The first-of-its-kind technology may afford Volvo a competitive edge in the European market. Under a new amendment to the European Union’s Batteries Regulation, a battery passport – which can be thought of as a kind of sustainability certificate – must be embedded in every electric car sold in the European Union by the end of February 2027.

Think of the passport as a cake, with each ingredient identified and sourced, along with its environmental cost, explained Douglas Johnson-Poensgen, chief executive of Circulor, the U.K. firm that created the technology.

The passport is about accountability. It’s the only way to reduce the carbon footprint of a battery.

– Tim Burrows, producer, Electric Vehicle Society

Through a blockchain management system, the use of a battery is tracked in granular detail for as long as 15 years, thereby measuring the degree of degradation of a battery. This is important information. While a “dead” EV battery is no longer powerful enough for a car, it still retains 70% or more of its charge, enough to use as backup storage for other purposes, such as renewable energy.

The passport is seen as key to encouraging continued use of a battery or the minerals inside it, beyond its lifespan in an EV. Accelerating the circularity of batteries will go a long way to minimizing an EV’s environmental impact and, in instances where minerals are extracted from the spent battery, save costs.

Volvo announced that by 2027, every company model will be equipped with a passport and that more information will continue to be added. Volvo will not be the outlier for long. The Chinese government is launching its own model to comply with European regulations, and Japanese auto companies such as Nissan and Honda have vowed to do the same by the EU deadline. The Chinese version will follow the battery supply chain in China and will also store data on the carbon footprint, circularity and ESG rating for each battery.

At its essence, says Tim Burrows with the Electric Vehicle Society, “the passport is about accountability. It’s the only way to reduce the carbon footprint of a battery.”

Within a relatively short period, a digital sustainability tracker has moved from idea to fruition and appears to be the next step in the evolution of the electric car.

The carbon cost of battery production

Battery packs are stubbornly carbon-intensive to manufacture. They account for up to 60% of an electric vehicle’s carbon dioxide emissions during production, in part because a large share of the raw materials are mined and processed in China and shipped long distances.

Range anxiety is frequently cited by potential buyers as a primary concern when deciding between the purchase of an internal-combustion or a battery-powered car. Automakers have responded by manufacturing vehicles with longer ranges.

But there is a cost to this approach, which the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues outweighs the benefits. Extending the distance that can be travelled on a single charge requires bigger batteries, which increases energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions over a vehicle’s lifetime. The retail price of the vehicle also rises, as does the operational expense.

The upshot is that the environmental and social impacts related to the manufacturing and disposal of a battery are under increasing scrutiny by policymakers, industries and consumers as demand for the critical minerals that go into batteries – lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel – increases.

Currently, China dominates the supply of battery materials. According to the International Energy Agency, China produces 65% of the world’s lithium used for processing and refining.

Why do we need battery passports?

For a host of reasons, largely environmental and geopolitical, the need to advance battery recycling and reuse has become more urgent. The main objective of creating a battery passport, says Andrew McKinnon – policy director at Accelerate, an alliance of industry stakeholders in the zero-emission-vehicle supply chain – is to do just that.

The EU’s battery regulations specify recovery targets for lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel for recycling. Rising targets for the amount of recycled content in every battery further encourages mineral extraction from finished batteries for reuse.

As a bracing warning sign of how important it is to develop domestic capacity to repurpose and recycle, the ICCT reports that, globally, an estimated 1.2 million batteries from light- and heavy-duty EVs and plug-in hybrids will reach the end of their life cycles by 2030.

The stricter battery regulations are also intended to stymie dependence on China for materials and boost domestic sources instead.

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The United States is also considering introducing battery passports to strengthen onshoring efforts. EV manufacturers in the United States must purchase batteries made in North America to receive vehicle subsidies. A battery passport, which is vetted through a third-party audit, can prove the source of a battery’s content and clearly demonstrate eligibility for grants.

While it is unclear how much longer the U.S. subsidies will last under an EV-combative President Donald Trump, the directive to “buy American” appears entrenched in the current administration’s agenda, suggesting that the need to verify the chain of custody behind battery production will remain.

