Some comments from Thomas Flack, CEO Agratas, Tata Cell, Regarding their plans

This post is in continuation to last one regarding Agratas.

Following comments & information is from Thomas Flack, CEO Agratas, Tata's Cell Manufacturing branch. Here he is holding the cell. "Tata Group has been looking at this segment for about three years and it's been a project that we've coded internally Project 'Apollo'. "

"These are designed very smartly with idea of how long they last as well so this battery lasts a lot longer than the car and it's extremely safe. So We've worked a lot and very hard on coming up with these ideas."

"When it comes to cell design the cell that I just mentioned has been under Design and Development for about two years for Tata Motors this is one of the cells and so our relationship with them very quietly has been to work on what are the needs of the company so we could begin with what we call our lead cells for our anchor customers again about 18 months of actual cell development that's been going on for both JLR and TML."

Based on it seems like Tata has themselves developed it.

"A very affordable battery pack of about 50kWh, 130 of these you can push a small SUV 400-500km per charge."

So assuming it's LFP, one cell comes at about roughly 384.6Wh. Would love to know weight.

"Gigafactories are really expensive to produce and they're sitting in an ecosystem and so in order to be good at this if you want to politically de-risk yourself you need to get back into what is the raw material and supply"

"Some of the supply chain you can actually make so for us as an industry in our operations in Europe we have to make the Cathode Active Material(CAM) ..............................and we have to make that locally in Europe to supply Europe and in case of India we have to do the same thing here. So next to a Gigafactory you also have a CAM factory, ideally attached to a CAM factory you have recycling center hence you get this whole system."

"We started our journey with almost a gift in a sense that Shailesh, Girish and Balaji the whole leadership team said let's do this together and that's an amazing thing for us. We are signed on to do about 40GWh for JLR and about 20GWh to Tata Motors that does not serve all of their needs. So message to the whole room here is the suppliers that work with these companies today will continue. We're part of the expansion in their next Generation vehicle we're not here to displace any of the current relationship."

"The cell that drives a bus is not that cell. It's not ideal, it's not optimized. Wrong chemistry, Wrong format size. We have an opportunity to work with Girish's team on building the absolute best possible cell for the actual experience that he's driving with buses of service"

"We have the opportunity to also collaborate with him on investigating sodium cells that have an interesting angle of completely de-risking India from any importation of critical battery materials and with a little bit more work on the sodium ion solution actually potentially not just work on energy storage solutions but also potentially in buses."

So buses will get different shape cell, someday it could be sodium ion also along with for energy storage. Very interesting.

"We're naturally placed to work with 2W and 3W for us these are extensions of what we're already doing there's a different format that's ideal for those sectors so it's a cylindrical format."

Different cell form for 2w/3w! Wonder what shape in cylindrical.

"Inside of this guy 42 sheets of aluminium foil they're made on a continuous line that's longer than this room. We put some nice material on side on top, we cure it, control it, shape it, chop it. Same thing for a copper foil. We very delicately place them inside this box"

"That same cell will have one chemistry in India actually two but one initially and a completely different chemistry delivering much more power and energy for JLR exact same cell gives us that flexibility to make it ."

So Tata India giga to start with LFP & europe with NMC.

"So one of the great things we have is that we've got a decent lab that's actually up in the UK that's been working furiously for the past 3+ yr on just making sure that we understand the realities of the chemistries and changes that are coming to our industry"

Making of these 3 cells little over 1kWh takes 45kWh energy. Making 1kWh CAM takes 35kWh energy. But cell is good for over 2000 cycles, so use is very good. That's why they are focusing on RE for their factory. A MOU with Gujrat, they will be making their own energy.

"So our goal, all good battery companies are doing this right now is they're trying to identify where to attach themselves to clean energy otherwise what's the point. Affordable clean energy and if you can get that right with govt you can compete with anybody and point of us doing this as a group is to do it in India to have it made and designed in India but also lead the world in making it lowest cost not cheap, lowest cost world class battery and it starts with getting the energy right so we've spent a tremendous amount of time on this issue trying to work with govts to secure that and recently you saw our announcement in GJ is essentially an MoU to start the process but that Foundation of that was getting them to agree to let us develop our own energy in Gujarat to feed our own plant and so it's with great pride that we're telling the world that now but our intent is to actually be our own source of power, make our own batteries ultimately add CAM, expand that campus and even going from 20 to 40 and beyond and have it all fed by same renewable power."

"Our arrangement there the root of it is getting that ability to self serve you the power at that lowest affordable price which means if somebody tries to import a battery in that class into this country we will flat out beat them on price therefore there won't be an interest for importation. We can actually set the standard for what India is and also position ourselves smartly so with that type of arrangement as a hub for exporting batteries which is really fundamental to our business case."

"Well first the whole point of this is to geopolitically de-risk us from outside fluctuation of currency fluctuation of any type of outside country. Second is to make it very affordable and make India a great place to make batteries which means building the ecosystem under it"

Phew, this is it. Some big hopes there that they have shown. We hope all it turns out true. Regardless, really interesting & amazing to have R&D going on by a big Indian automaker and not just plan to buy cells from here & there.