The Battery Everyone Uses Is The One They'd Never Build | EnerVenue x HiNa | WTF are Batteries?

I went to Dalian with a selfish question. I run a fund that invests in energy transition, and I've come to think energy isn't the problem — moving it and storing it is. So I sat down with Henning Rath, who runs EnerVenue out of Silicon Valley and is building his first gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, who runs HiNa Battery, a sodium-ion company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's now ten years old with 600 people and a gigawatt line. I told them I don't know anything about batteries and asked them to teach me. We started at what a cell even is, went through why the entire industry standardised on LFP and what a thermal runaway actually does, and then Henning told me something I hadn't heard: the world had over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone. I asked whether I should start an electric car company or a battery company when I get home. Both said battery — and Henning was blunt about it: don't build anything that needs rare earth. Fifty million dollars to start. We got into nickel-hydrogen at 30,000 cycles, sodium carbonate at a tenth of what lithium carbonate costs, why solid state is still at level four out of nine, and the idea I keep coming back to — that your car sits idle 98% of the time with a battery and a stack of chips doing nothing, and there's a version of this where every parked car is a micro data center. 00:00 Introduction 06:45 China's bet on chemistries beyond lithium 12:14 Cell chemistry and the trade-offs it forces 17:15 Thermal runaway and the limits of LFP 22:44 Production quality and how long a battery lasts 27:07 Why China won the electric car 33:54 Decoupling a battery business from lithium and rare earths 38:50 Sodium's cost advantage and its energy density ceiling 43:51 Recycling nickel and renting the metal 48:17 Where generation, storage and demand should sit 54:05 Decentralization and the car as a grid battery 1:00:19 Three super cycles and AI's power demand 1:05:30 Automation, jobs and China's social contract Footage Courtesy: World Economic Forum (WEF) CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/amnc26... Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue LinkedIn:   / henning-rath   Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa Battery LinkedIN:   / kun-tang-52a52327   Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Instagram:   / nikhilkamathcio   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkam... Facebook:   / nikhilkamathcio   Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4nsm4ezn Watch 'People by WTF' Podcast on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/yme92c59 Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th #WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos