Ilika’s Goliath and the race to solid-state domination
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Welcome to today's episode of Lexicon. I'm Christopher McFadden, contributing writer for Interesting Engineering. In this episode, we sit down with Graham Purdy, CEO and co-founder of Illica Technologies, a trailblazer in solid-state battery innovation. With EV adoption surging and energy storage tech evolving fast, Graham shares how Illica's Goliath program redefines what's possible for electrical vehicles and beyond.

So join us as we explore battery safety, manufacturing at scale, Europe's role in the global battery race and why solid state might be the leap we've been waiting for. Graeme, thanks for joining us. How are you today? Very well, thanks. Many thanks for the invitation. Our pleasure. For our audience's benefit, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, please? Yes. So I'm the CEO of Illica Technologies and Illica is a specialist in solid state batteries.

Personally, I am an engineer by initial training. I also have a business education from INSEAD Business School in France.

And I've been the CEO of Illica for just over 21 years. Excellent. And were you a founder? I am one of the founders. That's right. I was brought in by some of the financial investors who funded the spin out of the company from the University of Southampton, our local university.

And I was working together with the academics who had developed the initial technology that formed the platform upon which we built the company. Most of those academics actually now have either retired or moved on. But I have remained and we've built the company up from those early beginnings to the organization that it is today.

Fantastic. Good work. Um, right. Illica's Goliath program is generating excitement in the battery space. What sets your solid state battery technology apart from conventional lithium ion solutions? Well, um, the biggest market for lithium ion batteries in the world is, uh, to power electric vehicles or EVs as we'll call them as we go through this call. And, um,

Many of us actually have already chosen to move from ICEs, from internal combustion engines, to vehicles that are electric, to EVs. And those lithium-ion batteries have actually really enabled that whole transformation to low-carbon transport. So we're in the middle of an electric revolution really for transport.

And solid-state batteries are really just better batteries. As a concept, people get excited about solid-state batteries, but ultimately we as users of electric vehicles are interested in an increased range to make sure that we can get to the destination that we plan on reaching without having lengthy stops to recharge.

Rapid recharging when we do need to stop and top up the battery. Of course, a totally safe experience that goes without saying, really. And then finally, also an affordable vehicle. So the batteries have to be cheap enough to enable normal people who would buy a car to be able to afford an EV.

And solid-state batteries can address these concerns. They're really a next generation of battery that have got a higher energy density. So that means when you translate that into a vehicle, you've got a longer range for the same weight of battery. They've got a higher power density, which means you can charge and discharge them more rapidly.

and they are intrinsically safe. And actually,

This whole thing about safety is a bit nuanced because EVs are totally safe. In fact, there's some great data from the Swedish Fire and Rescue Organization that was published about 18 months ago that shows that actually EVs from a fire risk perspective are 14 times safer than driving a normal petrol or diesel car.

But that safety comes at a cost because you have to engineer in enough mechanical protection around the battery pack so that if you're unlucky enough to drive into a tree or a telegraph pole, then actually you as the driver or the passenger will be safe from the risk of fire or any other risk that might come from damaging the battery pack.

And if you've got an intrinsically safe cell, and there's some great data that we've generated that shows that our type of solid state batteries are safe to things like the nail penetration test, which is where you put a nail through the battery and see what happens. If you've got cells that are intrinsically safe, then you don't need all of that additional mechanical protection. You can take weight out of the vehicle and that increases the range again and saves costs.

And then, you know, finally, actually custom manufacture of solid state batteries is very competitive. There are cost savings relative to the cost of making normal lithium ion cells relating to the use of cheaper materials and also more energy efficient processors in their formation.

so actually some pretty compelling reasons why the battery industry is looking to shift to solid state over the coming period safety is an interesting issue with evs so she's in the combustion engine you're basically sitting behind a controlled explosion so it seems a bit silly to worry about evs but that is a concern in my mind when i it's kind of

I've had resistance to buy an EV because of that inherent safety of the cells. If it does get punctured, it can cause all sorts of problems. It sounds like, perhaps I'm mistaken. Well, you know, that's the issue, is that we sort of got used to the safety profile of internal combustion engines. We got used to the fact that we've got a tank of flammable liquid just a couple of meters from where we're sitting. Highly interesting.

