Cuberg CEO Richard Wang speaks at Revolution.Aero
26 October, 2023
Cuberg was honored to be invited to Revolution.Aero in San Francisco on September 6th and 7th, 2023. Revolution.Aero is an important event for the aviation and aerospace industries, bringing together thought leaders, innovators, investors, and disruptors to explore the future of flight.
Cuberg CEO and Founder Richard Wang sat on a panel moderated by esteemed journalist Elan Head of The Air Current. Other panel members included Max Liben of H3X Technologies, Damon Vander Lind of Magpie Aviation, Hamid Hamidi of Limosa, and Nathan Millecam of Electric Power Systems.
Keep reading for a lightly edited transcript of Richard’s remarks and related panel discussion.
ELAN HEAD
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. We'll see if we can bring a little cheerier note to the conversation, but it is great to be up here again. I think we're going to have a really fantastic discussion. So battery electric, we're going to be looking at pure battery electric considerations. We have lots of things to talk about. We'll take some questions from the audience as well. But to kick things off, we have quite a diversity of panelists, so I'd like each of them to just briefly introduce themselves. And we can just go down the line, starting with you, Richard.
RICHARD WANG
Thank you. Good to see all of you. I'm Richard Wang. I'm the founder and CEO at Cuberg. We're developing high-performance, next-gen battery solutions for electric aviation. I started Cuberg eight years ago out of my Ph.D. at Stanford. We've grown the company now to about 200 full-time employees. We were acquired two years ago by Northvolt, the leading European gigafactory-scale battery manufacturer delivering automotive batteries to leading European automotive OEMs. And on behalf of Northvolt, we are their high-performance battery division. So really pushing forward the envelope on next-gen technologies, integrating these technologies into battery cells, battery modules and systems, and deploying them in various performance-oriented applications, with electric aviation being our core focus. And we fundamentally believe in cutting through the hype in the battery world, especially when it comes to next-gen technologies. We have cells that have been extensively validated independently by third-party labs. We have now successfully integrated these cells into high-performance battery modules, achieving 270 to 300 watt-hours per kilogram at the module level, and we'll be publishing the results of that in the coming months. Thank you.
ELAN HEAD
Excellent. Thanks everyone. So I said I was going to try to lighten the mood, but I lied. So I actually want to start with a reality check and I think everyone in this room appreciates that making aircraft fly with batteries is very, very difficult. And so just to set the stage for this discussion, I'd really like to hear from the panelists, why bother? What's the driving force for investing in batteries and trying to make battery electric flight work? And I want to start with Damon because I just published a big story on why Magpie has gone with battery electric, so I know he has some strong opinions on this. So Damon, why batteries?
DAMON VANDER LIND
I could probably consume the rest of the panel just rambling about this, but fundamentally, batteries are... If you ask someone what the solution is going to be on the ground in 2035, it's going to be battery electric. You find very few people who think it's anything else unless they're trying to sell you fossil hydrogen. So it seems like a reasonable thing to try in the air.
The reasons for this, in addition to the existing industrial base, are also the efficiency and the cost. When you have something that's round trip in the teens or the twenties for percentage efficiency, weld awake like hydrogen and electro fuels, you need a lot of renewables to make that work. This doesn't mean people shouldn't bet in this space, but it certainly doesn't mean it's a guarantee it's going to work. And then the other one is the cost. If you have that kind of efficiency, if you need to scale to that level, volume of renewable energy to power your industry, it's also going to cost you a lot of money. So generally, historically, the more efficient solutions have won.
ELAN HEAD
Excellent. And how about from the battery developers? What are your opinions on why batteries?
RICHARD WANG
Well, we're happy to sell batteries to anyone, whether they're hybrid or not, so we don't discriminate. But I think one point to comment on is the energy density of the batteries, of course. The heavier the batteries are, the less of an addressable market you have with fully electric. And of course at some point you do need either hydrogen or fossil fuels to take you that extra range. And so the importance of energy density and the continuous improvement of energy density in batteries is to keep expanding that addressable market for fully battery electric because of all the benefits that Damon has mentioned, it is a superior and more efficient platform, but you need the energy density to get the range to target new markets.
ELAN HEAD
I think it would be useful to start defining what can batteries do. So obviously we all have the impression that they're suitable for shorter missions. I mean, what are batteries capable of enabling today? And I guess what are the next steps for expanding that range and pushing into new markets? I know Damon has a very different approach to expanding the range of batteries, but what's your take on what batteries can do today and what we have to do take it to the next step?
DAMON VANDER LIND
So your range comes down to your cruise all over D, your energy to get there and then density of your battery, how much your plane is battery, range equation, which anyone here can tell you about. Practical batteries today, right? Like EPP systems, great batteries, 180 to 200 watt hours per kilogram. Today's technology, we have folks like Richard building much better things. I don't know why I'm telling people your specs, but they're great batteries out there.
RICHARD WANG
Appreciate it, Damon! [laughter]
DAMON VANDER LIND
In these ranges, we need people working on new airframes. That's just the honest truth of it. You will not get the real value out of battery electric without airframes that are sized for it that are... And we should all also expect these aircraft to fly slower. So they should be built for markets that can withstand those lower flight speeds. I think in that realm you can do very interesting things in the up to maybe a few hundred miles single stage and there is market there. I don't think we should expect the markets to grow magically much, much larger than they are today. So I think people should be focusing on approaches that fit the existing markets and maybe benefit from some growth. I think there's a lot to be done there, but obviously with what we're doing, we're trying to bring that to that next level. The peak for commercial aviation that everyone should keep in mind is that you want to get to like a thousand miles. If you get to a thousand miles, you've got half the emissions.
