How To Make Your Battery Pack Do _____
How many units do I need to sell to break even when I use a software-defined battery (SDB) solution?
The number can be as small as ONE.
Why? How? Let’s start from the beginning…
Many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) put off electrification or the transition to a better battery solution because they can’t achieve the economies of scale only feasible for the Samsungs, Apples, and Teslas of the world.
The volatile nature of battery chemistry makes developing and integrating battery packs into a product or equipment costly and hazardous. Certain types of batteries are “merciless" when you “do it wrong.” Explosions, fires, and bad press are real — even big fish like Samsung, General Motors, and Boeing aren’t exempt.
But it doesn’t mean that the high energy potential in most lithium chemistries is a guarantee for disaster. The secret to ensuring safety lies in developing a deep understanding of their behaviors and the know-how to manage their temperamental character.
After all, we carry lithium batteries in our pockets. Our smartphones all have the “less safe” battery types, almost always containing Lithium Cobalt Oxide (LCO). Yet, since the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 debacle, there have been few reports of external combustion accidents with late-model phones. The big players have figured it out.
What can we learn from this to make battery pack development more accessible to SMEs?
Chemistries that store more energy tend to be more volatile. It comes down to making informed decisions and balancing trade-offs on safety, reliability, cost, longevity, performance, and other factors.
You can have high capacity, safety, and cheap. But you can’t have all three maxed out simultaneously. The Samsungs, Teslas, and Apples of the world have fine-tuned the balance to make the batteries in their products good, cheap, and safe enough by adjusting battery chemistries to balance cost, energy density, and safety.
For example, iPhones still occasionally explode. But Apple has a high incentive to uphold its reputation, so it turns the “safety” dial relatively far to the right. Meanwhile, lithium battery-powered products from unpronounceable fly-by-night brands on Temu would likely turn the “cheap” knob up to eleven at the expense of characteristics like safety and longevity.
These behaviors in traditional battery packs are fixed once you’ve designed the solution. There’s no going back. On the other hand, SDBs make it easy to adjust battery characteristics on the fly during operations:
You may mix and match cells to introduce different characteristics into a battery pack. Let’s say you operate an electric plane. You could combine cells of high energy density (i.e., more lithium) for high-altitude cruising with those of high power density (i.e., thicker wires for power output) best for producing thrust for takeoff at different proportions, depending on flight routes.
You may rearrange cells in a battery pack from being connected in series (which produces higher voltage) to parallel (which allows for a higher current) on a dashboard with a few clicks to meet changing demand at any moment.
The flexibility and adaptability of SDBs allow companies to build the most effective and efficient battery solutions to meet their unique requirements without starting from scratch.
Whether you need an ultra-reliable, extra-high capacity, minimum-viable, or cost-optimized battery, we can combine the optimal battery chemistries and structures to hit the sweet spot.
Returning to the initial question — do you have to amortize the costs of these elaborate designs over tens of thousands of products?
Not necessarily. One of our clients has products orbiting Earth… one of the few things not yet for sale on Amazon. We designed a single unit that’s extremely reliable, has high capacity, and is full of redundancies for them. The high cost is immediately offset by the value the solution creates because there’s simply no other way to address the challenges.
Let’s get back to planet Earth. SDBs' strength lies in helping companies currently underserved by electrification solutions, like firms that may build a few units of mining equipment or brands that produce semi-volume equipment (e.g., a few thousand units a month), by bringing down the cost of developing custom battery solutions with an API-like approach.
In practice, our expertise and technology are most valuable for solving electrification challenges at the higher end of industrial, medical, and operational fields. But we don’t want to sell anyone things they don’t need — sometimes, existing technologies and solutions will do the trick if you know how batteries behave and how to architect the solution creatively.
When you involve us in your battery strategy, we start with your business and product requirements and provide vendor-agnostic recommendations on the best battery solution. We can even help you architect the solution (with or without SDB), using the most cost-efficient way to meet your electrification goals.