You know, if you put a nail into a tank of petrol or diesel, then you would know to take evasive action pretty quickly. But, you know, lithium-ion batteries, they do go off like a firework in most cases if you put a nail through them. Of course, you might have seen some of those accidents.

adventure survival programs like the type of thing that Bear Grylls does. One way if you're stranded on a desert island and you need to start a fire, you take your mobile phone out and you put a sharp object, put your knife through the battery and it'll start your fire. Clearly, you don't want that in a vehicle if possible. And if you can come up with a combination of materials, a chemistry choice,

that allows you to actually puncture that battery in an accident and not have an ensuing fire, then clearly that's a great advantage. And it just makes engineering the battery pack into the vehicle much more straightforward and less costly. Yep, fair enough. Excellent. How do you see solid-state batteries transforming the landscape of EVs over the next decades, both technologically and commercially?

Yes. Well, you know, technologically, we're going to see the rollout of solid state as a next generation. For the manufacturers, what that means is that actually they're going to start implementing slightly different processes in these so-called gigafactories that are being built at the minute in large numbers across the world.

There are slightly different processes that are required in order to implement solid state chemistry at gigafactory scale. Although some of our recent work at the UK Battery Industrialization Center, or UKBIC as it's often referred to,

has demonstrated that actually the processes we use for Goliath batteries can be carried out very effectively with some small modifications to existing Gigafactory technology and those modifications relate to the way that the electrodes are coated. We actually use a solid state electrolyte which is an additional coating on one of the electrodes and

And it relates to changes in how the electrodes are then assembled into pouches. So actually, the key difference between normal lithium ion batteries and our type of solid state batteries is that normal lithium ion batteries have a polymer separator.

that keeps the positive and the negative electrodes, so the cathode and the anode, separated from each other electrically in the cell. So it stops the battery shorting, basically. And also a normal lithium-ion battery has got this liquid electrolyte, which is the flammable base, actually, that transports the lithium ions backwards and forwards between the electrodes and

in the cell so it allows the battery to be charged and discharged. And when you have a type of solid state battery you can take out that polymer separator

and the liquid electrolyte. And you replace that with a solid state, ionically conductive, but electrically insulating material that you put between the electrodes. So you have to have a process that deposits that in the cell in an effective manner.

Once you've made the cells, they get engineered into the battery pack. And actually, there's not much difference between engineering a solid-state cell into an EV and a normal lithium-ion cell, apart from some of the advantages around safety and performance that we've just talked about. So in terms of the look and feel of the vehicles,

They'll probably become lighter. So, of course, if you've got a higher energy solid state cell, you can make the battery pack smaller.

um and of course the car would have the same range or conversely you can have a similar size battery pack similar looking ev and you can have a longer range so there are choices to be made there you know probably in in cities for an urban deployment you might make the battery pack smaller and you get additional you know cost savings associated with that because there's all sorts of advantages to having a compact vehicle

Whereas if you've got a car that you need to cover long distances on the motorway with, then you might treasure the largest battery pack that you can put in there in order to give you the longest range. So there are design choices around that. And then commercially, yeah.

And then commercially, you've got the lower cost of EVs that have got solid state. We've actually done some great modeling recently with a company called Balance Batteries. And they demonstrated by simulating what you can do with solid state batteries, actually with our Goliath batteries in an ionic battery.

an Ioniq Hyundai vehicle.

that you can get a saving of about £2,500 in the cost of the battery pack in terms of the bill of materials. And by the time you gross that up to the sales price, actually that makes up a lot of the difference in cost that you see between an EV and its sort of internal combustion engine equivalent.

There is on face value a premium to be paid for EVs at the minute and a lot of that is due to the fact that battery packs actually cost more than an internal combustion engine.

