 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this press conference from the fourth day of the 49th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum here in Davos. Thank you for joining us here in the room. Thank you for joining us on the live stream, whether you're watching on Twitter, Facebook or on our website. We're happy you're tuning in. If you're watching from Europe, good afternoon. If you're watching from the US, good morning. If you're watching from China, you should probably be in bed by now, but we're still happy you're here. You're joining the press conference titled Cleaning up the Battery Boom. It's quite a dramatic title, but you'll see as we hear from our panelists any moment now that it's also quite a topic that requires this sense of urgency. Allow me to introduce the wonderful panel to you that will help cleaning up the battery boom. To my immediate left, we're joined by Martin Bruder-Müller, the Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors and Chief Technology Officer of BRSF from Germany. We're also joined by Lin Bo Chiang, to his immediate left, who is the Dean of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy of the Chiamen University. Right at the heart and center of our panel, we're joined tonight by Christina Lampe Honorot, the Founder and Chief Executive of Cadenza Innovation, based in the US. Ricardo, last but definitely not least, we're joined by you, Ricardo Politi, the Senior Director for Energy and Extractives of the World Bank Group. So we're very pleased to have, in classical forum style, a multi-stakeholder panel to address these questions. Martin, without further ado, let me hunt over to you and let's hear from you how can we clean up this battery boom? How can the global battery alliance, where you play an important role, help to do this? And what's the role of BRSF? Yes, thank you very much. Yes, as you said, I'm CEO and CTO of BSF, which is the largest chemical company in the world. I'm also co-chairing the Global Battery Alliance. The battery area is one of the largest innovation areas for the chemical industry, and this is also why my company is engaged in innovation in battery materials. Well, I mean, we talk about the battery boom. I think the success of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, if we want to really make this a success, we have to tap into all potentials possible and take all efforts. And I think definitely a transformative shift to decarbonize the energy and the transport systems is an absolutely must to do this. And that requires battery technologies to be established as a core of this, as a core technology, and we have also to massively increase the renewable energy. There is a lot of speculation going on how fast that is, but the best guess is in 2050, the electric vehicle market will be worth more than two trillion US dollars. And that will also mean that we need a global cumulative energy storage deployment, which is maybe 30-fold from what it is today. This needs a deliberate interaction to fully use the potential of batteries to support really the sustainable development and the climate change mitigation, because it's a rather complex value chain. What we need is, we need a sustainable and low-carbon value chain for batteries. So you have to take care about the working conditions and also poverty and the social and environment concerns that come with it, mainly through the raw material supply chain. We talk here about cobalt from the Republic of Congo. We have also to structure the battery production with its footprint to life cycle impacts, the carbon balance, and also have to define standards and regulation to cater that we really harvest the full opportunities for helping the climate mitigation. The Global Battery Alliance is taking care about all these aspects. It's trying to structure the value chain. It was founded in September in 2017. We have now gained a lot of speed because it is a fully operational organization with the secretariat that is hosted by the WEF. And we have now started basically from a small number of members at the beginning. We are very proud that we have now more than 40 members. And actually here in Davos, three more members have committed to join the Global Battery Alliance. It's the Volvo Group, its Cadenza Innovation and its Climate Works formation. So we have very well structured what we want to do. We have clear objectives for this year and the next years. And what it comes now to come from talk to action. And this is why the members have to facilitate in alliance with the Global Battery Alliance here new projects and to really make it happen. I'll give you one example of what my company BSF committed with car producer BMW and also Samsung STI and Samsung Electronics. In cooperation with GIS, this GIS set, this is the Gesellschaft für International Zusammenarbeit. We are taking care to structure and mobilize along the aromatill chain of Cobalt. We have been targeting that we improve the artisanal working conditions along this. So there will be many more projects to come. I have to say we have a very positive momentum in this moment. And that needs to be sustained in 2019 and 2020. And what we want to do to give this another impulse is actually that the Global Battery Alliance and Supervisory Council has decided and committed here in Davos to mobilize and publish a pledge which clearly aligns and brings the Global Battery Alliance forward which should be signed with 50 CEOs and also leaders of other institutions and stakeholders along the value chain. And I think with this we are very well positioned to gain speed, to gain actions and I think we are very good on track to make an impact. Thank you very much. So you see ladies and gentlemen not just the batteries are booming but also the Global Battery Alliance. That's definitely good news that here in Davos we could sign up three more members. Lin Boi Chang, I will make you work twice as hard as every other panelist in the sense that I'm asking you two questions. So my first question would be about energy storage. Obviously that's one of the areas where you are like a proven expert. So we'd like to hear from you which