American expert attracted Swedish battery expertise.

Some 100 people, the most knowledgeable people in Sweden on battery technology, met up for a day at Lindholmen in Gothenburg. This conference was called "Electromobility 2020 — drivers and technology".

The major attraction was Dr. Menahem Anderman, who spoke for a total of three hours over the day.
Dr. Anderman is a well-known, influential person in the field of battery development and is also a consultant, author and arranger of AABC, the biggest annual battery conference in the USA and Europe. To sum up a little of what he said, he reckoned that some of the critical factors for achieving electromobility are as follows:

• Development of national subsidies will have a major part to play
• The EU's legal requirements for g CO2/km may benefit Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs)
• China, which has the most aggressive attitude towards favouring electromobility, while at the same time being the country with the least interested customers. He also reckoned that China is in the process of re-evaluating its target of 1 million new energy vehicles by 2015.
• Despite this, Dr. Anderman is a little more optimistic about PHEVs (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles) and HEVs (Hybrid Electric Vehicles) than about BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles). He estimates that the total global market share for PHEVs may be 1 % by 2020, and 0.5 % for BEVs.
• As regards the batter issue, Dr. Anderman concluded that the range of Li-ion cells will be two to four times greater than demand even by next year, 2013. From this, it may be concluded that a number of companies will probably be superseded. The ones Dr. Anderman believes will continue to operate are LG Chem and Sanyo, which he believes will be the biggest for Li-ion batteries by 2015. In his opinion, AESC will be the biggest company for Li-ion batteries for electric cars by 2015.
• He also reckoned that companies developing batteries are now focusing on safe, reliability and durable batteries. There is no emphasis on developing cheaper batteries with better performance.
• To conclude, Dr. Anderman said that he does not believe any alternative to Li-ion batteries will emerge over the next 20 years.

Besides Dr. Anderman, the day included a number of other interesting presentations from people such as Magnus Karlström, publisher of "Omvärldsanalys av energieffektiva vägfordon" [Market analysis of energy-efficient road vehicles].