Recharge Dec25 (Overstated forecasts, CATL, semi-solid batteries, battery costs, BESS)

Hi, my name is Matt Furnley, editor of battery materials review, and here's all the key news in the world of battery materials this month. [Music] Welcome to December's edition of the Recharge Podcast. I seem to be a bit of a stuck record at the moment, but apologies for our absence last month due to ill health. We have got lots to talk about this month, so without further ado, let me welcome my co-presenter Kormack O'Lara, MD of Electrials Energy, and let us get cracking. Hi, Kormack. Hi, Matt. Glad to hear you're feeling good. See, this is greetings, I guess. Oh, yeah. Yeah, perfect time to do it, right? The week before Christmas almost. So we'll have to cover here. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Is there anything interesting for the Christmas period? Yeah, it's a Wednesday, warm really. Warm and dry. Warm and dry, that's the way to go. Okay, let's sort of crack on, because as I said, there is a lot to talk about this month. First up, I just want to talk a little bit about the leading article in battery materials review, which is about brokers, potentially, overstating lithium demand. And I flag two areas really that I think that they're going wrong in. One is in terms of lithium loading, so the amount of lithium carbonate per kilowatt hour of battery power, which I think many brokers are probably overstating by between 30 and 50 percent. And then the other area is an area I know you've got views on, which is EV battery size. So my view is that the actual battery size as the market is probably a little bit lower than many brokers have got in their models. And I don't expect it to grow as rapidly also as many brokers have got in their models. And my contention for that is based on the fact that in a passenger vehicles, that's sort of the EVs plus ICs, 50 percent or greater than 50 percent of sales are in small cars and SUVs. And that's an issue of affordability. And my gut feeling is that over time EVs will trend towards small and medium-sized cars and not large cars and large SUVs like they are at the moment. So I'm not sure that the size of batteries will grow as fast as many brokers are suggesting in their forecasts. But you have a different view. So tell us. Well, yeah, you covered a few. You know, we could get into, so these are all, I guess there's an automotive analyst where tires are growing. It's not just automotive wheels in general are growing wider, longer every year. This is what the consumers want. It seems to be no stopping the tsunami of SUVs and the our cross cars or. That's a big part of the Chinese market is the crossovers. But you see the crossover for the most part is classified as a small SUV. So SUV and a hatchback. So that's been a really high growth area over the last few years. And obviously we shouldn't forget plug-in hybrid EVs in here as well. Because stuff like EREVs, which is potentially cheaper than a comparable EV, is quite a high growth area or although lower growth, I think this year than it was last year, is that correct? In EREVs. EREVs, yeah, there's actually a bit of a debate in China but EREVs now. A well-known industry specialist there is commencing. EREVs are a waste of resources. Because the battery packs in the EREVs are quite large, right? Well, they are at the moment. For me, the obvious development of the EREV was to go for smaller battery packs and then use the gasoline engine just as a range extender for affordable vehicles. But we're not really seeing that happen in the Chinese market. They're pretty big cars. There are SUVs, right? I mean, there are SUVs not even crossovers. But yeah, I mean, in Europe here, I think Volkswagen ID4 is the best selling of the range. Which is the biggest BV they have. And there's just everybody wants a big car, Matt. That's where it's going. I don't deny that battery sizes for individual models are growing. There's no getting away from that that's happening. But I just think that as we move towards mass market, there's affordability issues as well. I mean, EVs in Europe are not mass market. EVs in China are mass market and average pack sizes are probably about 10 to 12 kilowatt hours below what they are in Europe. And for me, that tallies up with affordability in mass market. People can't afford to buy big batteries. So they just adapt to the range price trade off. There is in Europe, it's still a lot of second cars and fleet buying and less consumer buying, particularly in the mass market because it's only been this year that we started to see low price DVs come onto the market or low priced viable small EVs come onto the market. Affordable EVs, as I call them, I got there eventually. So it's only been this year in Europe that we started to see affordability is coming into the market. And I think that as we move more towards mass market in Europe up to the 50 to 60% market share, you might not see the battery size grow as fast as perhaps people are expecting it to grow. I mean, some of these broken