role does energy storage play here in the battery boom and how can it help to solve some of the challenges. And also secondly, what's the role of China in these developments? Please, the floor is yours. Thank you. We know that the current change and substantial development is very important and critical to us at this point. And our batteries play a very important role in the future energy system. Let me give you a few lines of how important could it be. For example, we know that the transportation sector is one of the most difficult sectors to reduce the emission. Up to this point and to improve the efficiency. About 60% of the oil was consumed by vehicles. Electric vehicles really provide the alternative to substitute the oil moving forward. Battery is a critical point of electric vehicles. Next is the storage. We know that the solar cost has been reduced substantially over the last few years. Let's say in China, the solar cost reduced by 90% in about 10 years time. The wind reduced by 50%. Right now both solar and wind are quite competitive and can actually compete with coal fire in many places in China. But it's still small percentage. Once you become a larger percentage, then the system stability and everything become critical. Important for the larger scale development of wind and solar. And here is the battery storage and the storage coming to the picture. Let's move forward with the distribution such that we can together with the storage. Many people believe that the cost is pretty far away. That's actually not true. Because the cost of distribution together with the battery in China is pretty close to the commercial tariff in China. So that's feasible. At this point, we need to try harder moving forward to improve it. The next line is that can we imagine that we go home and pack in the electric vehicle and set it at 12 midnight. And take it out at about 6 in the morning. And that's very good for the whole entire electricity system. We need to improve existing efficiency. Because for China, the residential only consumes 12%. Less than 12% of electricity. Where the United States consumes more than 40% of electricity. So moving forward, we know that the residential from China is going to consume more electricity. And that means the peak electricity demand will increase dramatically. We need to utilize this capacity during the low time such that the whole system efficiency can be improved dramatically. So I will emphasize the importance of the storage and the battery in several areas. Let's now move to the China's role in the battery development in several areas. In 2018, the China Bureau also under construction probably 200 gigawatt hours of capacity. The global demand is only about 70 gigawatt hours. So there's a huge capacity built up. Because of the scale of the capacity, the cost dropped dramatically. Over the last three years, the cost is down by roughly 60%. And that really we flag in several numbers. One is that the electric vehicle last year China saw roughly one million units. And that's roughly 50% incremental. This year many people expect that 2019 we're going to double into two million units. And by 2025 is a good possibility that majority of incrementals is coming from electric vehicle. And we saw every year, in recent year, 24 million units of the vehicles every year. So that is very substantial. So on the storage side, the largest battery company, 7 in China, the largest one that is CATL last year on the storage side, the anti-storage side, the sales increased by 10 times. So all the indications indicate that it's a dramatic build up of the capacity and the dramatic build up of the downstream such that we can utilize the battery capacity very quickly. Now let me also mention a couple of points that moving forward what we need to do. One is that we need to design the policy that's comprehensive and co-ordinated. Because right now that we come up with all kind of policies like supporting solar, supporting wind, and we also come up with something to support the electric vehicle. But those policies, in fact that's only for China, it's for all other countries, they do not have a comprehensive design such that we don't create a waste. We have a build of a huge capacity upstream, but it's not much capacity downstream or not much consumer downstream. So that created the waste. That's one is that policy design from government need to be changed comprehensively. Second is that this is a global issue, climate change. We need a global approach. That means that countries need to cooperate together in terms of technology, in terms of investment. For example, if China wind provides a very low cost of the battery, why not utilize it? So we really need the international cooperation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Christina, you're somewhat of a miracle. You're by far the youngest panelist here today, but you still managed to have somewhat of 20 years of experience in the battery space. We'll solve that miracle another time, but let's hear from you a little bit the longer term perspective here on these battery developments. Obviously batteries have been around for a while. How do you see these developments over years? And if I might kind of put you on the spot, how do you predict the trend going forward? Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for tuning in. We are so excited from the battery industry in general. Having lived through the revolution of mobility and mobile technology with cell phone technologies going a year over year, a doubling of capacity and basically adjusting costs to becoming a consumer good. Having been part of the laptop industry as it went from an hour runtime to four hour runtime from basically having to replace your batteries every six to 12 months to now have batteries that last the life of the device also coming down in consumer costs. So the battery industry focused now very much on lithium ion battery technology, which is something consumers are quite familiar with. You use them today still in consumer electronics with emerging electric vehicles and the opportunity for grid is unbelievably interesting and of course very challenging. We're lucky to be at a place as an industry with 30 years experience that lithium ion technology was really invented in the 70s but got into mass production through Japanese initiatives and the Koreans and the Chinese followed and now the United States is also following in nice step. But the opportunity now to use knowledge for 30 years and deploy it on scale to be part of a solution to climate change where battery technology has to learn from the consumer and mobility era into what is going to be our biggest challenge which is electricity and access to electricity in fast developing economic regions. The technology per se is well known and well understood as is the manufacturing processes. Of course there's room for improvement but the opportunity to do this at this scale will demand quite a bit of collaboration not only across boundaries but also across partners that traditionally have never worked together. So we're touching not the paradigm of consumer electronics where the battery industry had the luxury of saying here's my battery please use it in your device. There is a need now for collaboration where we set the specs together where we basically fine tune the operating window through chemistry and we take it through into a cell design that matches very, very closely what the device actually is meant to power. And when those devices become interactive key feature of how we see electricity in the old paradigm, traditional paradigm of centralized power generation and take that into the distributed era with a lot of renewables which will happen over the next 30, 50 years. It is very important that data gets a seat at the table that we collectively decide a good pace for distribution and opportunity and yet that we all raise the bar for urgency. It's very, very urgent call to action. The opposite is really not that pretty and the good news is we can deploy with batteries a lot of the solving features in the climate change puzzle. We can participate actively in peak shaving. You can basically enable distributed energy in high energy demand and basically allow for electricity and gain access to electricity in countries that do not have that frequently deployed. So the opportunity is massive. The level of innovation that will now go into the product and the definition of the problem we're used to basically seeing where we had used maybe five years to define the problem and another 10 years to mature a product. We don't have that time. So being here in Davos with World Economic Forum debating the energy paradigm at the same time seeing the battery industry being a key contributor is of course immensely exciting. And the guiding light remains cost is really, really important and it has to be cost for the system. So that touches everything from materials, how we source, how we use, how we process them into cells and the design for those cells, how we then take the cells and put them into packs and then install them in what will become fairly large installations at points. Basically the size of this room and beyond and how we control that. The era of digitalization will help immensely learning how to deploy energy and how to source energy, the onset of blockchain, so much exciting technology happening at the same time. And all of this is going to drive basically use cost to an affordability price. It is interesting of course to note we already have case studies where battery technology is the enabling technology to put in distributed energy storage or energy distribution basically and energy generation which is renewable and sustainable which is cheaper than traditional sources. So there's not one size fits all, there's not one solution for the call to action for climate change, nor is there one way to generate green jobs and opportunities for economic growth but lots of different opportunities and lots of different solutions. So if cost is the number one guide, number two becomes safety and reliability. So the way again to stream more communication what is the spec, how are we doing this and how do we make sure it meets the problem statement. And the third time of course is energy density. We are in an era of urbanization so energy has to come closer to the user which also increases some of the efficiency. So by driving and basically developing more compact solutions that ultimately are easier to integrate into large systems where you have an opportunity to put basically 20, 30 years of experience inside a box putting them into packs and racks and now contributing as a key partner in the paradigm of electricity where transport is a key aspect, industrial applications are a key aspect and yet consumer electronics continues very, very interesting. Some opportunities and frankly an opportunity in a lifetime for us alive right now to do good and do well. Thank you, Christina, thank you very much. Ricardo, let's come to you obviously the battery boom is a global phenomenon so it makes sense that an international organization like the World Bank Group is paying close attention and as the senior director for energy and extractives this is I understand close to what you're looking at. Share with us the perspective of the World Bank is important and why have you shown your support to the global battery lines, please. Thank you very much, Georg, thank you to everybody. Certainly on batteries we are potentially at the same point where we were with the wind and solar 20 years ago so really the potential is huge but let's think about what we do at the World Bank. I mean we talked about China, Europe as a European initiative for batteries, the United States, North America is very advanced but a lot of developing world is not advancing on batteries and batteries are key to the developing world. Think about how many, first of all there are one billion people without access to electricity but there are far more people with access to electricity which is limited to three, four, five hours per day. There are people who have access to electricity but they have very expensive diesel so batteries can on off-grade can certainly improve access in a terrible way. Can you think in a little village in Africa what is the difference between having