So to see that quite clearly and some of the costs of comparable SUVs, etc., that come in an ICE version and also in a battery version. And you can see you pay a premium. Now, there are government incentives to try and offset that. And, you know, clearly the best way to encourage people to buy EVs is to make sure that those incentives exist.

even out that price difference but even better if you can engineer it out commercially uh and make sure that actually uh evs cost the same or less than a normal car then of course people will be more enthusiastic to buy one absolutely it's also well i was going to say the evs are quite new i mean electric cars have been around for about as long as a normal car but um

The current market, I guess it's important to point out that as it matures, you're going to get more aftermarket solutions and more mechanics are going to be more experienced with the vehicle. So the maintenance cost of it and repairs and replacement parts should decrease over time as well, presumably. Yeah.

Absolutely. You know, as the supply chain gets more efficient and you get competition coming into the market to be able to offer after sales support, people, you know, acquire the skills in order to do repairs and maintenance, then of course the costs will come down. There's also this thing about economy of scale. You know, with all of the gigafactories going in, the cost of battery packs does start to decrease.

because you're just able to do things much more cheaply when you've got larger scale manufacturing footprint. And, you know, you see the advantage that China has got with economies of scale at the moment with huge investments having gone in through companies like CATL or CATL, as they're sometimes called, and BYD.

Absolutely. Sticking on the subject of China, so the ED market has surged ahead in recent years. How is the rise of Chinese battery and ED manufacturers influencing innovation and competition in the UK and Europe, if it is?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's a global market. And China has been a real phenomenon. They have got some intrinsic advantages now, actually, over the rest of the world in battery and EV production. You know, they've got a very large and growing domestic economy that gives immediate demand for product.

They've got a very advanced manufacturing supply chain, so they can get the components that they need in order to build product very rapidly.

And they've got a low cost of capital because actually a lot of the industrial and commercial investments that are made are government backed. And so if somebody wants to build a factory in China, then you can go to the local government, go to the central government and get support in order to help with that investment.

So that's enabled them actually to get to scale and push down the cost of technology for this marketplace very effectively. And it's very fierce competition for the rest of the world.

But of course, there are costs associated with a long supply chain that goes all the way to Asia. And so there is demand in Europe and in the US to shorten that supply chain. Also, there's some political reasons for wanting to do it. Also, you know, desire to balance the economy and not be entirely reliant on imports from other economies.

So really, the challenge for companies here in Europe is to stand on the shoulders of the giants of the Chinese battery and EV economy and learn really from the expertise that's been developed there very quickly, innovate rapidly and invest in technology that is going to make a difference.

I would advocate that companies that want to establish an economically viable battery manufacturing footprint here in Europe

By all means, start with best-in-class technology from Asia. Get a stable manufacturing basis. Understand the challenges. Learn from what others have already worked out.

And then think about how you can differentiate yourself and make yourself compelling to your customers. So think about differentiated technologies like Goliath and leverage that. Europe has got one of the most advanced knowledge bases in the world. We've got some of the best universities in the world actually here in the UK.

and um you know there's some great ideas come out of those universities they need to be efficiently and rapidly commercialized uh in order to give industry the type of differentiation that's sustainable from an economic perspective absolutely another strength for china is obviously their wealth of natural resources um i'm not sure

how much we have in Europe with regards to sort of rare earth metals and things like that that go into these kind of batteries. Is that potentially a bottleneck though for development, domestic development? Well, actually, yeah,

lithium itself is far more abundant in other parts of the world than it is in China. So what China has done is that it has invested in mining and refining in a way that has established an effective supply chain for them. You know that the majority of the world's lithium is mined in South America and in Australia but

But the world's biggest lithium refining companies actually are based in China. Now, that's quite a challenging industry to put into Europe because there is a certain environmental impact that needs to be carefully managed when you're running those types of refining operations.

And, you know, I think that's one of the reasons why there hasn't been such a large lithium refining industry established here in Europe, simply because people don't really want that type of heavy industry in their backyard. And that's one of the things that needs to be tackled going forward is, you know, where would you locate that type of industry and can you operate it in an environmentally responsible manner?

