Best of LinkedIn: Electrification & Battery Technology CW 14/ 15

00:00:00: Brought to you by Thomas Alguyer and Franus.

00:00:02: This edition highlights key LinkedIn posts on electrification in battery technology, in weeks fourteen and fifteen.

00:00:09: Franis is a B-to-B market research company that supports automotive suppliers with building featurebyfeature competitive intelligence That shows exactly how their product stacks up against the competition.

00:00:19: You can find more info in description

00:00:21: Yeah, and welcome everyone to this deep dive.

00:00:23: We are super excited.

00:00:24: have you with us as we unpack some of the biggest trends in electrification And battery tech that had been blowing up across LinkedIn recently.

00:00:32: exactly

00:00:33: and To kick things off I want you to imagine something.

00:00:36: Imagine buying a like A two thousand dollar television right?

00:00:41: You bring it home and you mount it to your living room wall using a flimsy two dollar plastic bracket.

00:00:47: Oh, that sounds like disaster waiting to happen.

00:00:49: right because you're trusting this massive highly technical investment To the absolute weakest link.

00:00:55: and well looking closely at the mobility industry discussions over the past few weeks That is exactly what's happening with electric vehicle infrastructure.

00:01:02: Yeah It really is.

00:01:03: The bill is finally coming due.

00:01:05: I mean we are officially passed the honeymoon phase of just deploying hardware.

00:01:10: Now we are slamming straight into the gritty operational realities of making this tech actually work?

00:01:17: The conversation is absolutely pivoted, it's gone from celebration to system optimization...the era of getting steel in the ground completely over.

00:01:26: Over calendar weeks, fourteen and fifteen, top voices were entirely focused on operational uptime- the actual economics severe grid bottlenecks, and of course the geopolitical realities.

00:01:59: Because it's a textbook false economy,

00:02:00: right?

00:02:01: Tillman mapped out the cascading failures that happen when you buy unsupported hardware.

00:02:06: And It isn't just about the machine breaking later on.

00:02:09: The chaos actually starts during construction

00:02:12: really like before its even turned

00:02:14: off.

00:02:14: exactly project managers and EPCs You know the engineering procurement and construction teams.

00:02:20: they often receive these cheap chargers with poorly translated installation manual or Honestly sometimes no manual at all.

00:02:27: wait

00:02:28: Walk me through the mechanics of that on a job site.

00:02:30: If you're an EPC pouring concrete, how does a bad manual actually cost money?

00:02:35: Well

00:02:35: it forces engineering teams to make assumptions they have to guess based on generic spec

00:02:40: sheets.

00:02:42: No.

00:02:42: Right, so they'll trench the site lay down the conduit pull all this expensive copper wire and pour a concrete pad based on those generic plans.

00:02:50: then The actual charger arrives And the mounting holes don't align with the concrete anchors.

00:02:55: You're kidding?

00:02:55: I

00:02:55: wish i was or worse?

00:02:57: The internal terminal blocks require A totally different gauge of wire than what was pulled underground.

00:03:02: So you end up having to tear up fresh concrete resize the wiring And suddenly your cheap hardware has triggered this massive multi-week standoff.

00:03:12: Between

00:03:12: the vendor, installer and site operator.

00:03:15: that is a nightmare!

00:03:16: Yep

00:03:17: And what blows my mind is that even after all of the chaotic installation, equipment rarely functions seamlessly anyway.

00:03:23: Like Kate Coudoli shared a study covering Finland Germany and UK and it revealed nearly forty percent public charging sessions still experience issues.

00:03:32: Forty percent?

00:03:33: It's wild!

00:03:38: And this is the worst connectors getting physically locked to the car.

00:03:41: How was the failure rate still sitting at forty percent?

00:03:43: A huge portion of that comes down to what Paul Raj identified as handshake glitches,

00:03:48: handshake glitches Yeah.

00:03:49: so when you plug a vehicle into high-speed charger power doesn't just instantly flow right.

00:03:54: The car and the charger have this highly complex millisecond level conversation.

00:03:59: Right, they have to sync up.

00:04:00: Exactly!

00:04:01: The car software says hey I need four hundred volts at this specific amperage and the charger has to verify it can deliver exactly that before the heavy physical metal contactors inside the machine actually snaps shut.

