Solid-state battery EVs to start proliferating in 2025 as 500 GWh come online in Chinese factories by 2030

Considering the lifespan of current EV batteries with liquid electrolyte, it will take at least 20 years for solid-state batteries to achieve 50% market share, tips a Chinese scientist. China will be at the forefront at that market penetration effort as its companies have 130 GWh of solid-state battery factory capacity scheduled for next year, quickly scaling that up to more than 500 GWh by 2030.

According to Academy of Sciences member and Tsinghua University professor Ouyang Minggao, the most important threshold for commercial solid-state battery penetration is not the 50% rate, but rather the 1% mark. The EV batteries with liquid electrolyte being installed right now would have a lifespan of at least 20 year, he argues, so it will take solid-state batteries decades to hit 50% market share, while the 1% penetration rate is an important marker for the commercial viability of the technology.

Said important marker may be reached as soon as next year, report the analysts from CITIC Securities, predicting 1.7% global solid-state battery penetration rate for various use case scenarios then, growing to 8.4% in 2030.

The Mercedes partner ProLogium just cut the ribbon on the first solid-state battery Gigafactory with 2 GWh capacity, located in Taiwan. It said that this will be enough for 26,000 electric vehicles powered by an average-sized 75 kWh solid-state battery. By that metric, the 130 GWh capacity that will go online by 2026 in China alone should be enough for nearly 1.7 million vehicles powered by a solid-state battery.

The cells with solid electrolyte are still expensive, though, so the Chinese analysts predict that this year they will first go into "in areas with lower price sensitivity and higher safety performance requirements, such as aerospace, medical, and some high-end new energy vehicle (NEV) models."

Solid-state batteries will then slowly trickle down to the mass EV market in the 2025-2030 period, they argue, just as the world's biggest battery maker CATL predicted. That claim is also confirmed by Toyota which said that the first EVs with its own solid-state battery will be in the premium Lexus line and only a few thousand of those will be available in the initial launch period. 

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