gravity, if oriented properly) where the cycle repeats. This is so effective at moving heat that if you hold a 6-8 mm diameter x 150-200 mm long heat pipe in your hand, you can use it slice through an ice cube in record time (or for as long as your hand can withstand the freezing cold conducted to it, anyway). Consequently, a heat pipe can allow the use of a natural- or forced-convection heatsink to cool devices running at such a high heat flux (or amount of heat per unit area) that a cold plate would otherwise be required, but without the pump, coolant reservoir, etc, hence this massive increase in effectiveness is also more reliable, overall. Heat pipes are a rare case of a win-win situation in engineering, and highly recommended for dealing with the most vexing heat-removal problems.
As the old saw goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. As the EV ecosystem develops, there will be an increasing need to measure and manage the performance of battery cells. Cell manufacturers need a standardized way to evaluate test data for new cells; EV designers need to predict how different cells will perform in their vehicles; fleet operators need a way to monitor the health of the packs in their vehicles; providers of second-life battery applications need to measure the remaining capacity of used batteries; and used-car buyers would like to have some clue about the health of the batteries they’re buying.
The German firm TWAICE was founded in June 2018 by Dr. Michael Baumann and Dr. Stephan Rohr to address these needs. Since then, it has built an extensive database of information about how different cells from different manufacturers age and perform over time. It has also developed a platform that can simulate the real-world performance of different cells, and can evaluate the state of health of existing battery packs. TWAICE is also working with TÜV Rheinland (Technical Inspection Association, a network of companies in Germany and Austria that test, inspect and certify technical systems, roughly similar to UL or Intertek) to build a test and certification system for used EV batteries.
Charged spoke with co-founder Michael Baumann about the many applications of his company’s battery analytics platform.
Charged: Tell us about the origins of the company.
Michael Baumann: I’ve always been a very technology-passionate and technology-driven person, and I wanted to make an impact with technology for the planet and for our society. This is why I studied mechatronics, and finished my studies with battery management systems for electric vehicles. And this was also the motivation for doing a PhD in that space to dig a few steps deeper. This was where I met Stephan Rohr, my co-founder—we met at the beginning of our PhDs in 2014, when we investigated second-life batteries.
Stephan did a techno-economic analysis of that—all the different economical aspects, when the second life makes sense, how much revenue can you generate, and so on. And I specifically concentrated on the technological challenges which come along with batteries, but which are especially important for second life.
What’s the key challenge with batteries? Batteries age over time, but the question is, what influences the life of a battery? How can you get insights about the life and the performance of batteries? Back then, there was no way to do this—there were a lot of uncertainties when it came to batteries, which is a bad thing when you have uncertainties on a very costly component. This was the motivation for my PhD thesis, and then later on, also for TWAICE. We said, ideally, you have this digital twin of a vehicle battery, which is like a model of the physical battery system. This is connected with all the individual batteries in the field, and gets all the data on the vehicles or stationary storage or whatever. And then you are able to tell [from] the digital twin, how each individual battery in the field performs, like how it ages over time and also how we can influence this behavior.
Early on, the idea [was to address] the field of second-life vehicle batteries, but Stephan and I soon realized that you actually can apply it to the whole life cycle of batteries. That’s what TWAICE is doing—battery analytics, all along the life cycle and for different industries. There are a lot of reasons why it makes sense to [study] the whole life cycle, because you can then really generate the value in these individual steps. So, starting from the development phase where you help to speed up the development process, [you can] save time, save costs, get a faster time to market. And then it stretches to end of life—potentially second life, quantifying residual value and so on.
Back in our PhD [days] we saw the potential of this technology, and no one else was doing this. Nowadays, there are other startups popping up in this field, which is also good, because it’s a lot of market education in this new market. But back then, we really saw the potential of this and decided to spin this off after our PhD, which we did in 2018.
Charged: What exactly is the product?
