The Battery Everyone Uses Is The One They'd Never Build | EnerVenue x HiNa | WTF are Batteries?

I went to Dalian with a selfish question. I run a fund that invests in energy transition, and I've come to think energy isn't the problem — moving it and storing it is. So I sat down with Henning Rath, who runs EnerVenue out of Silicon Valley and is building his first gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, who runs HiNa Battery, a sodium-ion company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's now ten years old with 600 people and a gigawatt line. I told them I don't know anything about batteries and asked them to teach me. We started at what a cell even is, went through why the entire industry standardised on LFP and what a thermal runaway actually does, and then Henning told me something I hadn't heard: the world had over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone. I asked whether I should start an electric car company or a battery company when I get home. Both said battery — and Henning was blunt about it: don't build anything that needs rare earth. Fifty million dollars to start. We g