Challenges and opportunities for high-quality battery production at scale

Abstract

As the world electrifies, global battery production is expected to surge. However, batteries are both difficult to produce at the gigawatt-hour scale and sensitive to minor manufacturing variation. As a result, the battery industry has already experienced both highly-visible safety incidents and under-the-radar reliability issues—a trend that will only worsen if left unaddressed. Here we highlight both the challenges and opportunities to enable battery quality at scale. We first describe the interplay between various battery failure modes and their numerous root causes. We then discuss how to manage and improve battery quality during production. We hope our perspective brings greater visibility to the battery quality challenge to enable safe global electrification.