Barriers and drawbacks to creating a passport system for batteries

For regulators, auto repair shops and recyclers, the passport will provide test reports, detailed information about cell chemistry, and diagrams that show how to safely disassemble the battery pack.

But creating a battery passport and bringing it to market will not be a smooth drive, cautions the Electric Vehicle Society’s Burrows, who points out that there is no common terminology or practice among the many locales where minerals are mined and cars are manufactured and assembled. The passport “could be very expensive to produce,” he says. “Who bears the cost?”

Furthermore, the composition and chemistry of batteries change rapidly. By the time the passport is ready to be released, the battery may have a different chemical composition. “This becomes a question of whether the value of a passport is proportionate to the expense – the cost of chasing technology alone would be prohibitive,” Burrows says. (In an interview with Politico, Ellen Carey, chief external affairs officer with Circulor, said the passport developed for Volvo will add about US$10 per car.)

Although a strong proponent of battery passports, McKinnon, too, has some concerns. “I don’t know how far back they’re going to try to source the provenance of metals and minerals,” he says. “The supply chains are very complex. How will you get information from companies when we’ve never asked for this before?”

Canada has yet to codify battery traceability requirements, although the trend is in that direction, and Natural Resources Canada supports the Global Battery Alliance’s digital tracking system.

Electric Mobility Canada, a national industry association that advocates for sustainable electric mobility, has been in discussions with the federal government, says Daniel Breton, president and CEO. “We’ve been working with government to align with the EU on passport regulations. Our biggest challenge has been with the auto industry. The industry says that a voluntary approach [to reporting] is enough. But we believe there should be a mandatory program. I’d like to see all batteries recycled.”

The post New supply-chain ‘passports’ pave the way for more recycling of EV batteries appeared first on Corporate Knights.

At least, that is what leaders in Quebec are banking on, as the province gears up to assume an axis position in the world’s electrified transition. Quebec’s riches have long been on display. One of the mining capitals of the country, accounting for one-fifth of Canada’s mineral production, it has baked into its bedrock the precious elements coveted in the electric vehicle boom – graphite, nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum and the showstopper: lithium. And increasingly, the provincial and federal governments have been pouring money into the rest of the supply chain, with investments like the one slated for the green fields in Saint-Basile-le-Grand and McMasterville, a short drive from Montreal.  

Here, Swedish climate-tech giant Northvolt has plans to build a “gigafactory” the size of 318 football fields that the federal government calls the cornerstone of a unique integrated battery production line in Canada. With more than $7 billion in investments and incentives, the first phase of the project at “Northvolt Six” will have an annual cell production capacity of 30 gigawatt hours and create up to 3,000 jobs in the region. They will be making what Ottawa has called “the world’s cleanest batteries,” at a rate of one million per year once the plant is fully operational.

But big questions loom over Quebec’s battery bet, amid an energy landscape that appears to be shifting by the day. A recalibration of the explosive growth projected for electric vehicles is forcing companies such as Northvolt to shrink their global operations, even as competition from neighbouring Ontario to attract EV business grows. While protectionist tariffs against more affordable Chinese-made EVs will affect how quickly Canadians make new mobility choices, the energy transition is nonetheless moving full steam ahead in Quebec, where EV adoption is among the highest in the country.  

“Getting a car manufacturer in Quebec was not my objective,” says Pierre Fitzgibbon, Quebec’s former minister of economy and energy, in an August interview, expressing a divergent path from that of Ontario, which includes EV assembly. 

Fitzgibbon, who resigned his post in September, travelled to Japan, South Korea and China in 2019 – when “the word ‘battery’ was not in Quebec’s vocabulary” – with a goal of understanding how the Asian powerhouses had secured a head start in the EV race. He came back focused on leaning into Quebec’s competitive advantage. “My objective was: how can we transform here in Quebec our critical minerals, as opposed to what had been happening before, which was to export it on a raw basis,” he says. “We’re setting up a kind of ecosystem.”  