Michael Baumann: The product in the end is a battery analytics software platform, which we are building out—it addresses the whole life cycle of batteries, and can be used by different industries. This platform has different solutions, and these solutions can be very specific. To give you some examples, we have a development tool, which is at the moment used by automotive OEMs—all the big German ones for example. It’s a simulation tool, which can virtually test and model individual cells, but also complete battery systems.
It models the electric, the thermal and the aging behavior, and it is used by battery engineers to design the battery pack and then simulate, see if it stays within
certain temperature boundaries, how long it will actually last in the field. Is it oversized? Is it undersized? What about the thermal cooling system, and so on? So, it addresses these questions, but then when we take a look into in-life, there we have different solutions depending on whether you are an automotive OEM and want to monitor your vehicles in the field, whether you are a fleet operator and you want to determine the best charging infrastructure for your bus fleet, or if you’re a stationary energy storage operator and you need to determine which kind of operating strategy you should run on your storage. So, these can be very different solutions for our customers, but they are all built on top of the same battery analytics platform, which uses the same technology, algorithms and models.
Charged: Taking a step back, how do you get the core data?
Michael Baumann: That’s a very good question. There are essentially two ways and also two types of data we distinguish. One is lab data. I mentioned this development tool [with which] you can simulate batteries. In the development process, you typically don’t have field data yet, because you are developing the system, there are no vehicles in the field yet. We parametrize these simulation tools with in-house measurements in our own battery laboratory on cells and/or modules.
We parametrize these simulation tools with in-house measurements in our own battery laboratory on cells and/or modules.
We have a laboratory in Munich, which we are also extending right now. Typically, customers send us some sample cells, and then we do measurements—electric and thermal measurements, aging measurements—and then we parametrize our software and ship them the software back, which they then use in their applications. So that’s one step.
The other data source is of course field data. Once vehicles and systems get into the field, we then get the data from these vehicles. There are different ways how we can get them. It’s directly sent to us, to our platform, [from] telematic units on [the vehicles], or our customers can also input data batches into our platform via API. And then we do our analytics on this field data and then give back insights like the state of health of the battery in the field. Are there any anomalies, failures, or whatever? And of course, also a prediction, how long will the battery last under these circumstances?
Charged: What was the most popular application that people started using this data for? And what do you think in the future would be next-generation stuff for your platform?
Michael Baumann:In our first customer calls, we really first had to explain the problem to our customers, and why they need battery analytics software to solve it. This has improved now quite a lot, but the market is still very, very young, I would say. We always talk about the battery super-cycle in this context. What we mean is that the combustion engine has now had a century of optimization and development. With batteries, we are probably at the starting point of this century, perhaps it’s just decades, but it definitely will take some time. And we are now developing the tool to optimize these batteries to maintain them, to monitor them, and so on. But this also means we have to develop ourself with the market. What we see now is that a lot of our customers have their biggest pains in the development of the systems. When you take a look at automotive OEMs (but I think it’s even worse in other industries like buses, or trucks), they are really now developing the first generations of electric vehicles. So, there’s really a need for good tools to do a proper design of these systems, like fast testing, also virtual testing, not only doing physical testing in the field or in the lab, to really speed up the development process.
This is also why we have a lot of customer engagement with our development tool, our simulation tools, and within the development process, but it’s also moving more and more into in-life, because that’s naturally the next step in the life cycle. And this also has tremendously changed when we take a look at the last one or two years. [In] the energy industry, we now really see a large ramp-up of certain players. That’s also a reason why we set up an office in the US last year.
There are already a lot of really mature energy players like Fluence and Eaton, also customers of ours, and now we are starting first projects with them. But they have very aggressive plans for hundreds and thousands of megawatt-hours over the course of the next months and years, so we are slowly but steadily moving more towards in-life. For instance, we formed a joint venture with [testing organization] TÜV here in Germany to develop a solution to quantify the residual value of used car batteries.
Charged: The energy players you mentioned, you’re talking about stationary storage on the grid?
