Solid-state lithium battery technology developed by a Canadian utility has been licensed for use in electric vehicle batteries made for the Chinese market.
Hydro-Québec said the licensing deal with Dongshi Kingpower Science and Technology includes cooperating on building a pilot battery assembly line at Kingpower’s factory in China.
The general director of Hydro-Québec’s transportation electrification and energy storage Centre of Excellence, Karim Zaghib, said the agreement would “promote the electrification of transportation while taking advantage of the rapid growth of this sector in China”.
Zaghib, who heads the utility’s team working on solid-state, said the technology was “especially well suited for use in electric vehicles as solid-state batteries are much safer and have twice as much energy density as standard lithium-ion batteries”.
Hydro-Québec said Kingpower is a “high-tech enterprise with batteries at the heart of its development strategy”. The company also operates the science and technology division of China’s National & Local United Engineering Lab for Power Batteries in Changchun, in the northeast of the country.
Kingpower’s science and technology division president Tiancheng Zhu said: “Electric vehicles are a revolution in the global automobile industry. Batteries are a core technology at the heart of this revolution. Developing electric vehicles provides an opportunity for China to compete on this burgeoning global market and the keys to winning this competition are technological innovation and the battery.”