The provincial government touts itself as the first in the country to develop a critical minerals strategy, which it first released in 2020. At the moment, there are 25 mines in varying stages of economic evaluation or exploration to produce the minerals needed for energy transition. That’s on top of the one graphite mine, one lithium mine and two mines already extracting combinations of nickel, copper and cobalt. Quebec’s strategy is buttressed by circularity, mining the “urban mine” of used, recalled or damaged batteries that are piling up around us. In June, doors opened on the province’s first critical minerals extraction plant, by Lithion Technologies, located on the outskirts of Montreal and one of the first in North America. Once fully operational, the facility will have the capacity to shred 45,000 EV batteries per year. 

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Beyond the precious elements in its soil, Quebec’s ample hydro power – at what the minister calls a “very reasonable” price – offers companies the chance to build sustainability into their business models.  

Of course, it’s not just about access to cheap green energy. In the race to secure a place in the EV transition, governments around the world have been pushed to provide hefty incentives to lure investment (or block competition, like the 100% tariffs on Chinese-made EVs by Canada and the U.S., and lower ones in Europe). Canada and Quebec have been matching the kind of production support available under the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act for the Northvolt battery line, topping out at $4.6 billion. In addition, Quebec has earmarked $3.46 billion in loans, subsidies and equity investment for 15 battery projects so far. Among the recipients of the funding is a cathode factory by General Motors and South Korea’s POSCO Chemical, in Bécancour, slated to be another battery hub, or “battery valley,” near Trois-Rivières. Construction on a third joint cathode venture, also in the Bécancour area but this time between Ford, Korea’s EcoPro BM and SK On, was recently put on hold.   

Strategy speedbumps

For all its green transition promise, the efforts are not without controversy. Fitzgibbon’s resignation unleashed a wave of criticism over how the Coalition Avenir Québec government was handling energy policy, with Conservative Party of Quebec leader Éric Duhaime calling its strategy of focusing on electrification and battery production “a very risky bet, potentially even already a failure.”  

The Northvolt project, due to its scope and degree of public investment, has garnered the most scrutiny thus far, especially from environmental groups and Indigenous communities that say the government has circumvented the rules and failed to properly consult and evaluate the project. Local residents have raised concerns about the potential environmental impacts, in particular on the Richelieu River, which is a source of drinking water for some 300,000 households and a biodiverse habitat with protected fish stocks. In more extreme examples of opposition, vandals have driven nails and metal bars into trees to prevent forests from being cut down and planted incendiary devices made of bottles filled with flammable liquid on the site. No one has been injured, but it’s put the community on edge and caught company and government officials off guard.  

“It’s really a case about how the government and minister of the environment take decisions about big industrial projects,” says Marc Bishai, a lawyer with the Quebec Environmental Law Centre (Centre québécois du droit de l’environnement, or CQDE). The group has filed a lawsuit challenging the provincial government’s decision to make a change to its environmental assessment rules, thus exempting the first phase of the plant from a comprehensive impact assessment, known in Quebec as a BAPE. A court denied CQDE’s bid to halt the felling of thousands of trees on the 170-hectare site. “The government is denying the public the ability to participate in the decision, which normally happens in Quebec,” Bishai says.  

The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake has also taken Quebec and Canada to court for allegedly breaching their duties to consult, both in terms of approval of the Northvolt project and, in the case of Quebec, over destruction of wetlands.  

Fitzgibbon denies that the rules were changed for the Northvolt project, although in March, Environment Minister Benoit Charette told the media that an environmental assessment at that juncture would have delayed approval and jeopardized Quebec’s chances to secure the gigafactory. He insisted the company will nonetheless have to satisfy the province’s stringent environmental standards.  

Navigating headwinds

On the streets of the picturesque village of Saint-Basile-le-Grand, community members raise concerns about potential environmental risks from the factory, while also expressing interest in the employment opportunities the complex would generate. Long-time residents such as Annie Chabot, a 57-year-old educator, say the issue has been divisive. Chabot wishes the government had undergone a more extensive environmental assessment. “But I’m not against the project,” she says.  