numbers have the battery size growing from 55 kilowatt hours to 80 or 90 kilowatt hours by 23. I mean, that's a huge growth. I'm not saying that it's not going to grow in my numbers that have the battery size increasing, but not by that sort of growth rate. Yeah, I don't think we'll see 100 watt kilowatt hour battery packs in family cars. I mean, you're getting right into commercial levels there. That's your, you get up to Amazon delivery trucks there. Yeah. Obviously they need that sort of battery size to justify really strong, you know, the really strong lithium demand forecasts. And that's, you know, it comes back to that that I think a lot of brokers are structurally over estimating lithium demand. And I have to say that structurally over estimating lithium demand is as dangerous as structurally underestimating lithium demand. Right. You know, you're encouraging people to build projects that perhaps shouldn't be built. That already happened. Someone else predicted the structural deficit, right? Cleaned out the market in 2022. Yeah. So I mean, you know, I've got said, yeah, I'm not bearish on lithium. I'm, you know, I'm pretty positive on lithium. I've got like 15 or 16% CAGR over the next, you know, five to 10 years in my models. But I haven't got like 25 to 30% CAGR. And I think, you know, a lot of the guys who are like paying the table and talking about lithium going back to $80 a kilo, they've got really, really high expectations in their models, which I, I can't, I can't make work in mine. Yeah. You know, we can, we see it right now as the prices go up, China releasing more capacity. It's already happened. They can seem to do it month by month, which is. Well, they, they haven't, I mean, everybody's been expecting the CATL mind to come back into operation. And we were guided the beginning of December. And it hasn't, hasn't come in yet. So that's certainly helping prices to stay high, I think. Yeah. And, you know, the CATL have been resting. I've heard they've made some other investments in other lithium projects in China in the meantime. But I think that is a real messy situation they have up there. I'm not surprised by that because I think CATL move very slowly into lithium and they picked up one of the, the last assets in that area and that asset really has uber low grades. I mean, probably average grade in that area is 0.4 to 0.5% lithium oxide. And that nine has a 0.2% resource grade. So I'm not surprised that they, you know, are perhaps struggling a little bit to, to make money off that mine because, you know, you can have as brilliant processing as you, as you can. But you're still going to struggle if the, if the grade of the material is uber low, which it is. Yeah. I mean, but they are their own customer, right? That, even though some of that, or is, is going into America because I've heard these shortages of the converters, lipid or like converters, there's a real shortage in order and access to ore. And a lot of us tribute it to that particular project. Well, this is, this, I mean, I actually do those numbers and this is why I think that they brought the project back into production in February because there was a two to three month window when there was actually a shortage of lithium raw materials in the Chinese market. And I think that's why they, they reopened in February. So, you know, maybe they're, maybe they're milking it for a little bit before they, um, letting the deficit build up before they restart. But so wouldn't be surprised if they do restart again. I think they have to pay the value, right? The undervalued these site based on a claim, as a claim claim, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, ceramics project. Yeah. So they have to pay for the new revaluation after the, uh, the, uh, I, I, I, I understood they'd already done that. And I, I don't think it's a huge amount. I mean, I think it's less than sort of $50,000 or something. It's, I think I saw something like 50 million. Are you really? Yeah. 50 million, remember. Yeah. So, okay, so, uh, what's that about? Just seven or eight million dollars. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But not a huge amount for CNATL. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't see another number for 260 million. So it's, I think there's no negotiations going on. Yeah. Okay. But I mean, it would be eminently payable for CATL, um, if, if they wanted to. So I guess they'll just wait till the, um, to the market is tight enough and then, uh, and drop that in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, um, you know, I was reading in China. China is, have you heard of China set to overtake Australia as the, uh, in 2026 in terms of lithium production and extraction. So not lithium carbonate, but, uh, lithium extraction that they're set to overtake Australia this year. What? Did you, is that something you're seeing in your numbers? Um, well, it depends how you count it. I mean, if you count lithium hydroxide production, some of that could be based on imported also. I, um, you'd have to, I'd have to check that out. No, I mean, actually just extraction alone. Sorry, not, not even the, um, carbonate, lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, uh, including the brain projects, the pitilite and, uh, spargeamy. I must say I haven't seen that. I will have to go and check. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I know. Just, yeah, yeah. I don't believe it. I'm asking you. Yeah. If you heard anything about it, it's just, uh, some, some random fact they stumbled across. Yeah. Some, some dodgy random fact. Okay. Uh, let's talk about Neo because, uh, quite an interesting, uh, data point this month, um, that they removed or, or, or, or they've taken out of sale, their new semi solid battery, which they launched with a huge fanfare, um, last month. Um, it's 150 kilowatt hour pack semi solid. Um, yeah, it seems that it's too expensive for consumers. Um, so most consumers of, of, uh, focused on their 75 kilowatt hour pack, some by the hundred, but very few want the 150 semi solid, um, because it's just too expensive for, you know, the extra energy density and distance. Um, interesting point given we see so much investment from the Chinese Japanese OEMs into semi solid batteries and solid state batteries. Yeah. I mean, yeah, this is a bit of a theme of the next five year plan. And for, uh, Chinese government, uh, there is, yeah, I mean, semi solid state, hard to tell what we're talking about now. Uh, what solid state means semi solid, all solid, so let's, I guess when we say solid state, we're talking about all variants, but, um, yeah, I mean, there's not a single Chinese OEM who's not and battery companies and lithium refiners, everybody's in a gangfang. Uh, every single one of them has made announcements regarding solid state batteries. And each of them expects to be in, I'm going to say, inverted commerce commercial production by sort of 29, 2030, but you wonder how commercial commercial production could be if the price is so high, it mitigates against, you know, large commercial. 150 kilowatt hour battery pack that, that, that, what the battery pack alone's got to be $25,000, right? Yeah. And it's huge. Um, and it's made from semi solid state. It's like, I might as well made it from platinum and gold, I think, uh, I mean, what market is that for? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's going to be very interesting. I mean, I guess the, the initial thought on that is that if, if semi solid is struggling because it costs, um, then that's good for, for lithium ion, um, because it means that, you know, semi solid and a solid state are only likely to get a niche of the industry because, you know, mass market just won't be able to afford it in, in the, in the early years. Um, yeah. So, so, you know, we'll take that, I guess. I mean, like, this is, all this work is going to the, uh, EVTAL. China is going all in an EVTAL as well. And, I mean, rational solution for that is semi solid, our solid state. And I think I could see, you know, uh, uses in that in EVTAL, low altitude, um, autonomous flying or electric flying. Um, that, that's where we're going to see it first. And there's definitely a need for that. That was going to be lithium sulfur. Well, you know, what's the, so what's going to be in between the lithium and the sulfur? It's probably going to be, in some forms form of solid state, but not lithium sulfur. That's another one that's coming next, next year, coming next year. Um, I think we're going to see semi solid state with, um, some variant NMC and, and a graph I electrode. I mean, that's, I mean, there's a, in the US as well, there's no shortage of money for these type batteries for the aviation projects. We're seeing the same in China. That's part of the five year plan as well. Um, to have, uh, you know, Chinese government just released the solid state, uh, national standard, uh, this month. So they're taking a quite serious, if, if we take our, you know, foot off the pedal, it's something else you could, it could be lost as well. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Well, while we're talking about boundary costs, I guess we should talk about the BNF, um, battery survey, which was published actually last week. Um, and, um, a full pack cost down to $108 a kilowatt hour on average. Um, now when I started in the industry way back in 2017, the dear dark days, um, $273 a kilowatt hours. So I mean, you know, $108 a kilowatt hour was a pipe dream for pack costs, sell costs, 20, 25, $74 a kilowatt hour. And I'm hearing ESS battery costs around about $70 a kilowatt hour. Um, amazing numbers. But, core Mac's going to come in and burst everyone's bubble, uh, probably not able to be, um, uh, the, the rate of, uh, drop, probably not able to be continued, eh? Well, that's what it's looking like. Yeah. I mean, there's been a number announcements this week. If 15% rises in, uh, battery, battery costs in China. Yeah. So that is battery makers letting their customers know that the prices are going up 15%. Um, and, you know, a lot of