Battery Manufacturing Cost reduction Strategy

 1.Basic methods to reduce cost of battery manufacturing 

Battery, as a general purpose product, plays an increasingly important role in the future national economy and becomes an indispensable part of the energy system for electric products and manufacturing. The manufacturing of general purpose products must start from the basic requirements of large-scale manufacturing, based on the principle of product composition, considering materials, design, structure, safety, performance, as well as manufacturing standards, equipment, quality, efficiency, cost and other aspects, comprehensive implementation of intelligent control measures. For battery products, we should ensure that cost reduction does not reduce quality and cost reduction does not sacrifice safety. The main measures to reduce cost include: improving quality and reducing cost, reducing cost by standardization, improving efficiency and reducing cost by manufacturing cycle.

2. Improve quality and reduce cost

At present, the qualified rate of advanced battery manufacturing industry is only 90-94%, and some are even worse. There is still a large room for improvement from the 98% qualified rate of advanced manufacturing industry in developed countries. According to the current manufacturing cost composition of advanced batteries, for the battery production line with an annual output of 1GWh, every 1% increase in qualified rate takes material loss and implied maintenance cost loss into account. There's going to be a $5 million to $10 million profit increase. Assuming that the battery selling price is 0.8 yuan /Wh, so as to increase the qualified rate of 1%, the enterprise profit margin will increase about 6.25-12.5%, not to mention the overall 4-5% quality improvement space here!

To improve product quality is to improve the qualified rate of manufacturing and reduce unqualified waste. Reduce hidden defects, reduce service costs, etc.; Modern large-scale manufacturing quality management technology can be adopted to improve quality and reduce cost, especially intelligent manufacturing quality optimization and data closed-loop upgrading technology.

3. Cost reduction by standardization

Standardization is the most basic and effective means for the development of modern large-scale manufacturing industry. Its basic idea refers to "in order to obtain the best order within a given scope, promote common benefits, establish common use and reuse provisions for real or potential problems, as well as the activities of compiling, releasing and applying documents". Standardization is a technical support for economic activities and social development. It plays an increasingly important role in guaranteeing product quality and safety, promoting industrial transformation and upgrading, improving economic quality and efficiency, and serving foreign trade. The basic means of standardization for manufacturing industry are: simplification, unification, generalization, serialization and combination.

Standardization can greatly improve the manufacturing scale of a single variety. According to the American professor Theodore Wright's law on the change of manufacturing cost with manufacturing scale, the manufacturing cost will decrease by 15-18% for every 1 times the scale of manufacturing product. Based on the 50-70% compound growth rate of China's battery industry in recent years, the average annual decline in China's battery industry would be 7-10%, not taking into account price fluctuations.When production costs were studied, it was found that for every cumulative doubling of the number of aircraft produced, the manufacturer achieved a continuous decline in cost by percentage, such as the 2,000th aircraft costing 15% less than the 1,000th aircraft and the 4,000th aircraft costing 15% less than the 2,000th aircraft.

By using the above standardized methods and cost change rules, the size and specifications can be reduced, the scale and quantity of a single variety can be increased, and the cost of supply can be reduced. After the standard of battery manufacturing and equipment is unified, it is convenient for battery enterprises to scale production, and the manufacturing equipment can also be standardized, which is conducive to the reduction of the types of production lines and the reduction of R&D and manufacturing costs. The standardization of battery manufacturing and equipment has a decisive impact on the development, design and manufacturing of battery manufacturing equipment. Battery production enterprises will standardize the layout of the production line according to the battery manufacturing standards, enabling standardized and large-scale production, reducing the R&D cost of battery equipment enterprises, shortening the development cycle of equipment, and improving the production efficiency of battery manufacturing equipment. The standardization of battery manufacturing and equipment. When developing new products, new energy vehicle enterprises can choose fixed modules to design the battery system of products according to battery manufacturing and equipment, which is conducive to the development of new products and shorten the development cycle. Meanwhile, different products can also choose the same manufacturing standard process, which is conducive to the interchangeability of batteries and reduces the R&D cost and production cost of enterprises.

4. Improve efficiency and reduce cost

The basic principle of improving efficiency and reducing cost is: the improvement of manufacturing efficiency and the reduction of amortized cost per unit of capacity. This is true for battery materials, cells, and battery pack manufacturing. For example, for manufacturing processes such as coating machine, winding machine, laminating machine and assembly line, the efficiency is increased by 50%, and the general equipment cost is increased by about 30%. At the same time, the battery factory will reduce the floor area, so as to reduce the cost of auxiliary air conditioning, environmental humidity and personnel control. For the current main process of battery manufacturing, with the increase of production capacity, the battery manufacturing efficiency from single machine, segment to the whole line has a large space to improve the manufacturing efficiency. This is the dividend to the battery industry from the development of industrial demand.

5. Manufacturing cycle cost reduction

The basic principle of battery manufacturing cycle cost reduction is that the abundance of material elements in the recycling battery is much larger than that in mining the ore containing active elements in the battery, so the cost of recycling the battery to extract active materials is cheaper than that of mining to obtain materials.