Northvolt is facing other headwinds. With the projected growth of EVs slowing in the near term, driving companies such as Ford to reevaluate their plans, the company announced in July that it was undergoing a “strategic review,” prompting a flurry of media coverage speculating that Northvolt Six was in peril. The Swedish company has repeatedly stressed that it remains committed to Quebec, most recently in September, when it announced a slate of closures and mergers for several sites around the world, Northvolt Six not among them. Potential revisions to the timelines of the Quebec facility and others “will be confirmed during the fall, along with any further necessary cost-saving actions,” the company said in a statement.  

As long as we still want to decarbonize the planet, this is a very sound strategy.

 

—Pierre Fitzgibbon, Quebec’s former minister of economy and energy

Fitzgibbon says delays are to be expected. The evolving technology may affect how quickly EVs are adopted but not if they are, he maintains. “As long as we still want to decarbonize the planet, this is a very sound strategy,” he says.

Quebec, which has a track record of leading environmental policy in Canada, has shown its commitment to the electric transition through consumer policy, too.  Since 2012, Quebec has offered a healthy rebate for the purchase or lease of an EV. And it has paid off. Quebecers are buying far more EVs than the rest of the country. Electric vehicles had a 21.5% chunk of the vehicle market in the province in the second quarter of this year (compared to 9.9% in Canada overall and 8% in the U.S.). In announcing its decision to phase out the financial incentive for EVs by 2027, the Quebec government said the industry no longer needs that extra help.  

For Normand Mousseau, director of the Trottier Energy Institute at Polytechnique Montréal and a co-chair of the Quebec Commission on Energy Issues in 2013, the success of Quebec’s battery bet is far from clear. He says that there is no obligation for manufacturers such as Northvolt to source their critical minerals from Quebec, so the fully integrated supply chain may not be realized. And he thinks the province missed a critical opportunity to link the energy transition to intellectual property.

 “There was no demand from these industries to invest in any research and development in Quebec. And it’s the same in Ontario,” he says, referring to large government subsidies for EV and battery plants. “We’ve seen it with Hyundai and GM. They set up shop here, and after a few years they leave, because there is nothing that ties them in terms of higher value.” 

 Still, he acknowledges that time is of the essence as the world races to decarbonize, and “you can sit on the side and wait until you have a perfect investment, or you take bets.” 

While some supply chain investments may look shaky, others, such as the Lithion Technologies battery recycling facility, are powering ahead. It’s already processing recalled or end-of-life car batteries. “We want to be able to create the circular economy so that the batteries we produce are the greenest possible batteries,” says CEO Benoit Couture, echoing the provincial government’s larger goal.  

It’s an important cog in Quebec’s aspirations, however they materialize. Regardless, the EV economy will keep driving forward.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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To make renewable energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind available when it is most needed, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it later. But one thing about the Cuyama facility, which began operations this week, is less common: The batteries sending energy to the grid once powered electric vehicles.

The SEPV Cuyama facility, located about two hours northeast of Santa Barbara, is the second hybrid storage facility opened by B2U Storage Solutions. Its first facility, just outside Los Angeles, uses 1,300 retired batteries from Honda Clarity and Nissan Leaf EVs to store 28 megawatt-hours of power, enough to power about 9,500 homes.

The facilities are meant to prove the feasibility of giving EV batteries a second life as stationary storage before they are recycled. Doing so could increase the sustainability of the technology’s supply chain and reduce the need to mine critical minerals, while providing a cheaper way of building out grid-scale storage.

“This is what’s needed at massive scale,” said Freeman Hall, CEO of the Los Angeles-based large-scale storage system company.

Electric vehicle batteries are typically replaced when they reach 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, largely because the range they provide at that point begins to dwindle. Almost all of the critical materials inside them, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are reusable. A growing domestic recycling industry, supported by billions of dollars in loans from the Energy Department and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, is being built to prepare for what will one day be tens of millions of retired EV battery packs.

