Watt It Takes: Creating a Battery Unicorn
Energy Gang
Wood Mackenzie
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2019
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Watt It Takes: How a Ukrainian immigrant quietly toiled away on a new battery chemistry and created a billion-dollar unicorn.
Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Gene Berdichevsky, the CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies.
Sila is developing a new lithium-ion battery chemistry that uses silicon in place of graphite — leading to an improvement in battery density by 20 percent. This spring, Daimler led a $170 million round in Sila, valuing the startup at $1 billion.
Berdichevsky was the seventh employee at Tesla, where he developed the Roadster’s battery.
For the last eight years, Berdichevsky’s team at Sila has been working on a drop-in replacement for today’s lithium-ion batteries.
This conversation was recorded live at Powerhouse’s headquarters. Buy tickets for upcoming events.
Support for this podcast comes from PG&E. Did you know that 20 percent of EV drivers in the U.S. are in PG&E’s service area in Northern California? PG&E is helping to electrify corporate fleet vehicles. Get in touch with PG&E’s EV specialists to find out how you can take your transportation fleet electric.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for this podcast comes from PG&E. Did you know that 20% of EV drivers in the |
| 0:06.3 | US are in PG&E's service territory in Northern California? Well that's a lot of |
| 0:10.8 | people but the Electric Revolution can't happen with single drivers alone, so PG&E is helping to electrify corporate fleet vehicles. |
| 0:18.0 | Get in touch with PG&E's EV specialists to find out how you can take your transportation fleets electric. |
| 0:24.0 | Find out more at PGE.com slash GTM. |
| 0:27.5 | Support for this podcast also comes from Wonder Capital. |
| 0:30.5 | Wonder has financed well over 100 megawatts of small commercial solar projects, and they were recently named the leading commercial solar financier by our researchers at GTM. |
| 0:41.0 | To find out how Wonder Capital can help you finance your next community solar or commercial solar project, |
| 0:46.0 | head over to Wonder Capital.com slash GTM. This week on what it takes, how a Ukrainian immigrant quietly toiled away on a new battery |
| 1:00.6 | chemistry in Atlanta, which turned into a billion dollar |
| 1:03.7 | unicorn in Silicon Valley. Going into it I think we had a very healthy |
| 1:07.9 | understanding that hey physics and chemistry might just be against us and so we |
| 1:11.7 | we thought philosophically what we wanted to do |
| 1:14.1 | is build a kind of company where the process really mattered. |
| 1:17.3 | If you're doing the work right and you're pushing the limits |
| 1:21.0 | and you're doing the best work you've ever done in your career that's what |
| 1:24.6 | success looks like. |
| 1:27.0 | Welcome to What It Takes, an interview series produced by Powerhouse and Green Tech |
| 1:32.2 | Media, I'm Stephen Lacy. In this |
| 1:34.4 | series we hear from founders and executives at the most influential clean |
| 1:37.6 | energy companies, their backgrounds, their passions, their struggles, |
| 1:40.7 | their deals, their management philosophies, their near-death experiences. |
... |
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