A brief description of the current domestic power battery technology gap

In 2017, in the policy digestion and price game, the power battery industry ushered in a bumper year. But the boom can not hide the periodic problems facing markets.

Under the multiple impacts of declining financial subsidies, unbalanced supply and demand, and rising prices of upstream raw materials, the power battery industry chain has intensified. The industry is facing a round of large-scale reshuffle and the industrial pattern is being rebuilt.

Looking at the market pattern of lithium electricity this year, there are several obvious changes: First, under the upsurge of investment expansion and merger and reorganization, the competition between leading enterprises has intensified; Second, the three lithium battery market has greatly increased its application; Third, international multinational companies such as Panasonic and LG Chemical are entering China to seize the future market in China.

Industrial development conflicts

Although the key raw materials, equipment manufacturing and other industrial chains of the battery industry have a significant synergistic development effect, the overall R&D capacity is weak and the international competitiveness is not strong.

On December 24, an expert in the field of electric vehicles said in an interview with the 21st Century Economic Report reporter: "The new energy vehicle industry policy system and power batteries are not matched and run-in; The cooperative development of new energy automobile industry and power battery industry has not been well established. The ecological development of the power battery industry has not entered a benign development, especially in recent years, the price increase of raw materials has brought about a greater negative impact. "

However, the adjustment of the subsidy policy and the improvement of technical indicators have put forward hard requirements for energy density and battery costs. Under multiple factors, the competitive advantages of leading battery companies such as Ningde era and BYD will be more obvious. The industry will move from decentralized to concentrated, and the battery and car companies will be more closely linked.

The lithium iron phosphate battery that once played the leading role is difficult to achieve the energy density standard. Due to the prominent advantages of the lithium ion battery, at this stage, the lithium ion battery will become the mainstream technology route for new energy passenger vehicles. According to industry experts, China's total demand for power batteries next year is about 43.9 GWh, a year-on-year increase of 41.4 %. Among them, the demand for ternary batteries is about 24.6 GWh, an increase of 83 % year-on-year; The demand for lithium iron phosphate batteries was 19.3 GWh, a year-on-year increase of 9.7 %.

However, the biggest factors that restrict the large-scale development of battery companies are raw materials and manufacturing costs. Overcapacity due to the reduction in subsidies in early 2017, power batteries entered the price path, although the average price of power batteries in the first half of the year was more than 20 % lower than in 2016, but the upstream materials lithium carbonate and cobalt prices continued to rise.

However, the above people are optimistic that with the continuous progress of domestic power battery technology in recent years, the rate of reduction of battery costs has been accelerating. "Within two years, the cost of power battery can reach 1 yuan (per watt), which is 200 wh/kg or more than energy. It will be decided that electric cars and fuel trucks have a cost-effective advantage. "

At the same time, the fluctuation and differentiation of mid-stream prices also have a great impact on the industrial chain. Therefore, in order to improve the competitive advantage, the industry leaders have begun to extend their tentacles to the upstream and downstream industrial chains, and the number of cooperation cases between them is gradually increasing.

"Battery must contain a set of material systems for the positive electrode, the negative electrode, the electrolyte, and the separator. A single dimension breakthrough will not lead to a breakthrough in the entire battery. For example, nano materials for negative electrodes or other technologies, it seems that the capacity will be greatly improved, but it is subject to In the positive electrode material, the positive electrode and the negative electrode are all subject to the diaphragm, and the safety problem must be considered. The higher the energy density of the material, the more unsafe, the lower the energy density, the safer it is.” On November 11, the founding partner of Jinshajiang Venture Capital Pan Xiaofeng, the person in charge and managing director, said in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald that the breakthrough technology of power battery is very complicated and needs to be coordinated and balanced.

Of course, the new energy car market in the rapid development of the market, the survival of the fittest is increasingly fierce. On December 15th a draft outflow of subsidies for new energy vehicles in 2018 raised the threshold for the coefficient of subsidies in each category, in addition to accelerating the slope of subsidies for new energy vehicles.

