Energy Storage Innovations Europe 2017

Electric vehicles, consumer electronics, and renewable energy sources differ significantly from one another when it comes to which battery should power them or store the energy they generate. Companies like Tesla are betting on a one-size-fits-all approach, with a defined cell chemistry that is applied across their entire product portfolio.

Other players, like Samsung SDI and LGChem, rely on their customers’ spec sheets when they produce their batteries, but they rarely step out of the LIB realm into new battery avenues, like lithium/sulphur and sodium-ion.

IDTechEx, with its battery-agnostic approach, analyses and compares all of the above (and more) and delivers market intelligence based on the five competitive forces to predict how the market will evolve over the next 10 years.

At Energy Storage Innovations Europe 2017 (ESI), taking place in Berlin on the 10th-11th May, IDTechEx will showcase a unique selection of the main available battery chemistries being investigated and deployed at the moment.

Day one will start with keynote lectures by Toyota, Electrovaya, and Ilika. Toyota paved the way to hybrid cars in 1996 with its signature Prius, of which 10 millions have been sold to date worldwide.

The company is now pushing the boundaries further to establish itself as the market leader in electric vehicles (EV) with very interesting research on magnesium batteries, flow batteries, fuel cells, and solid-state electrolytes. Electrovaya is a Canadian company that currently runs Europe’s largest Li-ion manufacturing facility.

They have been very successful in the specialty EV market and claim to have the best batteries on the market for heavy-duty applications. Finally, Ilika is a British company that focuses on thin film batteries, a key enabling technology for RFID, the IoT, wearable devices, and medical applications.

Our ESI conference will then move on to a session entirely dedicated to thin film and solid-state batteries, with excellent speakers from established names like STMicrelectronics, Fraunhofer IFAM, and ULVAC, which will present their product offering as well as R&D efforts in terms of large-scale manufacturing.

We will also have speakers from Zinergy and EMPA, who will present ground-breaking work on zinc-based thin film batteries and solid-state electrolytes with high ionic conductivity, respectively.

Finally, day one will be closed with a unique session on redox flow batteries, where vanadium flow batteries will be covered by players like Volterion and eChemion, while Dutch company EleStor will present its grid-scale hydrogen/bromine system, and JenaBatteries will introduce the audience to organic redox flow solutions.

The second day will be entirely devoted to advanced and post-Li-ion chemistries. Academic and industrial speakers will alternate to show ground-breaking innovations on sodium-ion (Helmholtz Institute), silicon anodes (Leyden Jar), ionic liquids (Solvionic), solid electrolytes (Prologium), quantum dot batteries (StoreDot), aluminium batteries (TU Berlin), and supercapacitors (Poznan U., Northern Arizona U., and PO-CellTech).

In addition to this one-of-a-kind speaker line-up, attendees will be able to benefit from the other co-located events that also deal with energy storage, like our EV track, where enabling technologies will be showcased by ZEM, SAES Getters, TankTwo, and NabalTec, as well as our graphene and energy storage session, with Thales, Graphenea, ZapGo, and Skeleton Technologies.