Before they are disassembled, however, studies show that around three quarters of decommissioned packs are suitable for a second life as stationary storage. (Some packs may not have enough life left in them, are too damaged from a collision, or otherwise faulty.)

“We were seeing the first generation of EVs end their time on the road, and 70 percent or more of those batteries have very strong residual value,” said Hall. “That should be utilized before all those batteries are recycled, and we’re just deferring recycling by three, four, or five years.”

Extending the useful life of EV batteries mitigates the impact of manufacturing them, said Maria Chavez, energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The whole point of trying to deploy electric vehicles is to reduce emissions and reduce the negative impacts of things like manufacturing and extractive processes on our environment and our communities,” Chavez told Grist. “By extending the life of a battery, we reduce the need for further exploitation of our natural resources, we reduce the demand for raw materials, and we generally encourage a more sustainable process.”

Just as batteries have become crucial to reducing emissions from transportation, they’re also needed to fully realize the benefits of clean energy. Without stationary storage, wind and solar power can only feed the grid when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

“Being able to store it and use it when it’s most needed is a really important way to meet our energy needs,” Chavez said.

The use of utility-scale battery storage is expected to skyrocket, from 1.5 gigawatts of capacity in 2020 to 30 gigawatts by 2025. EV packs could provide a stockpile for that buildout. Hall said there are already at least 3 gigawatt-hours of decommissioned EV packs sitting around in the United States that could be deployed, and that the volume of them being removed from cars is doubling every two years.

“We’re going from a trickle when we started four years ago to a flood of batteries that are coming,” he said.

B2U says its technology allows batteries to be repurposed in a nearly “plug and play fashion.” They do not need to be disassembled, and units from multiple manufacturers — B2U has tested batteries from Honda, Nissan, Tesla, GM, and Ford — can be used in one system.

The packs are stored in large cabinets and managed with proprietary software, which monitors their safety and discharges and charges each battery based on its capacity. The batteries charge during the day from both the solar panels and the grid. Then B2U sells that power to utilities at night, when demand and prices are much higher.

Hall said using second-life batteries earns the same financial return as new grid-scale batteries at half the initial cost, and that for now, repurposing the packs is more lucrative for automakers than sending them straight to recyclers. Until the recycling industry grows, it’s still quite expensive to recycle them. By selling or leasing retired packs to a grid storage company, said Hall, manufacturers can squeeze out more value out of them.

That could even help drive down the cost of electric vehicles, he added. “The actual cost of leasing a battery on wheels should go down if the full value of the battery is enhanced and reused,” he said. “Everybody wins when we do reuse in a smart fashion.”

B2U expects to add storage to a third solar facility near Palmdale next year. The facilities are meant to prove the idea works, after which B2U plans to sell its hardware and software to other storage-project developers.

At the moment, though, planned deployment of the technology is limited. B2U predicts only about 6 percent of decommissioned EV batteries in the U.S. will be used for grid-scale storage by 2027.

“People are skeptical, and they should be, because it’s hard to do reuse of batteries,” said Hall. “But we’ve got a robust data set that does prove reliability, performance, and profitability. We’re at a point where we really can scale this.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/ev-batteries-stationary-storage/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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It’s an aggressive target, especially considering that only 8.9% of registered vehicles in Canada were ZEVs in 2022. But it should prevent 430 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, moving the country closer to net-zero.

To reach those goals, the government will need a vast network of researchers, engineers and technicians, all with the flexibility and ambition to undertake this work. They’re going to need students.

Across the country, university students are researching all aspects of ZEVs, from improving battery life and strengthening the electrical grid the cars will rely on, to how best to incentivize Canadian drivers to get behind the wheels of their own ZEVs. There are the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria, producing new batteries with smelting by-products rather than relying on virgin metals. Two researchers at Dalhousie University have joined an exclusive partnership with the car manufacturer Tesla, working to improve the lifespan and performance of its batteries. And recently, Project Arrow, the first fully made-in-Canada electric car, made its debut at the Canadian International AutoShow in Toronto. The car prototype was designed by students at Carleton University and built at Ontario Tech University, utilizing students’ skills the whole way.

