Tig,The Limiting Factor has several videos about silicon in...

Tig,

The Limiting Factor has several videos about silicon in anode. He has asked all sorts of experts what the near, medium, and long outlook is. Every single one has said that the first step is 5-10%, then 20-30%, and who knows after that. We cannot stress enough the basic fact: silicon swells 400% by volume when fully saturated with lithium. That is outrageous. It is difficult to manage.

What Talga is doing is surrounding silicon with graphene and graphite in a special lattice to try and reduce the damage the volumetric expansion does. Other proposals have been suggested, such as using graphene to anchor silicon; which works because graphene polymers are so flexible and strong.

See figure 3 of a 2021 publication on temperature and aging of lithium ion batteries: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/5/1248/pdf

What you should see is that nickel cobalt batteries perform best if only discharged 80%, but LFP performs best for 2000 cycles at 30C. Higher temperatures and greater silicon content dramatically reduce the life cycles of the batteries compared by this paper, which reviewed publicly available publications. It is possible that tesla creates a battery more robust than what is shown here, but the point of the graph to me is that in a lot of conditions, adding silicon rapidly degrades batteries. Even worse, there are some places in the world that reach 45-50C regularly, particularly of cars parked in direct sunlight. Scary thought for anyone living in desert climates.

Importantly, in both cases graphite is the anode of choice, not graphite-si. Tesla is opting for LFP for safety and cost, iirc, and maybe they can further extend cycle life. But my point here is that if you want a stable battery, GRAPHITE is the way to go, and then play around with the cathode, as far as our current science can project.

Furthermore, there are additional technologies that use graphite as a feedstock (Silicon nanowires) which may be excellent long term, though more testing is required. Talnode is the cheapest high quality graphite around which also happens to be ethically sourced. Talga is a sure deal, bank on it.