Michael Baumann: Yeah—it’s essentially three levels, we always say. There are these really large grid storage [systems], which have hundreds of megawatt-hours, sometimes even gigawatt-hours. Then there’s kind of the middle layer, which is also industrial storage, can be like tens of kilowatt-hours up to megawatt-hours. And then there’s the residential storage market—essentially storage in your cellar with a few kilowatt-hours. And we are now active in all of them.
Charged: For the smaller bus and truck companies designing their first or second generation of EVs, what decisions are you helping them to make? Are they choosing between different cell suppliers? Is it pack size? What exactly is your tool helping them evaluate?
Michael Baumann: Multiple questions there—one you already mentioned is supplier benchmarking and selection. A typical use case there is that you want to investigate and simulate different cells in order to find out what’s the best one for your application, in terms of energy density, power, power density, costs, lifetime, safety, and so on. And we have one tool called Model Library in our offering, which does exactly that. It’s a library of cell models—different suppliers, different sizes, cylindrical, pouch, prismatic, different chemistries. And you can get a license for that and then choose different cell types in our online platform. Then you download the model and you can directly simulate the behavior of these cells. And then you can see whether it fits your application or not, and then select the cell and move forward in your design process.
Once you’ve selected a cell, then you typically need to design the modules and the system around it, and that means you have to select what voltage level you need. Serial connections of cells, energy content, parallel connections of cells, then what about temperature and climate conditions? Do I need a cooling system or not? And essentially, you can build this in your simulation environment, then simulate the cell module and system behavior, and then see whether it fulfills the requirements in terms of thermal conditions, duty and range conditions, and of course also lifetime.
So that’s like a typical development workflow in a nutshell.
Charged: Can you tell us more about the analysis tool you are developing with TÜV that OEMs or individuals can use to evaluate a used vehicle?
Michael Baumann: That’s one very, very big problem right now, because when you buy a used EV as an end customer, you are essentially buying a black box with the battery system, and the battery system makes 30% to 50% of the vehicle costs. So, now in this joint venture with TÜV [Technical Inspection Association], we are addressing exactly this. The idea is that we have a product that, when you are selling a car, or when you want to buy a car from someone, you can drive this car to a workshop of the TÜV or other partners, then we connect a charger to it, like an 11-kilowatt charger. We perform a certain charging profile for half an hour or so, then we process the measurements we get from the car, really low-level measurements of voltage, current, temperature and so on, within our platform. Then you will get a certificate which states the residual state of health of the battery. It will also give you a number in terms of dollars or euros, what the battery and also the vehicle is worth. This of course gives a lot of trust and removes the uncertainty in the used electric car market.
You can drive this car to a workshop of the TÜV…we perform a certain charging profile…then you will get a certificate which states the residual state of health of the battery.
Charged: You recently opened an office in the US. How big is your current team?
Michael Baumann: Right now, we are around 120 people all in all, and we have three offices. The headquarters are in Munich, we have one office in Chicago for our US business, and we have another one in Paris for the Southern European market.
We are a purely venture capital-financed company. This was very important for Stephan and myself to keep TWAICE independent. We didn’t want to bring in some strategic investor to give the company a strategic angle. We really want to build this battery analytics platform as an independent third party in the market, so this is why we decided on venture capital. We have had five rounds so far, and have raised around $75 million US in these five rounds. The second-to-last was led by Energize Ventures. That’s a fund based in Chicago, a very operational and hands-on fund in the energy and electric mobility space. This was kind of a strategic decision for us, why we picked Energize, because they really helped us enter the US market.
Charged: This seems like a great platform and business opportunity, because everyone from cell manufacturers to used car buyers have a need for this type of battery analysis. Are you working on any other interesting applications that we haven’t discussed?
Michael Baumann: Battery analytics will be a tremendous market in the next five to ten years, and it will be super-important to really make electrification and renewable energy a success story. We set out to define this market, and to be the key player in this, but we not only want to do this by ourselves and not purely by our product, but also actually to reflect certain partner approaches.