The federal targets “give everyone a deadline to start implementing their solutions,” says Nilou Keshmiri, project manager of the McMaster EcoCAR Challenge team. “Even if it’s slightly aggressive, it’s definitely possible. And it’s necessary.” Keshmiri is leading a team of 180 students and faculty advisors in a competition to modify and improve a fully electric Cadillac. McMaster is one of two Canadian universities participating in the four-year challenge, with benchmarks and goals every month to keep teams on track. The first year, Keshmiri says, the focus is on modelling and simulations, as the team decides how they’ll begin to modify the car in year two. “We’re trying to come up with new technologies or software optimization techniques that are not in common practice in industry as of now. And as we’re in school, we have more flexibility to try these things out,” she says.

Of course, there’s more to cutting emissions than just getting Canadians to buy ZEVs. Once all those cars are in garages across the country, how do we ensure our cities are ready for them? Omid Ardakanian’s team at the University of Alberta is figuring that out, looking into grid-friendly charging, also known as congestion control. If everyone plugs in their cars at the same time, it could overload the capacity of the transformers and power lines. Cities are looking to replace this infrastructure but will have to do it over time because of the immense cost. Ardakanian’s team is looking at ways the power grids can vary the rate of charging based on how many people are tapping into the grid at the same time.

“Some of these technologies already exist,” Ardakanian says. Variable-rate chargers are becoming more common. “We have a very small number of chargers today, and a lot of people are thinking about buying a charger and installing it in their garage, and they’ll have a choice. And if they know that [variable-rate charging] will be a thing, they could make an informed decision.”

Even if it’s slightly aggressive, it’s definitely possible. And it’s necessary.

 

– Nilou Keshmiri, project manager of the McMaster EcoCAR Challenge team

 

Ardakanian’s team is also looking at multi-directional charging. Right now, your ZEV draws power from a charger – but what if your car could also power your house or appliances? “During extreme weather events, natural disasters or just because there’s a contingency on the grid,” Ardakanian explains, “if you have your car with a charged battery, you can use your car.” It’s known as a virtual power plant, where there are decentralized, small power-storage systems in the form of car batteries all across the country. Tesla is experimenting with the idea, working to help consumers rethink how their cars can function. And the Dutch city of Utrecht has installed more than 800 bidirectional chargers that let EV drivers sell electricity back into the grid.

Bringing drivers on board is a crucial step, and one that university research is especially primed to help with, says Tim Burrows, a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Electric Vehicle Society. As the adoption curve of hybrid and electric vehicles ramps up exponentially, drivers will be looking to take their cars on longer trips, so they’ll need consistent and powerful charges on their cars. It’s long been an issue for car manufacturers, but Burrows posits that “for certain aspects of technological development, universities are in a unique position. They’re not necessarily funded for profit, and they have some luxury to do research that a private-industry researcher probably can’t afford to do,” he says. “We need both our learning institutions and private industry working on this challenge.”

Ardakanian agrees and says it comes down to timelines. “University-level research is very important, because we work on things that may not be immediately relevant to the industry – medium-term to long-term projects.” The projects are a risky cost for many smaller car companies and a drain on resources for many larger ones. But universities have both the time and a regularly refreshed pool of talent to tackle them.

If we do not have this research, all the cool things that could happen 10 years or 20 years from now, they won’t.

 

– Omid Ardakanian, University of Alberta assistant professor

To date, the federal government has pushed hundreds of millions of dollars to universities working on EV research. In the past five years, they say they’ve paid out $1 billion in total funding to build up Canada’s EV market, with some of that money going to research at post-secondary institutions. They’ve funded charging stations on campuses and supported research on things like ensuring that vehicle stability mechanisms (like anti-lock brakes and traction control) work within electric systems. However, in order to maintain a well of engineers and technicians, some say the federal government needs to step up its support.

