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Advancing Battery Technology with Natron Energy

Watch this video to see ARPA-E Technology-to-Market Advisor Dr. Daniel Cunningham and Natron Energy CEO Dr. Colin Wessells explain how Natron's unique battery chemistry works, how far the company has progressed since its initial funding from ARPA-E, and much more.

Topics:
Batteries Electrification Energy Power

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 so we felt that there was an opportunity for our technologies that had come from earlier projects and programs there was a concern that they may be stranded that they needed additional support to actually go from their lab stage to a demonstration phase the goal of the scale-up program is to take technologies to the next level of

    00:00:20 demonstration to start to prove out their value proposition and to demonstrate that they have scaling capabilities whether it's a product or a process natron were very was a very interesting technology for a very good candidate for scale up as the team had already de-risked their technology significantly during their

    00:00:42 original project they had a very strong team that had a track record for scaling projects scaling manufacturing they also had a very good backing from financial point of view and also from a supply chain and also from a customer base too natron energy has developed a sodium ion

    00:01:02 battery technology we store sodium ions in electric materials based on prussian blue pigment and these batteries offer significantly higher power density much longer service life and unique safety characteristics in comparison to existing technologies so arpa-e brought the first money into natron even before our first venture capital seed investments and with that

    00:01:24 first rpe award we were able to develop the core prussian blue chemistry in our battery cells subsequently we productized that technology began taking it to market on a pilot line and after seeing that progress in the markets and in the supply chain the arpa-e then came back with this scale-up

    00:01:45 award the purpose of the scale-up award is to support natron in ramping from a pilot line to mass manufacturing it's more than order of magnitude scale up and what that allows us to do is to go from serving you know one customer a month to dozens and in the process of doing so with all of the scaling we're able to bring the

    00:02:06 cost of our technology down and prove that we have a viable business for this interview i'm actually sitting in a plant in holland michigan that was originally built for the purpose of manufacturing lithium-ion batteries and it was originally built with doe support natron is using this facility for the

    00:02:25 production of its sodium ion prussian blue technology and rpe's role through the scale-up program is to help us finance new equipment that will allow us to repurpose this existing plant for our new technology in terms of what this means for our business there are only a few plants in the world

    00:02:44 like this one into which we could bring a new technology very rapidly arpa-e has been unbelievably supportive and everything we have we owed our pay we wouldn't have raised the initial venture capital funding round for natron except because arpa-e had brought the first grants and supported this technology concept

    00:03:06 and similarly the scale-up award for marquette e was a signal to prospective investors that the technology has legs that it's been de-risked that the pilot line works so for me personally working with companies like natron and other teams awardees within the scale-up program it's very exciting for me to see them

    00:03:27 come from the laboratory to the demonstration the bench phase all the way to a manufacturing environment like you see here today that really shows the the capability and the potential for making maximizing the impact of our technologies at rpre the most important thing i do in my career will be

    00:03:47 taking natron's product to mass manufacturing and making a big market impact when we think about the problems we're trying to solve in society today climate change is one of the fundamental issues i can't think of anything higher impacts that we should be working on