that's due to lithium carbonate. And also cobalt. Yeah. I mean, while a lithium carbonate prices have gone up by what 40 to 50% since the bottom. Um, and cobalt prices have been very, very strong. So I'm not surprised to see, you know, turnery battery prices go up. And, and even LFP prices go up. And I mean, you know, if, if many people were right that lithium prices continue to rise next year, um, it looks like we've probably seen the trough in, in selling pack prices, eh? These levels into 2025. Yeah. I'm, well, you never want to say that, but there's a lot going on, right? So, well, obviously there's manufacturing improvements and, and everything. But the question is, can you get enough manufacturing improvements given the very low price at the moment to offset increasing material prices? And so, as I was going to say, Chinese government have pulled in cathode makers for meetings, EV makers for meetings, battery makers for meetings, and they want to eradicate this low cost pricing competition between these, these players. And so, our, should I say, unrealistic pricing. And a lot of these guys are operating a loss for a long time. I mean, the lithium guys, until quite recently, we're making any money across the board. Maybe the, maybe the, uh, Ching Hai, uh, Brian extractors, but, uh, I mean, before this, this second half of the year, I understand that most, um, battery manufacturers in China, or running it below 50% capacity utilization. So, there's no way you can make money at, uh, at the sort of below 50% capacity utilization. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I would say that the industry has been, you know, struggling for, for some time. And now we need to sort of move away from investments and focus on capacity utilization of profitability, because, um, the industry has obviously been incentivized to grow. But now we need to sort of try and match, match supply with demand and, and hopefully start to, to raise, um, raise margins. Yeah. And, you know, we could see, um, a lot of capacity being just the mouthballed all together, because over the last two, three years, the production techniques, the technology, the LFP were using coding techniques, drying technique, everything's changed. So, if you have a five-year-old gigafactory, it's probably not going to be competitive with current state of the artist. And, uh, well, I'm going to go to college. Five-year-old gigafactory is probably only going to be what 10 or 15 gigawatts hours. And, and your new gigafactories are coming in at what 80 to 100 gigawatts hours. So, uh, it's probably not as efficient either. I mean, yeah, it's, I think all like, there's a lot of capacity in China. I'm reading it as up to three gigawatt hours, where demand is about one point, sorry, three terawatt hours. Uh, and demand apparently has half that. I think a lot of the early stuff is going to be mouthballed. And because it's just so competitive on the upper end, right? You see ATL, so your B-Wide East is really hyper competitive there. We're seeing the same thing in the LFP camp. So there's like, you know, close to four million tons of capacity and iron phosphate and, and LFP, but that's all for generation two and three and even one. And demand for that's crashing. So we're going to see a lot of that being mouthballed as well. So we can see, you know, variance, once you build the capacity, it just doesn't sit there. I think some of it's going to be, you know, some of it's going to be basically obsolete. So your timings are all right here. I mean, some of the factories that were started in Europe were probably, you know, their equipment were pretty close to obsolete. Everything's just changing so quickly. And there's, that's why it's very hard to invest in it. Your investment might be out of date very quickly, unless you can be quite flexible. Yeah. I mean, I suppose to some extent, you know, the building and everything is, you know, the infrastructure is a little bit of the investment, but it's like there's a continuous improvement process that you've basically got to go through and I'm going to replace every part of the plant every four or five years at the moment because the industry is so immature. The technology's changing so fast. Yeah, but most of the companies aren't as skilled as your CATLs. Like we've even seen the Koreans, not very flexible. Also on their production processes, I think the skill level, it's definitely not available in Europe and US for that kind of. Well, it's going to be very interesting. I noticed the CATL factory in Spain, they talked about bringing in either a thousand or two thousand Chinese workers to get it started up. And I remember in Europe, when both the Koreans and the Chinese were starting up, they did complain about the quality of local staff, if you remember. So CATLs obviously said, "We'll find stuff that we're going to muck around with local staff. We're just going to bring our own people in to start it up and take it from there. It would be interesting to see how many of those sort of go home