Narayan Kar and Madeline McQueen, with the University of Windsor’s Centre for Hybrid Automotive Research and Green Energy, have been calling for funding for university-level EV research and development that’s “proportional” with the government’s funding of ZEV manufacturing facilities.

“A federal investment to support a pan-Canadian, academia-industry research consortium will complement the government and industry investments on the manufacturing side, and set our country on the path to significant opportunities for EV innovation in the future,” Kar and McQueen wrote in The Hill Times. They add that without this funding, there will not be a large enough workforce for future projects, like the recently announced Stellantis EV research facility and LG battery plant in Windsor, which will need 3,000 skilled workers.

At the University of Alberta, Ardakanian’s own research is funded from a pool of about $8 million from the federal government, which he says is crucial.

“If we do not have this research, all the cool things that could happen 10 years or 20 years from now, they won’t.”

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In February, a KPMG study reported that 68% of Canadians who plan to buy a new vehicle in the next five years say they are likely to buy an EV. Younger drivers are more charged up than their parents: 79% of drivers aged 18 to 44 say they’re likely to buy an EV in the next five years, versus just 58% of adults over 45.

“Canada’s automotive industry is nearing the tipping point,” says KPMG partner Peter Hatges. But with consumers admitting they’re concerned about “range” issues and the limited availability of charging stations, Hatges says the onus lies with manufacturers and governments “to shift gears not only to meet the expected surge in EV sales, but to invest heavily in the necessary infrastructure.”

Manufacturers are accelerating into the curve, with bold production commitments and technology breakthroughs that kindle consumer confidence.

General Motors got the jump on Ottawa in January by announcing it will phase out all gas-powered vehicles by 2035. GM is spending an additional US$27 billion to ensure EVs make up 40% of its models by the end of 2025. The auto giant also promised to power its U.S. sites with 100% renewable energy by 2030 – five years ahead of schedule.

By trading in its century-old internal-combustion technologies for EVs, GM is gambling that it can transfer its market leadership to an all-new industry. But some analysts argue GM had no choice. David Keith, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, asked Quartz News, “Do you want to be the company that bends metal in a very low-margin business or a technology business with recurring revenue and a blue-sky valuation?”

The race is on. In March, Volvo one-upped GM by vowing to phase out production of all gas-powered vehicles – including hybrids – by 2030.

“There is no long-term future for cars with an internal combustion engine,” said Volvo’s chief technology officer.

But the big headlines belong to Israeli lithium-ion battery company StoreDot, developer of the world’s first EV fast-charging system. It can “fill your tank” in five minutes – versus the current minimum of half an hour. StoreDot’s breakthrough comes from replacing the electron bottleneck in most car batteries – their graphite electrodes – with germanium-based semiconductor nanoparticles that can absorb much faster flows. Eventually, the company hopes to use silicon, which will bring costs down to match those of today’s lithium-ion batteries.

StoreDot, whose investors include Daimler, BP and Samsung, has already produced 1,000 batteries, which were sent to carmakers for testing. The World Economic Forum is a fan, declaring that StoreDot’s technology “could transform electric vehicle uptake by tackling range anxiety.”

Other companies developing fast-charging batteries include Tesla, Enevate, EC Power and Sila Nanotechnologies. EC Power founder Chao-Yang Wang told The Guardian he thinks fast-charging batteries will hit the mass market in three years: “They will not be more expensive; in fact, they allow automakers to downsize the onboard battery while still eliminating range anxiety, thereby dramatically cutting down the vehicle battery cost.”

Want to buy Canadian? Three global automakers have announced big EV investments in Ontario. Ford will spend $1.2 billion to begin building five battery-powered models in Oakville, while General Motors will invest nearly $1 billion to produce electric commercial vans in Ingersoll. Fiat Chrysler has said it will invest up to $1.5 billion to begin EV production in Windsor.

Change can happen faster than we think – especially when it’s been delayed too long. KPMG concluded its recent report with this advice to people who rely on the traditional auto industry for their living: “Don’t just brace for change. Actively seek it to avoid being left behind.”

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