I already mentioned the joint venture with TÜV. There are also two other things which go in that direction. One is that we have a collaboration with [German multinational insurance company] Munich Re, with whom we are offering insurance solutions for battery storage for the stationary field, but also in the future, for mobility. And then another exciting example is that we work together with companies like ViriCiti, who got acquired by ChargePoint. They are offering fleet management software for electric bus fleets, and we are giving them the battery insights, which they then also pass to their customers. So that’s one important thing—we are very much working on certain partner approaches to really build out an ecosystem of battery analytics and battery analytic-powered solutions in the future.
The recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act—a sweeping package of tax, health care and climate measures—was like the happy ending to one of those heartwarming “Save Christmas” stories. We may never know what Machiavellian machinations persuaded Senator Manchin to release Santa Claus, but the merry old elf is coming to town with a bag full of goodies for EV advocates.
The provision that’s gotten the most press is a redesign of the federal EV tax credit—that’s only natural, because it’s the policy that’s most likely to directly affect the average consumer, and because politicians love to talk about tax breaks. However, there are a number of other important measures in the bill, including some “sleeper” elements that could prove to be far more influential than they seem at first glance.
Credit where credit is due
The revamped tax credit scheme is clearly a great improvement over its predecessor. It addresses several long-standing criticisms of the previous law: the bias towards high-income car buyers; the bias against early-moving EV makers; and the lack of a provision for used-car buyers. It also appears that auto dealers may be able to convert the credit into a cash-on-the-hood discount for their customers.
The existing cap of 200,000 EVs sold per automaker has been eliminated. This is good news for Tesla, Nissan and GM, which have been selling EVs for years, but have recently been at a disadvantage against companies like Toyota and Stellantis, which sat on the sidelines until the EV bandwagon picked up speed.
However, two aspects of the new rules are controversial: the price caps and the assembly and sourcing requirements.
The tax credits will now be available only for sedans priced at $55,000 or less, and for pickups, vans or SUVs at $80,000 or less. Some fear that the new rules will penalize startups such as Lucid and Rivian, which are selling pricey luxury vehicles, presumably as the first phase of an iterative strategy to work their way to more affordable EVs (as Tesla originally planned to do). Lucid’s sedans currently start at over $80,000, and Rivian’s pickups start at $72,500. (It’s the total sales price, including options, that determines eligibility.)
The most contentious feature of the new law is a set of requirements aimed at encouraging automakers to produce vehicles and components in North America.
However, both theory and practice suggest that the price caps are unlikely to significantly harm sales of high-end EVs. Marketing gurus tell us that luxury buyers don’t tend to be very price-sensitive—if you can afford an $80,000 car, a few thousand bucks one way or the other is unlikely to affect your purchase decision. Tesla provides a real-world example—it lost access to the tax credit years ago, and has raised its prices several times since then, with no discernable negative effect on demand.
The most contentious feature of the new law is a set of requirements aimed at encouraging automakers to produce vehicles and components in North America. To be eligible for the full credit, a vehicle must be assembled in the US; at least 50% of the components in the battery must come from the US, Canada or Mexico by 2024, and 100% by 2028; and at least 40% of the raw minerals in the battery must come from the US or “a trade ally” in 2024, and 80% in 2026.
The New York Times’ Jack Ewing writes that the package “aims to achieve two goals that are not always compatible: Make electric vehicles more affordable while freezing China out of the supply chain.” To qualify for tax credits under the new rules, “the cars and their batteries have to meet made-in-America requirements that many carmakers cannot easily achieve.”
The package aims to achieve two goals that are not always compatible: Make electric vehicles more affordable while freezing China out of the supply chain… The cars and their batteries have to meet made-in-America requirements that many carmakers cannot easily achieve.
This is a legitimate area of concern, but the naysayers seem to be assuming that automakers won’t be able to change their strategies in response to the new rules. Like fuel economy standards, the new tax credit regime can be seen as a “technology-forcing” regulation. Automakers who fail to meet federal mileage standards are subject to fines, but the point of the standards isn’t to collect fines—it’s to force companies to improve their technology in order to avoid the fines (and more importantly, to avoid being at a disadvantage vis a vis their competitors).
