Nikhil KamathThe Battery Everyone Uses Is The One They'd Never Build | EnerVenue x HiNa | WTF are Batteries?
Episode Details
EPISODE INFO
- Released
- August 10, 2026
- Duration
- 1h 10m
- Channel
- Nikhil Kamath
- Watch on YouTube
- ▶ Open ↗
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
I went to Dalian with a selfish question. I run a fund that invests in energy transition, and I've come to think energy isn't the problem — moving it and storing it is. So I sat down with Henning Rath, who runs EnerVenue out of Silicon Valley and is building his first gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, who runs HiNa Battery, a sodium-ion company spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that's now ten years old with 600 people and a gigawatt line. I told them I don't know anything about batteries and asked them to teach me. We started at what a cell even is, went through why the entire industry standardised on LFP and what a thermal runaway actually does, and then Henning told me something I hadn't heard: the world had over 14,000 LFP fires last year alone. I asked whether I should start an electric car company or a battery company when I get home. Both said battery — and Henning was blunt about it: don't build anything that needs rare earth. Fifty million dollars to start. We got into nickel-hydrogen at 30,000 cycles, sodium carbonate at a tenth of what lithium carbonate costs, why solid state is still at level four out of nine, and the idea I keep coming back to — that your car sits idle 98% of the time with a battery and a stack of chips doing nothing, and there's a version of this where every parked car is a micro data center. 00:00 Introduction 06:45 China's bet on chemistries beyond lithium 12:14 Cell chemistry and the trade-offs it forces 17:15 Thermal runaway and the limits of LFP 22:44 Production quality and how long a battery lasts 27:07 Why China won the electric car 33:54 Decoupling a battery business from lithium and rare earths 38:50 Sodium's cost advantage and its energy density ceiling 43:51 Recycling nickel and renting the metal 48:17 Where generation, storage and demand should sit 54:05 Decentralization and the car as a grid battery 1:00:19 Three super cycles and AI's power demand 1:05:30 Automation, jobs and China's social contract Footage Courtesy: World Economic Forum (WEF) CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/amnc26_summer_davos_highlights/ Henning Rath, Chief Executive Officer at EnerVenue LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henning-rath/ Kun Tang, Executive Chairman of HiNa Battery LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kun-tang-52a52327/ Nikhil Kamath-Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast Twitter: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Watch 'WTF Online' on Spotify https://tinyurl.com/4tjua4th #WTFareBatteries #EnerVenue #HiNaBattery #SummerDavos
SPEAKERS
Nikhil Kamath
hostIndian entrepreneur and investor who hosts the show and discusses his energy-transition private equity investing.
Kun Tang
guestBattery chemist and executive focused on sodium-ion batteries, with PhD/postdoc research experience and industry leadership.
Henning Rath
guestGerman mechanical engineer/economist with extensive infrastructure experience in China and work spanning energy systems and storage.
EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode of Nikhil Kamath, featuring Nikhil Kamath and Kun Tang, The Battery Everyone Uses Is The One They'd Never Build | EnerVenue x HiNa | WTF are Batteries? explores why today’s dominant batteries win on cost, lose on safety The conversation builds a battery fundamentals primer, distinguishing energy storage broadly from electrochemical batteries and explaining how cells store and release energy through reversible reactions.
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