By 2030, no new petrol or diesel car will be sold in the UK. In the past 10 years the electric car has transformed from rare curiosity to the new normal—as the cost of batteries has fallen by more than 80 per cent.
Driving an electric car is better for the environment than one with an internal combustion engine—and this is true even when taking into account the energy required to produce it in the first place. And electric vehicles are only going to get greener, as their lifetime emissions will reduce as our sources of electricity become increasingly renewable.
Echion Technologies, a start-up company which spun out from the University of Cambridge in 2017, is producing the kind of innovation that will supercharge EV development and reshape the future of transport. Their focus is on finding ways to make lithium-ion batteries more efficient, so that they charge more quickly and can withstand more charging cycles.
Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are the most widely used in the world: they power everything from our phones to our power tools. Ordinarily, Li-ion batteries have a positive electrode (cathode) made from a lithium compound and a negative electrode (anode) made from graphite. Echion has designed a new material called mixed niobium oxides (XNO®) to replace the graphite anode in Li-ion batteries.
This mixed niobium oxides technology has made significant performance gains. Their batteries can charge safely in just six minutes and last for 10,000 to 30,000 charging cycles, as opposed to the usual 1,000 to 2,000 cycles for Li-ion batteries. Given the number of industries that rely on Li-ion batteries and the global imperative to electrify as quickly as possible, Echion’s innovations could be revolutionary.
The company, which was founded by Jean de la Verpillière and Alex Groombridge, won second place in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Emerging Technologies Competition in 2017. Echion won £10,000. “The RSC Emerging Technologies Competition is not only valuable to us from a financial point of view,” de la Verpillière said at the time, “but we hope to take full advantage of the intangible networking and business development opportunities and mentorship that the RSC offers winners of this competition.”
Now, five years later, Echion has completed a £10m Series-A funding round and received a grant of £3.2m from the government. It has brought commercially viable products to the market while trialling experimental new technology with manufacturers: its superfast charging cells recently passed a safety and performance test with a hybrid bus company. Echion hopes that their batteries—which are made of sustainable materials—will accelerate progress towards the goal of net zero.