Likewise, the point of the new price targets and Buy American provisions isn’t to single out certain automakers for punishment, but rather to force all automakers to offer cheaper EVs, and to localize and clean up their supply chains. Mark Wakefield of consulting firm AlixPartners told the Times that the new rules would lead to “a laser focus on getting below the $80,000 and $55,000 caps,” and would increase adoption of battery chemistries such as LFP, which use more widely available minerals.
Complying with these provisions will obviously require a major restructuring of EV supply chains. This is widely considered to be a worthy goal, both for reasons of national security and sustainability, and it’s a goal that automakers and suppliers are already working towards. Unnamed industry executives told the Times that they should be able to revamp their supply chains enough for their products to qualify for tax credits within five years. Others are even more optimistic. Joe Britton, Executive Director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told the Times he would be “shocked” if it took as long as five years to bring the industry into compliance.
Some of the supply chain restrictions are subject to interpretation by regulators, and may not end up being as onerous as they appear. It appears that all manufacturers will be eligible for the $7,500 credit through next year, before content restrictions take effect in 2024. Furthermore, it appears to be up to regulators to decide exactly which components would be proscribed. For example, would batteries produced in the US by a Chinese company fall foul of the law? The point of the tax credits is to put more EVs on the road quickly, and hopefully regulators will interpret the rules accordingly.
The two leading legacy American EV-makers are on board. The goals of the new law “cannot be achieved overnight,” but the legislation “will be part of the catalyst that helps us move forward,” said GM CEO Mary Barra during a recent appearance with President Biden. “While its consumer tax credit targets for electric vehicles are not all achievable overnight, the bill is an important step forward to meet our shared national climate goals and help strengthen American manufacturing jobs,” said Ford in a statement that urged the House to pass the legislation.
It’s also worth noting that the sourcing requirements could create new business opportunities in the field of supply chain traceability. A company called Circulor provides mapping and analysis of supply chains—it says it can prove where an EV battery’s materials are mined and manufactured, and that it is already providing such services for customers including BHP, Volvo Cars, Polestar and Jaguar Land Rover. The EU is expected to enact a new regulation later this year that will require all batteries to have a digital “passport” that documents their CO2 footprints and the sources of their raw materials.
Keep on truckin’
Some believe that the IRA’s incentives for buying commercial EVs could be more significant than the more widely-publicized passenger vehicle credits. The Rocky Mountain Institute predicts that the Qualified Commercial Clean Vehicle tax credit, which provides an incentive of up to $40,000 per vehicle, will “turbocharge adoption of electric medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks.” According to RMI, the new tax credit makes owning an electric truck cheaper than owning a diesel truck in most use cases, and urban and regional electric trucks will become cheaper than legacy diesels as soon as 2023.
To obtain the full tax credit, commercial EVs will have to meet North American final assembly requirements, but apparently are not subject to the same battery and critical mineral requirements as the Clean Vehicle Credit for individuals.
The IRA also provides a 30% tax credit for installing charging infrastructure—a huge sweetener for fleets that are considering going electric.
Several other sections of the bill could encourage adoption of zero-emission trucks. There’s $1 billion in funding for a Clean Heavy Duty Vehicles rebate program, which is designed to help states, municipalities, Indian tribes and school districts to electrify bus and truck fleets. The IRA also extends existing renewable energy tax credits for utilities, which could make EV charging cleaner and cheaper.
Goin’ postal
Charged readers are already familiar with the tawdry tale of how the US Postal Service is being dragged kicking and screaming into the electric age. Postal delivery vehicles present a perfect use case for EVs, so advocates were appalled in 2021 when USPS announced plans to replace its fleet of 212,000 ancient gas guzzlers with mostly new and improved gas guzzlers and a handful of EVs. Since then, there have been lawsuits, petitions, open letters and, presumably, behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, and the agency has gradually, grudgingly increased the proportion of EVs it plans to order.