00:04:15: So if there's even like a microscopic timing error in that software negotiation?

00:04:21: If the timing protocol is off by even a fraction of second, The safety systems trigger an abort to prevent an arc flash or battery surge.

00:04:30: Wow!

00:04:30: So the contactors stay open...the screen throws some vague error code and the driver's just left stranded

00:04:36: Which brings up huge point.

00:04:38: if operators are treating these chargers like passive infrastructure You know?

00:04:41: Like park bench you bolt down.

00:04:43: forget about instead active software dependent retail spaces.

00:04:46: The economics will completely Destroy them

00:04:49: without a doubt.

00:04:49: But in Rahalia posted some numbers on this he noted the average public charger in The US operates at just six to ten percent utilization.

00:04:57: You

00:04:57: cannot build a sustainable business model On heavy capital assets that sit idle ninety percent of the day.

00:05:03: you Just can't.

00:05:04: and even during the ten percent Of the time they are utilized, the margin conversion is absolutely brutal.

00:05:10: Let's get into those margins because Tomaske Boer broke down the math using Fasten's operational numbers, and it perfectly illustrates the financial squeeze here.

00:05:19: It really does.

00:05:20: So Gabor mentioned they make about fifty three cents per kilowatt hour in gross profit at The plug which honestly sounds incredibly healthy.

00:05:29: Why is that misleading?

00:05:30: Because Gross Profit completely ignores the reality of running a network.

00:05:34: right You have to bridge that fifty-three cents down to EBITDA.

00:05:38: Right, the company's operating profit before accountants factor in taxes interest and depreciation.

00:05:42: Exactly!

00:05:43: So first you strip away the site lease costs The grid connection fees And daily maintenance.

00:05:48: That fifty three cents drops to roughly twenty four cents.

00:05:51: Okay

00:05:51: Still something.

00:05:52: But then you have a corporate layer on top of it.

00:05:54: Precisely Once you factor into broader company overhead The software backend licensing The expansion teams And crucially The massive depreciation on these really expensive hardware assets that fifty three cent gross profit at the plug shrinks to just five

00:06:13: cents.

00:06:13: Five cents per kilowatt hour?

00:06:14: Yes, only a tenth of the gross margin actually survives down to the underlying company EBITDA

00:06:19: level.

00:06:20: That is razor thin.

00:06:22: and that five-cent margin can be completely wiped out by someone with a pair of bull cutters.

00:06:25: Oh!

00:06:26: The copper theft.

00:06:26: yeah

00:06:27: Syed Hussain Hassan brought this up.

00:06:29: There's this wild asymmetric reality.

00:06:32: operators are phasing.

00:06:34: Thieves are cutting these thick, liquid-cooled charging cables in the middle of night.

00:06:38: for what?

00:06:38: Maybe fifty to a hundred euros and scrap copper value.

00:06:41: Yes that yeah.

00:06:42: But The operator is hit with a fifteen hundred to thirty five hundred euro bill just For new cable plus the specialized laborer To install it.

00:06:50: It is easily four thousand euros In replacement costs

00:06:53: And you lose out on your thin five cent margins for weeks while You wait for a service team.

00:06:57: it completely exposes how financially fragile A single public passenger charger can be

00:07:02: Exactly.

00:07:03: So, and this is where it gets really interesting if a single passenger charger What happens when a logistics operator tries to scale this for commercial fleet of heavy-duty trucks?

00:07:15: Because you clearly cannot just copy paste the public passenger model into heavy transport.

00:07:20: You

00:07:21: absolutely can't!

00:07:21: The first hard truth about freed electrification, which was brought up by Jared Archer is that electric trucks should not be deployed everywhere right now... Right.

00:07:30: ...the industry needs stop pretending an electric semi as one-to-one drop in replacement on every single route.

00:07:37: Yeah, Marina Muknok backed this up with a brilliant operational point.

00:07:41: She noted that if fleets take the time to fundamentally re-optimize their logistics routing specifically for the range and payload characteristics of electric trucks

00:07:49: Rather than just blindly forcing them onto old diesel routes

00:07:53: Exactly!

00:07:53: If they re-optermize They can literally double their electrification rates in cost savings.