RICHARD WANG
I'll just add on reserve requirements as well are probably an elephant in the room, especially for battery electric. And I think there's new proposed regulations from the FAA that generated quite a bit of controversy and contention in the industry because I think it's the recognition that if you actually take those reserve requirements literally, a lot of platforms could not fly any range with existing lithium-ion battery technologies. And it's a lot of what Nate has said is especially in emergency cases where you're near the end of flight and you're at a low state of charge and you still need a huge boost of power and you need to divert to an alternative landing site, that puts a significant amount of stress around the battery and reduces your regular effective flying range considerably.
And so that's why the effective flying range for a lot of platforms has been going down and down as you're getting towards certified systems. And now especially with reserve requirements, that's also putting stress on what battery electric platforms can do. And I think again, heightens the fact that we need lighter weight batteries that also have power at the end of the day to actually deliver on all these different requirements.
ELAN HEAD
What's on the horizon for improving what batteries can do in terms of their capabilities? I'm going to look to the battery developers for some insight on this. I mean, how quickly can we expect to see these trends improve?
RICHARD WANG
Yeah, happy to take a stab at that. I think one key element is to be very aware of the hype in the battery industry. I think in the auto world, people over the last 10, 15 years have come around to understanding how to deal with battery hype and all the claims and numbers that get thrown around. I've seen in aviation that is not quite there. It's sometimes still perhaps a bit of naivete that people are throwing out, oh, 600, 800 watts-hours per kilogram, a thousand, we're going to get there in five years, 10 years. This is not happening.
Batteries typically do improve at about a 3% a year. Maybe we can do a little bit better for the specialty designs. At our company, we're developing cells that today are at 400 watt-hours per kilogram, very consistent, reliable with high power capabilities.
ELAN HEAD
Let's dig into manufacturing. So I mean Richard, how are you really looking at making the leap from the lab to production and delivering a really useful product?
RICHARD WANG
What you see with a lot of next-gen cells is that maybe theoretically you can cherry-pick some cells and they might perform well over hundreds of cycles, but can you do it consistently? And a lot of that comes down to just very, very deep investments in engineering and process and quality controls and really manufacturing excellence and sophistication of the cell at the end of the day. The cell is probably the single piece of the entire electric aircraft that is most phenomenally difficult to manufacture. It's in terms of process controls, need for extremely high levels of automation, precision, layout of thousands of components in every battery pack.
ELAN HEAD
So I'm going to combine a couple of the top audience questions here. So I think everyone wants to know when are battery's going to get better. So we have a question about when are we going to see the 400 watt hour per kilogram? Why aren't they getting better faster? So Richard, Nathan, what's your take on those?
RICHARD WANG
Yeah, well, so from the Cuberg perspective, we have that today, that's already been independently validated at the cell level, of course not at the pack level. And so we are actually shipping our first products to a customer for their flight test campaign in the coming quarter. So it is here, it's not certified yet, we're taking it through the certification journey. So that's maybe a couple more years beyond that. But the battery's already starting to go into prototype and flight test campaigns.
I think the question in terms of why isn't it going faster and what drives this 3 to 5%, I think 3 to 5% is really not a bottoms up, but a top down observation of what has happened in the industry historically. And I think really a reflection of the fact that these kinds of innovations and chemistry developments are enormously complex and take a very, very long time to mature. And the work of taking something from lab scale, small coin cell all the way to a mature commercial reliable product is a journey that takes typically 10 to 20 years to come to fruition because of how much validation, how much re-engineering and so forth has to happen to ultimately find a solution that's fully commercially viable.
ELAN HEAD
So while we were talking about watt hours per kilogram, there was the 500 watt hour per kilogram announcement out of China. Any thoughts on that?
NATHAN MILLECAM
Big fan, CATL, they've got cost, they've got scale, they're buying materials the same of where other cell manufacturers are. It's a roadmap cell. It lends credibility that they see line of sight into the materials both on the anode side and the cathode side. It's not something you can buy today from CATL, but they lend a lot of credibility that the roadmap is clearly there to get to energy density.
And people like Richard at the cell level and others that are out there at the cell level are seeing that as well. So I think it's a great announcement.
It's also an announcement, I think, to further lend credibility to our industry that they see this as a big, big market, and that's a big deal for cell manufacturers who do automotive. They don't see this as a niche anymore if they're looking in the space. So I look at it as a very encouraging announcement.
RICHARD WANG
I'll add on that CATL, of course, is a very highly respected and capable company. What they have done historically is enormous sophistication at extremely efficient manufacturing of fairly commoditized technologies and products at extremely low cost, high quality. And that works very well in the automotive space. But when you talk about a truly disruptive innovation pushing 500 watt-hours per kilogram, and you look at what have they actually announced and how have they described their innovations, it sounds a lot more like smoke and mirrors than a concrete cell that you can hold, that has test data associated with it that performs and behaves in the ways that you need for electric aviation.
I mean, in their actual announcement when they talked about electric aviation, the photo they used in the backdrop was not a VTOL or a small CTOL aircraft. It was like a 737 jetliner. I mean, obviously these things are not getting electrified anytime the next few decades. So I think they still have a long pathway to go. Obviously they should not be underestimated, but a long ways to go to get towards a real product. I'll also add, I think given geopolitical concerns and national security implications around supply chain security and particularly in aerospace, building an industry that's predicated on cell supply coming from China is a risky bet to take as well, to take that through certification and ultimately through commercialization.
ELAN HEAD
Excellent. So we're out of time, but I know that on the program we promised to discuss, do we need a universal charging standard? So let's just go down the line. Yes, no?
RICHARD WANG
Yes!
HAMID HAMIDI
Absolutely.
MAX LIBEN
Yes.
ELAN HEAD
Awesome. So great. Thank you very much to everyone on the panel. Thanks to the audience. Let's give them a round of applause.