The latest figure Postmaster General DeJoy cited was $3 billion to fully electrify, and the IRA awards the agency exactly that.
To be fair, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a holdover from the Trump administration, has said all along that USPS would be open to electrifying its fleet as long as Congress provided adequate funding. The latest figure cited was $3 billion, and the IRA awards the agency exactly that.
Wait, there’s more!
The IRA is a vast and sprawling edifice, and there are several other sections that could directly or indirectly benefit the EV industry.
There are several different tax credits designed to help manufacturers bring production of EVs and batteries to the US. There’s also a wide array of measures aimed at supporting renewable energy generation.
Existing federal loan programs for clean energy and EVs will be expanded. Last month, the Energy Department awarded a loan of $2.5 billion to GM and LG Energy Solution to build battery factories in Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. The department is currently reviewing 77 applications for $80 billion in loans that were submitted before the IRA was approved. The IRA will add $100 billion in funding for existing loan programs and up to $250 billion in new loan guarantees. Some of this funding is likely to find its way to EV-related projects.
“This is a sleeping giant in the law and a real gold mine in deploying these resources,” former Assistant Energy Secretary Dan Reicher told the New York Times. “This massive amount being made available is a big deal.”
EV-related measures in the Inflation Reduction Act
Clean Vehicle Credit $7,500 consumer credit for the purchase of an EV, PHEV or fuel cell vehicle.
To claim the full credit, a certain percentage of battery raw materials must be extracted or processed in the US or a Free Trade Agreement country, or recycled in North America. Required percentage increases from 40% in 2024 to 80% in 2026.
To claim the full credit, an EV must be assembled, and a certain percentage of battery components must be sourced, in North America. Required percentage increases from 50% in 2024 to 100% in 2028.
Only cars priced at $55,000 or less, and pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans priced at $80,000 or less, are eligible.
Only buyers with annual income of $150,000 or less ($300,000 for joint filers) are eligible.
The cap of 200,000 vehicles sold for each automaker is eliminated.
Previously Owned Clean Vehicle Credit Used EVs or PHEVs are eligible for a credit of $4,000 or 30% of vehicle cost, whichever is less.
Vehicles must be at least 2 years old, and have a maximum sale price of $25,000.
Only buyers with annual income of $75,000 or less ($150,000 for joint filers) are eligible.
Qualified Commercial Clean Vehicles Credit Class 1-3 (under 14,000 lbs) commercial vehicles are eligible for a $7,500 tax credit. Class 4-8 (over 14,000 lbs) vehicles are eligible for a tax credit of $40,000, or 30% of vehicle cost, whichever is less.
Alternative Fuel Refueling Infrastructure Credit Tax credit of 30% of the installed cost of charging stations, up to a lifetime benefit of $100,000 per site.
Funding for US Postal Service electrification $3 billion in funding for USPS to convert its fleet to EVs.
Manufacturing credits Various tax credits to help manufacturers establish or expand manufacturing of EVs and batteries in the US.
Clean Heavy-Duty Vehicles $1 billion in grants for up to 100% of costs for heavy-duty EVs (school buses, refuse trucks, etc). States, municipalities, Native American tribes, and nonprofit school transportation agencies are eligible.
Clean Energy Financing $100 billion in new funding for existing DOE loan programs and up to $250 billion in new loan guarantees.
ConnectDER’s meter collar working together with Siemens’s charging station could save up to 80 percent of installation costs
Getting set up to charge an EV at home is easy and affordable—except when it isn’t. For many, especially those who live in older homes, installing a home Level 2 charging station may require an upgrade to the home’s electrical service, and/or a new panel (breaker box). By some estimates, nearly half the homes in the US may need these types of electrical upgrades to allow the installation of a typical Level 2 charger, which requires a dedicated 240 V circuit providing 40-60 amps. Upgrading the panel is a substantial job for an electrician, and the cost can easily run to thousands of dollars.
Fortunately, there are workarounds for this problem—and opportunities for companies that can offer ways for homeowners to avoid expensive panel upgrades.