00:07:58: But it requires completely Rethinking the hub and spoke logistics model.

00:08:02: but here's the catch Rethinking the routes doesn't solve The charging access problem.

00:08:07: Johannes Matthews highlighted this staggering statistic.

00:08:11: Out of roughly thirty thousand heavy-duty DC fast chargers currently shipped into the European market, twenty one thousand of them are locked behind private depot fences.

00:08:21: Imagine if seventy percent of world's diesel pumps were locked behind a company's private fence?

00:08:27: The supply chain would grind to a halt!

00:08:29: It will be chaos.

00:08:30: Seventy percent of the heavy-duty infrastructure in Europe is essentially invisible and inaccessible to any truck that doesn't belong to that specific yard.

00:08:39: But wait, break that down for me!

00:08:40: If the hardware is already sitting there fully powered up connected to the grid why can a third party truck just pull in tap a credit card and charge?

00:08:49: Like are these companies hoarding capacity out of range anxiety or is the software just failing to share it safely?

00:08:55: It's The Software It lacks what Mathy's calls an Airbnb-like software layer.

00:09:03: If a depot owner lets a third-party truck plug in, they need absolute software certainty that the visiting truck won't draw so much peak power... ...that the depots own buses fail to charge by morning.

00:09:13: Oh!

00:09:14: That makes sense.

00:09:14: Yeah The software has to manage dynamic load balancing route scheduling and site access all at once.

00:09:21: Without that predictive energy management layer Depo owners basically hoard their capacity out of operational self defense.

00:09:27: Wow..That makes the logistics have shared infrastructure incredibly difficult.

00:09:32: And you know when fleets do attempt to build public shared hubs, the sheer scale of engineering is wild.

00:09:39: Gilbert Rodriguez and Thomas Laurent discuss EV Realty's massive new nine megawatt truck charging hub out in San Bernardino California.

00:09:48: Nine megawatts is an industrial-scale footprint.

00:09:51: And what's really fascinating about that EV Realty project as Rodriguez shared is they were actively trenching, laying con to it and doing civil engineering with their OEM partner ChemPower while the actual technology standards are still being drafted.

00:10:07: Right because they're preparing for the megawatt charging system or MCS which isn't even fully finalized yet.

00:10:13: we aren't just talking bigger cables here?

00:10:15: Yeah

00:10:15: not at all.

00:10:16: MCS involves massive new pin configurations, intense active liquid cooling systems designed to push over a thousand amps of current continuously.

00:10:25: Building the civil infrastructure for that without finalized cut sheets or locked-in wiring schematics.

00:10:30: I mean, That requires an intense level of risk management.

00:10:32: It really highlights a severe talent gap in this space.

00:10:35: The mobility industry doesn't just need venture capital right now.

00:10:38: it needs highly specialized engineering teams capable Of delivering complex high voltage infrastructure under conditions of extreme regulatory and technical uncertainty.

00:10:48: So let's say EV Realty manages to navigate this wild west of un-finalized hardware.

00:10:53: They actually build.

00:10:56: What happens when they call the local utility and ask them to just, you know turn it on because he can buy the trucks.

00:11:00: You could build the charters but The physical electrical grid is rapidly becoming the ultimate choke point here.

00:11:06: Oh...the grid simply was not built for this kind of localized dense power draw.

00:11:12: Victoria Hutton provided a highly effective mental model To visualize the strain.

00:11:17: she points out that one megawatt Of power is roughly equivalent to five hundred electric kettles boiling water simultaneously.

00:11:24: Okay so each AV Realty's nine-megawatt hub is four thousand five hundred kettles firing up at the exact same

00:11:30: moment.

00:11:30: Exactly, and Hutton points out that a single twenty megawatt transit bus depot has ten thousand

00:11:35: kettls!

00:11:36: That's insane...

00:11:37: Think of a local distribution grid like a finely tuned string quartet right?

00:11:41: It hums along managing a few residential neighborhoods keeping the acoustic frequency perfectly balanced dropping a massive heavy duty depot onto that local substation.

00:11:51: it's like dropping a stadium rock band.

00:11:53: The quartet

00:11:55: doesn't stand a chance.