after start up or hang around the plant." Yeah, when we started seeing in the US when the ice rated the Korean battery factory. But those have all gone home, haven't they? They're not going to come back to the US from this so yeah, that's interesting. I believe there's local promises that the Chinese staff will be less than 10% when this is all up to capacity. But you can't mess around with GIGGLE factories. You might not survive the commissioning stage. If you, your scraper rates are too high, it's too expensive. You just can't be training people at that time. This is one of the things that CIGGLE products are also, wasn't it? I mean, on top of which they obviously were trying to bring in a completely new chemistry in everything. Scrapping rates were way too high. The profitability was very low and I think in the end they weren't able to use their own catholic materials. People underestimate the amount of work in capital that's necessary to bring a new factory on and potentially you've got a qualification stretching for six, nine, 12 months when you can't sell the material. But you've got to continue to produce it. So yeah, very, very difficult I think. Yeah, I think scraper rate kills a lot of these projects. Yeah, even for the big guys, CETL, it's the problem. Okay, okay. So while we're talking about the difference between supply and demand and low operating rates, let's talk about ESS. You'll probably be surprised by the apparent non-secure to there, but obviously operating rates in the ESS side are very, very high. But a little bit worried about inventories. ESS is a really interesting space at the moment. If you look at ESS sales shipments, you would be very, very bullish indeed. If you look at ESS battery installations, you would not be quite so bullish. And there is an emerging quite substantial difference between the two, which has resulted in quite a significant build in inventories. I estimate ESS sell inventories probably now around 25 months of demand. So what is normal in this industry? It obviously has a longer supply chain than EVs. What do you think is the new normal for ESS in countries? It's interesting. First of all, why don't you explain the hold up on the installation side? Well, I mean, there's a few, I mean, for starters, what we've seen is the Chinese manufacturers going, oh wow, ESS looks huge. Let's go in and convert a lot of our EV production into ESS. We've seen that in the US at the moment as well. In Europe, EV demand hasn't been as strong as people were expecting. There's a lot of moved to convert EV production lines into ESS. So that's number one. Number two is obviously ESS installations in China were very, very strong in 24 and early 25. So the Chinese have started really pushing resources into that area. Then you've had the changes to the Chinese sort of ESS installation, legislation in the initially negative changes at the beginning of the year. But then lastly, a lot more positive changes for the next couple of years. So I think there's been a real move of increasing production of ESS cells, particularly in China. And then ESS installations are robust, you know, between probably 15 and 20 gigawatt hours a month. But they're not growing as fast. And I sort of interpret that as delays to utility scale projects in the US and in Europe. And you know, some delays to utility scale projects after the subsidies were taken out in China in the beginning of the year. So, you know, we're going to have a long supply chain because projects do get delayed because of planning and the absence of interconnection and stuff like that. The question is how long and how big the inventory level needs to be. And I think it needs to be higher than it is in EVs. But I genuinely don't have an answer as to how long the supply chain needs to be in the ESS. I mean, a lot of people I speak to are very nervous about not having access to cell batteries. Nothing to do with policy, best cells, nothing to do with policy or tires or anything like that. You know, there's China as a goal of putting I think 270 gigawatt hours, not a goal, a government mandate by 2027, 270 gigawatt hours of energy storage on the grid. And they're going to do it. That's for sure. And that's over the next two years. So there's a big worry that these all availability of these inventories will just be utilized in China and access to that outside China will be quite difficult. Well, at the moment, just to put things in context, China is manufacturing around about 50 gigawatt hours a month of ESS cells. So I don't think there's going to be a shortage. If they're only putting in 270 gigawatt hours of capacity, that's less than six months of supply at current production rates. Okay, I'd like to see it. You know, I have China exporting about 10 gigawatt hours a month of batteries, ESS batteries, right? Compared to like 20 gigawatt hours for EV applications. There's still quite low numbers, right? But that's, I mean, I think a lot of it is being consumed internally. I mean, China is putting in so much domestically at the