ConnectDER’s clever products are based on a collar that connects to the meter socket, bypassing a building’s service panel. The company says it has some 15,000 collars installed nationwide for solar applications.
ConnectDER (pronounced kuh-nek-ter) is a young company that currently offers a solution to a similar problem that some homeowners face when installing solar panels. Its clever products are based on a collar that connects to the meter socket, bypassing a building’s service panel. The company says it has some 15,000 collars installed nationwide for solar applications.
Now ConnectDER has formed a partnership with Siemens, one of the world’s largest electrical infrastructure providers, to bring its meter collars to EV owners in need of a simpler charging solution.
Under the new agreement, ConnectDER will supply Siemens with a proprietary plug-in adapter for EV chargers. The new device will be designed and manufactured by ConnectDER exclusively for Siemens.
According to ConnectDER, the adapter will allow an EV charger to be installed in 15 minutes, and avoiding the need for electric panel upgrades could save a customer as much as 60 to 80 percent of the charger installation cost.
Charged spoke with Whit Fulton, CEO of ConnectDER, and Chris King, Senior VP of Strategic Partnerships at Siemens, to learn more about the two companies’ new partnership.
Charged: How did ConnectDER first develop the idea of a meter collar, and why was solar the first application?
ConnectDER’s Whit Fulton: The whole idea behind the company was to take the friction out of connecting large-scale assets like solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, into homes using an electric heater socket—it’s a giant socket you could use for an entire application there. We recognized that, and started the company about 10 years ago. And the low-hanging application was solar, because solar was growing really fast then. EVs were just on the horizon.
We realized that all the wiring challenges inside a house, especially service panel upgrades, could be completely avoided if you created a safe interconnection point, if it was plug-and-play with a circuit breaker in it, at the meter socket. And then that was it. How can we create a plug for this stuff?
Obviously, the technology footprint for distributed resources has evolved [since then], especially with the growth of electric vehicles and then vehicle-to-home, vehicle-to-grid applications. It was always our roadmap to really go after that, to be able to support that segment of the market. And Siemens came along at the right time. Chris King reached out and said, “Hey, we’re interested in looking at how we can work together on these things.” And we said, “Your timing’s great. We’re already hard at work on this stuff. Let’s talk about how we can put the pieces together.”
Charged: With this partnership between Siemens and ConnectDER, you’ll have a smart charger that talks to the meter collar and then balances the power of the whole system. Is that the idea?
Siemens’s Chris King: There will be different versions of the product over time. Initially, we’re keeping it very simple. Keep the cost down, keep the installation simple. It will act as a circuit breaker, so if the combined load of the EV and the house are approaching overloading the circuit, then it will shut off the EV charger.
It will act as a circuit breaker, so if the combined load of the EV and the house are approaching overloading the circuit, then it will shut off the EV charger.
Now this is actually something that we expect to happen very rarely, because you have to have basically all of your appliances on in your house to come close to your service load. You’ve got to have your electric oven on, and your cooktop, and your air conditioner and all that stuff. We don’t expect that to happen often, just as circuit breakers don’t go off very often.
Charged: You need to get local utility approval to install it, right?
Whit: Yes, it requires utility approval or state-level approval from the regulators and whatnot, but we’re less concerned about that element of it at this point, given the fact that we’ve seen so much interest and appetite. It will take some time to go through the process to make sure utilities are comfortable with it, but we’re very confident that we’ll have widespread deployment over the course of 2022.
Historically, utilities were not particularly keen on having things between the meter socket and the meter. Really, it’s the utility’s space, for safety reasons. But it’s just so valuable. The importance, the value of having a place you can just plug these things in has really shifted the entire mindset around the value of using that meter socket for more things than just meters.
And utilities have really come around to that too. They recognize the need for electrification, they recognize the need for decarbonization, and they’re looking at all the elements that are on the table around that to take advantage of. And so our solar product got off the ground. It took a while to get utilities to come around to the idea of it, but now it’s going really fast. And the EV aspect of this—utilities are really excited about providing ways for faster, cheaper electrification. We’ve already got a lot of utility demand in the pipeline for this product set.