energy during the day and having energy during the day in six hours every night? Then on-grid, this is only the off-grid, think about Africa again. I could talk about mega cities in Asia, mega cities in Latin America. There are at the moment seven mega cities in Africa. There will be in 2030, 10 mega cities. Mega cities defined every city with more than 10 million people in it. So think about local pollution, not only global local pollution due to the use, utilization of fossil fuels. Batteries through electric vehicle could very much help reducing local pollution and let's be frank, batteries on on-grid systems are incredibly important to avoid curtailment, power sheds and so on and so forth. Batteries are a key element for the stabilization of any on-grid systems. So this is why it is so important for the World Bank. Then we have to think about the whole cycle of batteries as my colleague said before me, cobalt, lithium are very, very important components to batteries nowadays. Well, cobalt is not found very, very many countries in the world, lithium it is far more, and there are always very important things about policymaking. That's why I have to say I have two heads here. Not only I'm the head of energy and strategies at the World Bank, I'm also the co-chair of the Executive Board of the Global Batteries Alliance. So you have to think about that there is a public concern. How is cobalt sourced? How is lithium sourced? So I mean, are we sure that the countries that have been well endowed with these resources are going to benefit from them? Is it going to be sustainable? So I think there is a lot of work and I have to say we found an amazing membership and team in the Global Batteries Alliance thinking exactly about this. How to make sure that we can develop batteries from mining to recycling in a sustainable way because it would be interesting to solve maybe the climate change equation and having a problem on the other side of the equation. I have to say that's what I found that there is a great membership at the GBA, the Global Batteries Alliance. I think we have to improve, we have to increase the membership on the public side. I think the private is working well. More help from Asia probably is needed. We need more of the public side because we need a lot of regulation, a lot of policymaking to accelerate the deploy of these, I have to say, fantastic technology. So we have all very much motivated and we hope to do our very, very best, not only for the benefit of the few but for the benefit of many of us. This is really a public good. Thank you very much, Ricardo. And we have a fifth invisible panelist here with us. So Alicia Barsena, the Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean wanted to be here today. Unfortunately, she was pulled away and has to be with the UN Secretary General which of course we all understand. However, it's very nice that Martin has agreed to read a short statement by Alicia for the benefit of all. So you don't have to miss her too much. I give my male voice to Alicia. So the ECLAC supports also the initiative and highlights the potential for the developing of battery value chain in Latin America. It will convene jointly with the forum and the GBA a meeting in the headquarters at Santiago de Chile in convening multiple key stakeholders from the supply chain side but also from the demand side of the value chain to further discuss these opportunities with particular emphasis on electromobility related to the public transportation in Latin America and we are very happy about this local initiative because at the very end we have to bring this also on the local floor. It's not only a global topic but also very much in the application of local topic. Thank you very much. Let's see if we have any questions from the audience. Can I see a show of hands if you have a question the gentleman there in the back. If you could for the sake of the online audience identify yourself please. My name is Marco Englund. I'm with German Newswire, TPAFX and I have two questions if I may. One from Mr. Lampe Honorud. You talked about lithium ion technology in general if I got that right. What do you think of solid state technology? When could it be the next driver of battery technology? And then one question from Mr. Bruder Miller. You've heard about cooperation models with car makers. Where do you see your share of value added in the value chain? Thank you. First on lithium ion versus solid state or any other newsworthy technology. Lithium ion in my opinion will take the lion's share of where we're heading and the reason is very simple. There is a lot of innovation in the pipeline. There are established supply chains and manufacturing channels. There are established use models and we know as an industry and as a consumer body quite a bit about how to integrate lithium ion. There's 30 years of trust and there's enormous supply chain basically backing this up including automation and equipment so to basically displace that at any range will take 10, 15 years. Of course as an innovator I am excited about all new ideas and solid state is one of those that hold great promise but as an innovator I also know I have some innovation on nickel cathodes for example with cobalt material that are 20 years old and that are just coming into the main market now. It takes a long time from concept to mass production to qualifying into these applications and typically a battery technology starts from smaller platforms we are looking at such an enormous growth right now so we will actually need the supply chain and the manufacturing body and the wisdom on product definition quite a bit to satisfy the need so in summary super excited about solid state and other technologies that are also attempting to solve these problems we need new inventions we need new ways to think about all these problems but there's also very rich and solid development line for lithium ion alone so I think lithium ion will probably be around for the rest of my life however young I am and I think it's just interesting to note let us it is still a technology that is investigated at all major academies these days it was invented 1850 Yeah but