00:11:56: Exactly, the voltage drops... ...the frequency violently distorts and local transformers physically overheat.

00:12:03: Dennis Leskovar painted very stark picture of this reality.

00:12:08: He looked at standard highway in Slovenia with kilometers heavy trucks backed up in transit.

00:12:13: And he did math.

00:12:15: If you transition those vehicles, each truck needs around five hundred kilowatt hours of energy.

00:12:20: Potentially twice a day.

00:12:22: to

00:12:22: charge just a fraction overnight in the localized area requires grid upgrades that take two-five years to permit and build.

00:12:29: The traditional utility grid just cannot scale fast enough.

00:12:33: This is exactly why the conversation is shifting toward decentralized edge-of-grid solutions.

00:12:38: Skip Bowman brought up a massive shift happening in Australia right now.

00:12:41: Oh,

00:12:41: distributed storage?

00:12:42: Yeah!

00:12:43: In just past year Australian households and parked EVs have added an estimated ten to fourteen gigawatt hours of distributed battery storage

00:12:51: Which is incredible, considering Australia's entire grid-scale utility battery fleet is only sitting at about five to eight gigawatt hours.

00:13:00: The distributed privately owned assets are vastly outpacing the massive utility projects

00:13:05: by a factor of two and Robert Farago noted how critical this distributed fleet is becoming.

00:13:10: Australia produces so much solar energy in the middle of day that power prices go negative and utility scale solar has to be curtailed basically thrown away.

00:13:18: A fleet of EVs with bi-directional charging capabilities could absorb all that excess daytime solar and stabilize the

00:13:25: grid.".

00:13:25: But hold on, this brings us straight into The Grid Debate or VTG.

00:13:30: Mark Kaye refers to VTGS as the quote missing layer in the European energy stack.

00:13:35: He envisions one hundred forty million parked EV's acting a giant virtual power plant.

00:13:40: It sounds great paper!

00:13:42: it does.

00:13:43: but looking at technical experts over last two weeks Andreas Heinrich Arne Shloak and Mark Moulton, they are pouring ice water on this hype.

00:13:51: And rightfully so because the underlying mechanism of V-to-G is incredibly complex as Mark Moultem explains.

00:13:58: The moment a vehicle feeds power back into the grid it is no longer just a consumer appliance.

00:14:03: It becomes a heavily regulated grid generator.

00:14:06: It must strictly obey local grid codes.

00:14:09: Wait how does a car actually act?

00:14:11: As a grid generator like?

00:14:12: why's that different from just draining a battery in to your house?

00:14:15: Because the wider grid operates on alternating current at a very specific frequency.

00:14:20: If a local power plant trips offline in the grid-frequency microdips, The car has to instantly detect that and push reactive power back.

00:14:30: Orchestrating that requires a flawless multi-layered software protocol stack.

00:14:35: You're using standards like ISO one fifty, one eighteen twenty for the car to charge your communication and OCPP two point one for the charger utility communications

00:14:43: in.

00:14:43: according to orange schlowock who runs a testing facility for these systems The industry is failing at the basics right now.

00:14:49: He shared that basic smart charging functions Like just waking an EV up from a scheduled pause are currently failing.

00:14:57: I mean, if we're currently seeing a forty percent issue rate with basic one-way public charging aren't we getting way ahead of ourselves?

00:15:04: asking the car to negotiate complex grid codes and pump power back?

00:15:08: We really are.

00:15:09: It's

00:15:09: like trying to teach your kid calculus when they were still failing Basic Edition.

00:15:13: That is exactly the operational concern under as Heinrich raised.

00:15:16: We are trying to add massive bi-directional software complexity To a hardware ecosystem that is still deeply struggling with basic interoperability.

00:15:26: Yeah, until the lower level communication layers or absolutely bulletproof V two G Is going to remain trapped in small scale pilot programs The car must charge reliably every single time before it can be a power plant.

00:15:38: So

00:15:38: let's step back and look at the bigger picture here.

00:15:40: we have EPCs tearing up concrete due to bad manuals.

00:15:43: We have forty percent failure rates on public chargers.

00:15:46: Copper thieves are destroying margins, twenty-one thousand depot chargers are locked behind private fences due to missing

00:15:52: software."