In this draft, the 2018 subsidy coefficient is still linked to energy density. Among them, passenger cars need to receive a maximum subsidy of 1.1 times, and the system energy density needs & GT; 140Wh / kg(2017 requirements & GT; 120 Wh/kg); Non-fast-charging pure electric passenger cars need to receive a maximum subsidy of 1.2 times, and the system energy density also needs & GT; 140Wh / kg(2017 request & GT; 115 Wh/kg). This means that the system energy density is higher than 140Wh / kg, which is a major threshold for obtaining high subsidies.

Therefore, for battery companies, it is imminent to increase battery energy density, battery companies with system energy density below 120wh / kg will be eliminated, and battery suppliers greater than 140wh / kg will receive praise from car companies.

When did the "international war" start?

Judging from the layout of the global power battery industry, three major gathering areas for power battery research and development and industrialization have been formed around the world. They are located in the East Asia region where Germany, the United States, and China, Japan and South Korea are located. However, for a long time, China, Japan, and South Korea have been in an absolute dominant position in the technology and market in the field of small lithium-ion batteries for consumer electronics. The production of lithium-ion power batteries is currently mainly concentrated in these three countries.

The scope is reduced to the East Asian market, and Japan and South Korea are more developed than China. As of November this year, Japan ranked first in the latest global power battery shipments, followed by companies such as Ningde era and BYD.

In January this year, Tesla announced the mass production of the 21700 power battery jointly developed with Panasonic. After the improvement, the battery energy density was 300 Wh/kg, and the price was 170 / kWh, which was calculated at an exchange rate of 6.8, equivalent to approximately RMB 1.15 yuan. / Wh, has basically achieved our 2020 goal, That is, the power core ratio energy reaches more than 300 watt/kg, and the cost drops to 1.5 yuan/watt-hour.

At the same time, Samsung SDI and LG Chemical are also developing high-energy density and low-cost batteries. In January next year, LG Chemical will develop batteries with a usable energy density of 640 Wh / L, a cycle life of 1,000 times, and a core cost of 100 / kWh.

It is worth noting that since 2009, LG Chemical has cooperated with South Korea's Hyundai, General Motors, Renault, Ford, Volvo, Nissan and other international car companies to become one of the mainstream power battery suppliers.

According to data from the Institute of Li-ion Research and Production, LG Chemistry ranked third in the global power battery shipment rankings from January to September 2017, second only to Panasonic and Ningde.

However, while China has an advantage in the power cell market and has increased research and development in high-energy density battery technology, it still has a big gap with Japanese and Japanese companies in terms of the speed of technology implementation. Moreover, before the domestic competition has officially started, Japanese and Korean battery companies have increased their investment in China and set up factories to wait for market opportunities.

At the end of October, after news emerged that Tesla had urgently contacted Samsung LG for foreign aid due to insufficient battery capacity, Panasonic, Tesla's largest battery supplier, officially announced its intention to cooperate with Toyota after seeing Tesla's demand. The two sides are considering joint development of electric car batteries.

On the other hand, Panasonic began to size the Chinese market in the first half of this year. In April, Panasonic was put into production at the Dalian base. After a month, it announced the construction of a power battery plant in Jiangsu. In October this year, it announced that it plans to invest 100 billion yen in the battery production business.

LG Chemical's idea of investing in China is to invest in advanced material production lines such as polarizers and new energy batteries. To date, LG Chemical has invested 3.3 billion U.S. dollars in China, and has established 8 branch offices and 11 factories around the world, including LG Nanjing New energy battery Factory, which was put into operation in October 2015. It can meet the power needs of more than 50,000 pure electric vehicles and more than 180,000 plug-in hybrid vehicles(PHEV), but it has received policy implications that have been blocked for a time, with subsidies declining and WTO regulations. LG chemistry's imprisonment in China is dissipating.

But European manufacturers, traditionally cautious about investing in electric vehicles, are also beginning to face up to the importance of the battery industry, seeking high-quality battery suppliers and worrying that Europe's main industries could lag behind other countries if they fail to fill the gap in energy-storage technology. In October, the EU is actively discussing the creation of a battery enterprise alliance.

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