moment. So I'm not surprised they're not exporting that much, but the growth. I mean, China has gone from producing about 30 gigawatt hours a month at the beginning of this year to producing 50 gigawatt hours a month. And I see where you get the number from. CATL only produce, you know, 40 gigawatt hours. Everybody else is like CALB, Goshen, they're all like five gigawatt hours. I mean, I don't see where they 50 consumed. After you drop below BYD, the rest of the guys are barely producing. I don't know, I don't know where the number is. I know that a lot of producers have moved from producing EV cells to ESS cells. And, you know, the LFP, you know, cell growth is huge. It's grown very, very rapidly. So, you know, it's significant, but you can see the growth in ESS cells compared to EVs over the last, you know, two years or so. It's really, really huge. It's really exciting. I mean, that's driving the battery sector, but you know, there's a lot more money to me in EV cells than energy storage cells for the for the actual battery makers. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's a, it's a different area as well. You talk to anyone in the sector, you talk to the Koreans, they'll say the, the number one cell they use is the 100 amp hour cell, which is traditional cell. China's, they'll say anywhere from 280 to 1000, but apparently you can't even buy 314 cells in China. It's all 280. So the tech is constantly changing, of course. So, every time they make a larger cell, they call that an innovation, technology innovation, you know, that before used to mean like breakthrough and cathode materials are graphite, something in the chemistry. Now when they make a bigger cell, that is called as a technology innovation. So you do wonder how many of these sort of large capacity cells they're selling though, because obviously we've seen, you know, I was tracking this data until the middle of the year, but between the beginning and of the year and June or July this year, there was something like 30 new cell announcements from Chinese producers with larger and larger, you know, ESS cells culminating, I think in the 1000 amp hours. Yeah, I mean, we buy best cells in China for customers. Very difficult to source 314 cells. And we've got 100 megawatt hours as well. Pretty big stuff. But it's difficult to source cells there at the moment. We're moving down the tier. I'll put that way to you and it produces. So it's definitely a bit of a mixed signals, but we're not seeing this excess in inventory. But we are seeing very similar pricing to what's shown in China in terms of anywhere between $50 per kilowatt hour up to 70, depending on who you're talking to. And are you seeing prices going up as well? Have a minute out of this month. You got me there, Matt. It's Christmas, man. But yeah, we'll see in the new year that we'll be in the new year. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is a good point actually. We use the ND here talking about EV sales. But now we're talking about best. And the best is the shining light in the sector. There's no doubt about it. But you know, there's other factors involved that you said interconnections can be difficult. We're involved in some projects here in Ireland as well as the Ireland's bit of a testbed for energy storage. A lot of energy storage going in here. Well, I'm hearing it extensively. I had a really interesting call with Iola Hughes from benchmark promotion on the rockstock channel recently. And she was saying that there's a lot of demand for non-renewable storage, increasingly to support gas plants and coal plants. Because I think there's this perception in the industry that hydrocarbon fuel plants are up 100% of the time. And they're not, they're actually down 30 to 50% of the time themselves. So there is demand for ESS in non-renewable power sources as well. And obviously because the US has such a problem within to connect to Qs, I mean, these delays are like eight to ten years or something. Best can fill in the gap there. And I think the other thing is obviously because the US with all these data centers going in and obviously China has a similar situation, powered by demand growth is growing very, very rapidly. And it's much quicker and actually cheaper to build a solar and best plant than it is to build a gas turbine plant or a god for a bit of nuclear plant. I mean, nuclear plants taking what 10 years to build. And even a gas plant is taking a while because there's shortage of gas turbines. So, you know, the potential to add solar and best or wind and best is very substantial. And I think when I look at my best forecast later on this month, I'm pretty sure I should be raising them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of these AI data centers seem to be going stand alone. They don't even need an interconnection. But I heard that the, you might be able to confirm this now, but the GROC AI data center called Colossus, I think it's an Alabama has gas turbines as their power source. I'm not as much in the weeds as that, but