Absolutely. If you're talking on a geopolitical view, if you want to have energy independence, especially with EVs and things, you're going to have to have some form of domestic production, refinement or recycling of some kind to get the actual elements you need, minerals you need, correct? Well, that's an interesting point actually, is that as the number of EVs increases, the

you start to generate your own source of lithium can be recycled back into the market. So, you know, imagine you're getting...

more and more EVs that are 10, 15 years old coming to end of life. They've got battery packs that contain an awful lot of valuable metals, minerals. So instead of mining the lithium out of the ground, increasingly you can start to take those battery packs

strip them down, extract the valuable metals, put them back into the supply chain, and then you don't have to worry about the environmental impact of extensive mining. At the moment, of course, there is more demand for some of these metals. So in particular, lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese,

graphite, there's more demand for these materials than you can get from just recycling existing batteries and so that's why there's an increasing number of investments in mines around the world to fulfill that need. Oh and I should mention copper actually copper of course for conducting the electricity out of the battery is very important as is aluminium actually for that matter.

Is silver important here, the solid state? No, not so much silver and not so much rare earth materials, actually. There are some solid state electrolytes that have got rare earths in them. Rare earths are more important for magnets, actually, and so in electric motors, they become important there.

So could we see potentially then old Victorian mines opening up again? Like in Cornwall, I'm thinking for copper and tin. Would that be possible if the EV industry grows to a certain level in the UK? Well, yeah, there are some mining ventures in Cornwall that have been funded that are assessing the economic viability of that. Actually, also for lithium. There are different ways of mining lithium.

You don't need to use the sort of evaporite deposits mining techniques that are used extensively in the high altitude locations in South America. So, you know, a lot of the cheapest resources of lithium are where there were high altitude lakes.

in the Andes. And, you know, the water evaporated from those lakes and they left behind the salts that were dissolved in the lake water. And a lot of these are rich in lithium. And so you can effectively mine the materials just from the surface of these evaporated lakes.

and process them. And they actually make beautifully colored ponds for condensing and concentrating the amount of lithium that's extracted.

These are very arid areas with low densities of population. So it's the type of environment where you can effectively do that. Here in the UK, there's some ideas around removing lithium from the tailings of historic mines, but also from using a brine extraction where you maybe have lithium in rock

and you pump high pressure, high temperature water into the rock formation and it leaches out the lithium salts which you can then process. So these are areas that are being explored but of course the

The scale of the amount of lithium is much greater in some of these mines in South America and Australia. So naturally the cost of extraction is very competitive in these other locations.

Yeah, that's fair enough. As needs must, I suppose, though, as these materials, if they do become scarcer, it's going to make it more economically viable to do that kind of thing in the UK, presumably. Exactly. Talking far future, probably. Anyway, how close are we to seeing solid state batteries deployed at scale in consumer EVs? What needs to be done to cross that threshold?

if anything well um you know you're starting to see some prototype vehicles uh using uh solid state batteries already actually some of the uh the chinese uh vehicles have got them um

And also Stellantis, for instance, has announced a mass production vehicle to be launched in 2026. So we're getting closer. I would say that although solid state is used as a single descriptor for the battery technology, the reality is that there's quite a big spectrum of different chemistries under solid state. And some of it's not that solid either. Yeah.

So none of that really matters because as we were saying earlier, it's more about better batteries than it being purest solid state. But some solid state chemistries are closer to market because people have been working on them for longer. They're slightly easier to get to work. Some of them are

quasi-solid states, so they've got some liquid or gel electrolytes in them, albeit a reduced amount. And therefore, you're going to see a number of different battery technologies get launched under the banner of solid state. But actually, as time goes on, it's probably going to get increasingly solid state.

So, you know, you're gradually moving from a sort of semi-solid or a quasi-solid chemistry through to an all solid state battery is the full advantages of solid state get ironed out and rolled out in vehicles.

I'd say most analysts would agree that over the next five years, you're going to see solid-state batteries become dominant. So you'll see some lower-volume production vehicles over the next couple of years. And as time goes on, you will see this new technology replace existing technology.

Right, and it'll start out as larger cells with it, presumably, and then over time would miniaturize and you might start seeing it in your phone or little AA batteries, solid state AA batteries. Yeah, I think that's probably true is that over time, the more price sensitive applications will probably go solid state as well. So, you know, in your mobile phone.

AA, of course, is a primary battery. So that's just a single-use battery. They tend not to be lithium-ion. They tend to be, you know, just...

