Part 1: A National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries
The last few months have been busy ones at Enovix as we prepared to go public and hosted our Advanced Battery Production Showcase. But during this time, another event occurred that caught our attention. In June, the Federal Consortium for Advanced Batteries (FCAB) published the National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries, 2021–2030.
It is intended to guide investments in the urgent development of a domestic lithium-battery manufacturing value chain. According to the blueprint, “The U.S. industrial base must be positioned to respond to this vast increase in market demand that otherwise will likely benefit well-resourced and supported competitors in Asia and Europe.”
The blueprint formalizes some of what industry experts have been saying for several years. In written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on February 5, 2019, Simon Moores, managing director at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, said, “We are in the midst of a global battery arms race in which the U.S. is presently a bystander.” Regarding lithium-ion battery production, he added, “…those who possess the manufacturing and processing know-how will hold the balance of industrial power in the 21st century auto and energy storage industries.”
In May 2020, James Greenberger, executive director of NAATBatt International, made the case that lithium-ion battery production is strategic to U.S. economic security because it is fundamental to other critical emerging technologies. He said that advanced battery development and production today is analogous to semiconductor development and production in the 1980s, when Japan was a primary competitive threat. Without a vibrant semiconductor industry, U.S. progress in emerging industries such as wireless communications, multimedia, and personal computers would have been hampered, damaging the broader economy. Today advanced battery development and production is strategic to other important, high-value technologies such as mobile communications and computing, electric vehicles, and energy storage systems.
These mandates of the National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries speak directly to our strategic goals at Enovix:
1. U.S. Electrode, Cell and Pack Manufacturing
2. U.S. Lithium Battery Manufacturing
3. Serving the U.S. Defense Markets
The following posts in this series will look at each mandate and how our technology, production, and business strategies align with each one.
If you would rather not wait, read our white paper now: A Strategy for U.S. Leadership in Advanced Lithium-ion Battery Development and Production. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