I wouldn't be surprised and I'm just you know, there's all sorts of, I mean, there's companies trying to source jet engines and use those as a substitute gas turbines and also because there really is a shortage, you know, in the system of of high quality, you know, power generating equipment. So it's going to be a really interesting sort of two or three years in in the sort of electricity markets because we are actually seeing a massive step change. And best now has the potential to be a strategic investment, which obviously EVs never got to. And I think, you know, increasingly in the US, people are seeing best as strategic, rather than something, you know, that's wishy-washy that you might have. It's something that has to be secured. And you know, from our point of view, or from my point of view, as a sort of specialist in raw material, business is great. I love it because I don't have to worry about the Trump administration going, well, you know, EVs are non-core, you know, they're wishy-washy liberal work because you know, eventually what's more strategic than power distribution. So I always say, EVs depend on maybe Trump's sentiment, but it depends on consumer sentiment, right? Whether they want it or not. But best is a business makes money. It doesn't depend if the people want it or not. It's, you know, it's a deficient way to store power, put it back on the grid, and you can make money once or twice a day on that. So that's definitely coming. It's not this question, when are we going to get the 100% EVs? And we go depends what the consumers want, but not for best. Yeah, definitely happening. Okay. I was going to talk about EV sales, but I think we're tied on time. So anything else you want to add to comment? I mean, yeah, I think I told you it's there, but yeah, 2025's never been a busier year for electric. So, you know, I think the battery industry is still in a very healthy spot. I think we might have come out of those bedrooms. We were here. We were talking about earlier in the year. And so, I think 2026 is going to be another breakout year. I think best is probably going to be another headline again. Yeah, I think that there's, I mean, for me, it's nice to see brokers starting to pick up on best, but I think there's still too low. I think there's still too conservative. I don't think people are understanding, you know, strategically how best fits in. And back end of last year and the beginning of this year, what I was talking about all the time was the changing economics of best with the low battery prices and how it made the long, long term, the levelized cost of energy. Sorry. Yeah, much lower. I think we're in for a bit of a wake. I don't know if we're going to see those low LFP prices. LFP is going up as well, you know, yeah. So I mean, I think the big question is how how high the lithium prices go before we start to see demand destruction and best. So how high the lithium prices go and then obviously force up sell prices. And then we start to see demand destruction. I think that's going to be really interesting. I mean, yeah, it's all about the cost remember, like when it was only cannot best couldn't do eight hours, right? Eight hour storage because lithium carbonate was $80.80 a kg. But now the current levels are previous levels. It's going best as suitable now for 10 hour storage. But I mean, I think potentially the big winners if lithium prices go up are going to be the other long duration storage solutions like flow batteries and etc. Because eventually, there will come a time if lithium prices continue rising. When it won't be viable to double and triple up. Sounds like you're talking about sodium. Sounds like you're talking about sodium, I think. I'm not others. We'll see. You know, maybe maybe sodium iron does does make a return. I think it very much depends how high lithium prices go. And you know, what level sodium iron starts to sort of break out into the mainstream. And if other long duration technologies like flow batteries can compete with that. I mean, I think, you know, two or three years, flow batteries were $200 a kilowatt hour. Lithium is now third of that. And I don't know that flow batteries have really improved to the extent that lithium has. So the big question is, you know, could lithium, lithium iron prices go back to sort of $150 a kilowatt hour. And if they do, will flow batteries be competitive with that? Questions, questions for the future. Okay. The next time we speak, it will be the new year. So I'll say happy new year to you, Kormack and happy new year to our listeners and look forward to speaking to you in 2026. Talk to you then. So that brings us to the end of our podcast for December. 2025 has been a fascinating year for the battery supply chain and 2026 promises to be just as interesting. Stick with us and we'll dissect and discuss all the most interesting developments throughout the year. And yeah, happy new year to everybody. I'm Matt Furnley, Editor of Battery Materials Review. And this has been Recharge. Thanks for listening. [Music]