I don't know, zinc batteries, something like that. Yeah, that's fun. So, you know, your supermarket batteries are unlikely to become solid-state. Right, right, fair enough. Okay, excellent. From your perspective, is the UK government doing enough to support battery innovation and EV infrastructure compared to the EU or US? Well...

I'd say that actually in the West, there's been a bit of a roller coaster ride in terms of support for battery development. You know, in the US, you're seeing different political views dictate the degree of support that's available.

uh, under the Biden administration, uh, you had the, um, the IRA, um, legislation and, and all sorts of support for, uh, battery manufacturing. That's not really the case with the current administration in the U S. Um, so, you know, the industry has had to deal with that. Um,

Here in the UK, we've had some great support through the Faraday Institution and the Faraday Battery Challenge. These are, well, the FBC, the Faraday Battery Challenge, and also the Advanced Propulsion Center have been managing funds on behalf of the UK government. So,

you know, their agencies that have been supporting academia and industry. And of course, we've got the UK big that we mentioned earlier, that is a national facility that companies can access in order to develop and scale up their technology. And,

And ILICA has received significant grant funding over the years. In fact, we've just completed a couple of programs, the history program,

which was in total a 5.2 million pound program that has allowed us to develop significant advances in solid state technology and also the system program, which is a 2.8 million pound grant funded program to develop technology programs

for the process itself and we've been working together with MPAC who are still building actually a battery assembly line for our pilot line and also Agrotas which is the sister company to Jaguar Land Rover that's building a gigafactory over in Bridgewater in Somerset.

So some good funding there. And of course, just in the autumn statement from the government, we heard that they're going to be deploying £2 billion for the automotive transformation over the next five years.

So that funding is there again to support some of the investments that companies are making in order to get the electric transformation to scale in this country. What role do you see? Have you heard of vehicle-to-grid solutions? Using the EV as a battery storage for your house and you can feed it back into the grid and back. How would you see that help the growth of this industry?

Yeah, well, you know, one of the big sort of attractions of that is that you can set up micro grids and you can balance the grid

And in particular, you know, say that your vehicle isn't being used for a journey and it's plugged in and parked up. Perhaps when you've got peak demand for electricity, you know, typically in the morning when people are having their breakfast or in the evening when they're home and making dinner and settling down for the evening.

that if you're not using your car at these times, then that's a great time to be able to draw down some of the energy from that battery instead of the grid having to ramp up production, instead of having to turn on all the power stations. Of course, the challenge is making sure you've still got enough energy in the battery to be able to do your journey. Yeah.

So usually that's combined with charging the vehicle overnight during the lowest periods of demand, typically from just gone midnight through to about 5 o'clock in the morning. This is a time when there's not much demand for energy, particularly here in the UK. And so you can use some of that baseload capacity that's being generated online

to top up your vehicle and then draw down some of it at those times when there's a higher peak. So that's great. Downside, of course, is that it does cycle the battery more.

What I mean by that is that you're discharging and charging the battery if you use it as stationary storage vehicle to grid, which could affect the lifetime. Typically, batteries are designed to last between, say, 1,000 and 2,000 cycles.

And clearly, the more often that you use it in that type of vehicle to grid context, the less calendar life that you're going to get out of your battery. But we're seeing that actually EV batteries are very resilient.

actually more resilient than perhaps some of the initial expectations were when EVs first hit the market. And we've got Nissan Leaf vehicles still on the road 10 years after they were first launched. And so some of the concerns of degradation in battery life haven't quite materialized.

Do you see a future then where batteries are much more modular? So instead of having to change the entire battery, you could just change each individual cell? Or is that just going to be too technologically challenging to do? I do see a fairly near-term opportunity for changing out entire packs.

So there is a company, a Chinese vehicle company called NIO that has developed a battery pack swap capability.