Christina I think the lithium ion battery potential is by far not exploited there is huge innovation and capacity in there and this is also the reason why it is interesting for us as a chemical industry in BISF the value chain has basically three steps you produce the material then the cell and then the battery so BISF is very much focused on the battery materials and with this with emphasis on the so called COM which is the cathode active material which is determining very much the energy density and capacity of the battery it is also by far the most expensive up to be 70% of the value of a battery at the very end and as I just mentioned this is nickel cobalt partly also manganese and also alumina containing materials very sophisticated I have to say you need a very fine balance you need to manage coatings size of the pallets and all that and you can influence very much the properties you want the battery that is charging fast you want to have a battery that has high energy intensity and this is also where the automotive companies differentiate at the very end because you have high luxury cars with a lot of capacity you need on the other hand batteries that are cheap for the lower class cars and so we are working on these materials not only scaling them up now because we expect a rather fast growing demand in these materials but we also cater the distinct needs of innovation needs of our customers so we are stepping in this business as I said it's a very very fast growing business also very exciting one where we shape with our customers the automotive industry that this makes its way and makes a fast way into civilization thank you very much and I have to confess I've never heard people speak about batteries with such passion so we definitely pick the right people for this panel here today and say that I think we have a question here in the front row if you could wait for the microphone it's on its way thank you very much hello the panelists this is Angela I'm working for Chinese digital media company I heard that all of you talk about the supply chain of battery production but I always have one question in the head is about how could you make sure that by calculating the whole production line of the battery that the battery will cause less pollution than consuming petrol and oil because I'm not a specialist in this field so and the second question especially for Dean Lin Boqiang you mentioned a lot about the electric cars in China and we all know that now we sold a lot of like one million two million electric cars in China but for how to recycle all these batteries in the end actually still an open question but there will be the use the batteries in a couple of years and we will see a big problem ahead of us so will you have a better solution for this thank you maybe I'll answer your first questions about the life cycle in the CO2 footprint the materials partly are very energy intensive so it is first depends on how you produce it I think it is very wisely to partly use renewable energies in the production of the materials and then the second part and that comes with the innovations about the lifetime first of all we have to increase that the battery and the car runs for quite a while and then there is also the opportunity of a second use which then extends the lifetime of a battery further to the recycling which also helps to reduce the overall footprint of CO2 there are still a lot of opportunities but you are absolutely right it has to be taken care about that thank you about the China has a lot about electric vehicle at this point but still very little actually we are thinking about by 2025 maybe 10 million possibly at this point we get 1 million per year later on probably 2 million per year because it is really going very fast then the issue you raised it is a good one it is a good question I agree with Martin that we don't need to worry about it because we can use electric vehicle and after that we can put into together with the distribution of solar so that you know on and on it can be utilised for certain periods of time and finally we can go for recycling so I think that the issue is not really as big as we anticipated at this moment as compared to nuclear waste that is you know you cannot have a secondary use or a third at this point that it is not feasible but for the battery that we can see it will be the case to improve the efficiency and economy of the battery thank you very much do you want to add something to the sustainability question maybe Rinkado? well just to say that you know even the mining industry nowadays talk about smart mining so the use of more renewables in mining and in the let's say refining of the mining products so I think that from this viewpoint certainly there is a lot of space for improvement from the very beginning of the train to the very end so I'm quite optimistic I can only say from the manufacturing side of batteries in general there is a lot of lead principles and ISO principles that are being pulled in with lots of experience again the lithium-ion battery industry is quite mature at this time and has already gone through multiple revisions of efficiency improvements and it's very appropriate at the World Economic Forum to say it's actually driven by economics so it's cheaper to recycle solvents it's cheaper to have high efficiency and you basically the industry as a whole including its supply chain is getting very good at yield thank you very much and mindful of the time and of the packed schedules of our panellists we have to come to an end soon but I want to point out one thing the lady from Sina asked about what happens after the life cycle of the battery and in ten minutes right here at this very place we'll have a press conference on electronic waste so you might just stay here so you see it's a complex issue it requires everybody from the multistakeholder community to pitch in and we're very happy that we have with the global battery line such a strong commitment and such a strong set of multistakeholder activity thank you very much for being here in the room thank you very much for watching and a big thank you to our panel this evening thank you very much