Charged: Talk us through the value proposition. What exactly does this solution replace? What are your key figures as to what you can save if you use this instead of going the traditional route on the solar side?
Whit: Just in thumbnail, the value propositions are very equivalent for EV and for solar. For solar, you need to have enough ampacity in your service panel, and also easy access to that service panel in order to tie the inverter into the service panel. So, solar comes off your roof, goes inside your house, goes wherever your service panel is, and that’s where it’s wired in. There’s a circuit breaker there that’s associated with that solar system. A lot of that’s just like with an EV charger. That solar PV system needs to have a circuit breaker associated with it that has to fit with the total limit of your service panel.
What we’re doing for solar is exactly the same as what we’re doing for EV, with a little bit of extra magic on the EV side. We have a circuit breaker inside the collar that allows you to connect the solar into the collar and have the circuit breaker sized to the inverter. So, you just take the solar off the roof, tie it into your meter collar, and you’re done. That’s it. There’s no going inside the house, no service panel upgrades, because it’s a completely separate circuit breaker, almost like a mini-service panel for the solar, that’s separate from the [main] panel.
The only difference for the EV product is that solar’s pushing power in, and the EV is drawing power. So, if the EV is drawing power at the same time as your [service] panel’s drawing power, you have to make sure that those two things don’t combine to draw more than the service can handle. And that’s what our collar does.
Charged: Obviously, this system will have to be installed by a licensed electrician, correct?
Chris: Yes, and Siemens has a network of existing installers that we work with. And this will be very simple—you get trained on it in five minutes. It’s literally unplugging something, plugging the collar in, and then plugging the meter back into the socket.
Then the wire and conduit will run from wherever your charger is right into the collar. And that’s another convenience. A lot of meters are near driveways, so then it’s a really easy installation of the charger there.
Charged: You’re estimating that a customer could save 60 to 80% by using this and avoiding the need for electrical panel upgrades, is that right?
Whit: Yes, It’s a 15-minute job for an electrician, but they’ll have a “get out of bed” cost they charge no matter what, just to come to your house. You can probably do the math as far as what the electrician will charge, and it’ll vary by state, but it isn’t a particularly big job. So, the total installed cost versus a service panel upgrade, it really is a fraction.
Charged: We’ve been covering Siemens work in the residential EV charging market for many years now, so this seems like a natural partnership. Siemens is also in the commercial and fleet charging space as well, correct?
Chris: Yes. Our e-mobility business has a full range of hardware and software for EV charging. We break up the market into four segments. For Level 2, the residential and the commercial; and then for Level 3, DC fast chargers, it’s the public market and then the private depots like transit agencies and truck depots. We serve all of those markets.
We have software that will manage fleet charging as well, and then we can provide services. So, if you’re building a charging depot, we can do a turnkey service and provide the chargers. One of the differences for us is that we also have electrical equipment, so we have all the make-ready equipment, the switch gear and circuit breakers and everything else to connect up to the grid interconnection, which could include a transformer if it’s a larger charging depot.
Charged: Is there a particular residential home size or age that you have identified as most in need of major electrical upgrades to accommodate Level 2 charging?
Whit: There’s one element that we really haven’t talked about it in the media too much, and that’s the overlap with underserved communities that we can help unlock. There’s a high level of overlap between 100-amp service panels in smaller homes and low- and middle-income customers. We feel there’s a particularly strong alignment here of what we’re doing to help unlock access to EV charging for a greater swath of people.
There’s a high level of overlap between 100-amp service panels in smaller homes and low- and middle-income customers.
You pair that up with the incentives that federal and state governments are providing for EVs for low- and middle-income customers, and I think it’s a really nice alignment there. We’re really excited about those two things going hand in hand. We feel like there’s a really nice additional play on top of just being a benefit to everybody—there’s a particularly strong benefit to underserved communities.