Instead of you charging your battery pack, you actually just drive into a SWAC station and the entire crack is removed from the bottom of the vehicle and a new one is put in. And that means that actually you can monitor the packs very effectively. You can maintain them and potentially replace cells or modules that might be damaged and

um so i think in that context it could work interesting then so you might you could potentially have a feature where you and the ev just a car and then you have little companies that just specialize in batteries and you kind of lease the battery off them or when you go to charge your car so buying a drink in a glass bottle you start to get a deposit back for the glass you take the battery back

Am I just thinking? No, that's exactly right. And in fact, you know, some lease models do involve leasing the battery rather than buying it outright. And that reduces the upfront cost of the vehicle. But of course, you've got the ongoing lease cost. So you've got a way up which suits your particular spend profile.

For that NEO model that I was just talking about, you do need to design the pack so that it can be removed from the vehicle. In most vehicles, actually, it's built into the chassis of the vehicle intrinsically, so it's more difficult to remove it. But you can design it as we were just discussing.

Fantastic. So you could also have like a standard design battery that fits many different models of EVs, or is that not possible? Yeah, that's also true. So actually Volkswagen are advocating a unified cell design and their concept is that actually we go to a standardization of batteries so that they can be deployed across multiple models.

You know, I think that could work in the Volkswagen-Audi group. They own so many brands that they've got the scale in order to deploy it across those different models. I think the industry is still fairly new in terms of, let's say, slightly immature in terms of the maturity of the design of batteries. There are lots of ideas around

how you can optimize batteries. So it may be a while before we go to an industry-wide battery standard. And of course, there may be advantages to different types of pack design given for different applications. So it may well be that we do still see some variety of packs and battery models for the foreseeable future.

You have to be consumer-led to kind of change, wouldn't it, or sort of regulation, really. The manufacturers are going to want to, if you do that, voluntarily. Anyway, last question, because we're running out of time, we'll skip ahead. Finally, what excites you most about the future of energy storage? Where do you believe the next big leap will come from?

Well, you know, it's a really exciting time to live through. To be honest, it's a bit of a roller coaster ride for the automotive industry. You know, you're seeing older technologies being replaced by newer technologies which are being developed. Big shake-up, really, in the industry. Energy storage in general is a much broader topic and

not only are you seeing the innovation in lithium-ion batteries, but also you're seeing other technologies like sodium-ion batteries being developed primarily for stationary storage. You've got flow batteries, which are being used for off-grid storage. And of course, you've got some hydrogen deployment. I

I personally don't think that we're going to see hydrogen used in EVs. I think the cost for engineering that technology into an EV is too prohibitive. And the pressures that you need in order to compress hydrogen to make it effective as an energy storage medium are just too high really for economic engineering solutions.

So I see an increase in rollout in batteries and an expiration of lots of different battery chemistries for different applications. So with regards to hydrogen, would that be kind of like a hybrid kind of solution, but using hydrogen instead of fossil fuel?

Yeah, I mean, there have been developments of hydrogen in vehicles. In fact, many years ago, companies like Honda and Toyota were particularly advanced in developing fuel cell vehicles where you use the hydrogen in a fuel cell. But actually, the economics of those are not particularly attractive.

I think hydrogen is probably more useful as an off-bridge storage material where you can electrolyse water and compress the hydrogen which comes off that and store it in compressed gas cylinders and then release it into a fuel cell in order to generate electricity and top up the grid that way.

I think that's a reasonably interesting approach. And of course, there are some fantastic combinations with renewables whereby you can use photovoltaics to electrolyse water and generate hydrogen. And then that's a sort of solar through to fuel type of conversion. There are even some novel technologies that have been

been developed, I'd say mainly in academic circles at the minute, whereby you can either make hydrogen directly from an integrated photovoltaic cell and an electrolyzer, or even use it to make synthetic fuels like methane. With hydrogen, I see that more as kind of like a space program kind of

fuel rather than for the general use on planet earth but i could be wrong that's just me um brilliant that's all of my questions graham um is there anything else you'd like to add you feel is important we haven't touched on no it's been a fantastic uh discussion and and many thanks for your interest in illica and and goliath solid state batteries and um yeah i hope we get the opportunity to give you an update at some point in the future

Absolutely. With that then, thank you for your time, Graham. That was very, very interesting. Thank you. Bye now. Also, don't forget to subscribe to IE Plus for premium insights and exclusive content.