Could you introduce our audiences to Durapower’s foundation and its footprint in Singapore and internationally?
Durapower is a Singaporean company founded in 2009. In 2010 we entered the Chinese market; establishing our manufacturing base there, we then expanded our product presence to several cities domestically. By 2013, we made ourselves known in the market as a leading high power lithium battery company.
I joined the company in 2014, being part of the first professional team hired to take over management. When I took over management, the main focus was to strengthen our core products, to develop a diversified customer base and to grow into the international market. Since then, we have set up offices in Singapore, Thailand, China, Netherlands; and our product presence has successfully extended to more than 23 countries.
Our earlier focus was about entering into different regions. Today, and for the coming years, our main aim is to solidify our supply chain globally. First of all, we are looking to diversify our market spread to anchor ourselves into key segments and try to bring ourselves closer to major markets, eventually becoming a part of the local ecosystems in those regions.
Can you walk us through the innovations of the technology you are using?
As a Singaporean company, we often cannot compete in scale and price, because the Chinese are manufacturing commodities at very low prices. So, our edge, from the beginning, was to offer a product that was different; something that would change the ways EVs are used. I wanted to empathize with EV drivers and their preoccupations; namely charging time, price, safety, weight, and space. We took these different pain points, and they became our core segments for design. Today our design is lightweight, spacious and safe (we maintain a 100% safety track record) and more than anything, they are fast charging. We realized that if batteries could be charged in a short time, the entire business model of the operators would dramatically change.
Fast forward to today, the batteries we deliver take 15-20 minutes to charge instead of 5-6 hours as they used to.
This emphasis and progress in relation to charging time is particularly relevant to commercial fleets; if you have a fleet of commercial vehicles that drive 300 km a day, a reduced charging time changes the whole operation, requiring less vehicles, reducing the real estate footprint, and making it more practical.
How has Durapower navigated through recent supply chain shortages?
As a battery manufacturer, we have seen challenges such as the shortage of materials, the disruption to logistics and the rising material costs - all which created a downstream ripple effect from battery manufacturers to vehicle manufacturers and owners. This problem has to be tackled, and at Durapower we have a strategy in place to affront it. We are agnostic to battery materials - we develop our batteries with materials that are low cost and not scarce. To be able to scale on a global basis, the designer product is embedded in the solution. We need to build standard blocks that then allow us to build different solutions; not to the extent that all applications have to fit a shell design, but we have to create flexibility for the manufacturer and the user through standard blocks.
Is it possible to make the battery industry a circular industry, and if so, how far away are we from achieving it?
The world is moving towards electrification - vehicles, grid, ships. All these vehicles will bring with them a battery’s end of life, which will then create a big crunch in the recycling world. This is why we extend the life of batteries to a second life. Batteries in EVs are usually put into retirement when they are still 60% to 80% efficient; this might not be useful for mobility anymore, but it works well for stationary storage. If we were to use retired EV batteries for this purpose, then we would create a whole new life for the battery. However, this is particularly challenging - battery solutions after retirement need a massive amount of engineering work in order to be redesigned and ready to use as stationary storage. Today, as Durapower offers battery solutions to its partners, it does so one step ahead in relation to these engineering challenges, adapting the batteries for their second life from day one. Thanks to this, our customers are already successfully transforming their EV batteries into stationary ones.
A lot of recycling technology today is focused on the lower cost of disposing or recycling, but I think the crucial objective is to close the loop so that materials are recovered at a state where they could be efficiently put back into the supply chain. If this were achieved, recycling would become unimaginably beneficial across the totality of the supply chain, reducing climate impact massively.