00:15:53: The grid requires five year upgrades and the communication protocols are failing basic addition.

00:15:59: with all of this massive systemic friction why is the mobility industry still pushing so hard?

00:16:05: because macroeconomics and geopolitics are leaving them zero alternatives.

00:16:09: The fragility of our current fossil energy logistics system is on full

00:16:13: display.".

00:16:14: Mika Sumola highlighted how recent conflicts in the Middle East caused immediate violent spikes and global diesel prices.

00:16:21: Right He noted that missiles hadn't even finished falling before diesel costs started climbing

00:16:26: And logistics operators running on razor-thin margins simply cannot absorb a sudden doubling of their fuel inputs.

00:16:33: Exactly!

00:16:34: Sumola pointed to the transit system in Helsinki, which stopped buying diesel buses back in twenty nineteen.

00:16:39: It wasn't driven by environmental altruism.

00:16:42: You know it was pure brutal arithmetic.

00:16:44: The math just makes sense,

00:16:45: yeah a diesel bus in their fleet costs roughly eighty euros per one hundred kilometers.

00:16:50: to operate an electric bus cost about ten euros for one hundred kilometres.

00:16:55: that is an eight x operational difference.

00:16:58: I mean when the financial math is that stark you figure out how to make the infrastructure work regardless of the headaches.

00:17:04: Roger Atkins pointed out that the tipping point for EV adoption has officially shifted from ecological ambition.

00:17:12: The internal combustion status quo is just becoming too expensive to maintain.

00:17:16: However, escaping dependency on imported fossil fuels brings up a completely different geopolitical bottleneck...

00:17:22: the batteries!

00:17:23: Yes.

00:17:24: Nemanja Mikic provided a crucial reality check regarding battery supply chain.

00:17:29: European operators desperately want battery independence from China, but Mikaech highlights that over ninety-eight percent the world's LFP cathode material lithium iron phosphate which is the heavy durable cheap chemistry perfect for commercial fleets and up to ninety eight percent of synthetic graphite used in battery anodes is produced in china.

00:17:48: Wow so you can't just flip a switch declare independence and build a localized supply chain overnight.

00:17:53: No, you really can't innovate your way out of a ninety percent material dependency in one move.

00:17:58: Mechich outlined a very strict sequence three-step plan that Europe must follow if it actually wants to build local capacity without destroying quality control.

00:18:07: Okay let's unpack that plant.

00:18:09: so basically do we have to copy the recipe exactly as its written before we try swapping out the ingredients?

00:18:15: That is exactly it!

00:18:16: Step One... Europe MUST start producing cells locally But they must use Chinese raw materials, Chinese factory equipment and Chinese manufacturing processes.

00:18:26: You do not change a single variable until you prove that you can hold quality at massive production volumes.

00:18:32: Step two- you invite those Chinese material suppliers to build their material processing plants locally in Europe.

00:18:38: Step three- only after the local ecosystem is completely stable do you slowly requalify these operations into European run facilities through technology transfers.

00:18:47: It's entirely about quality control then

00:18:50: Exactly.

00:18:50: If you try to change the anode materials, cell design, factory equipment and manufacturing process all at the exact same time... ...and battery fails testing You have no idea which of those four variables caused failure.

00:19:04: Right!

00:19:05: You need a known good baseline.

00:19:07: Pretending the European mobility sector doesn't depend heavily on China right now is only costing companies time and massive amounts of capital.

00:19:34: It is,

00:19:37: without question the ultimate systems engineering problem of our generation.

00:19:41: Absolutely!

00:19:42: Well if you enjoyed this episode.

00:19:43: new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:19:45: also check out other additions on future mobility and market evolution next-gen vehicle intelligence and commercial fleet insights.

00:19:51: Thank You so much for joining us in this deep dive.

00:19:54: don't forget to subscribe So never miss an addition.

00:19:57: And I just want leave with one final thought Malover We've talked about hardware traps, software protocols lock depots and grid strain today.

00:20:05: If a mobility operator's total cost of ownership now depends entirely on utility grid access and software communication protocols does the mobility industry need to stop thinking of itself as purely building vehicles?

00:20:17: And start realizing it is now fundamentally in the energy-and data routing business?