Everybody wants a better battery, Christine Ho is printing one

Zero: The Climate Race

Bloomberg

Technology, Business, Science

4.7 • 219 Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This summer, Bloomberg Green reporter Akshat Rathi visited Imprint Energy, a Silicon Valley startup that prints batteries. Using the same tools as screenprinters, Imprint Energy prints thousands of batteries to power shipping labels that can report the movement, temperature, and even humidity that packages are exposed to. Imprint’s batteries are being tested by companies that ship food, crop seeds and even vaccines. Akshat speaks with founder and inventor Christine Ho about how she bootstrapped the company, raised $25M, and why these small batteries made of a glue-like goo can cut down waste and reduce emissions.

What do Imprint's batteries look like? Check them out here.

Read a transcript of this episode, here.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Venkat Viswanathan and Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshadrati. This week, explosions, experiments and 3D printing.
0:09.0	From the outside, batteries can seem boring.
0:26.1	But they're a bit like jazz or museums.
0:29.0	The people that care really care.
0:31.7	They become obsessed when they find something intriguing and can't stop thinking about it.
0:36.2	Everybody wants a better battery.
0:42.3	There's just infinite demand for better batteries that are safer, that are higher performance. And those better batteries are not just because you want a smartphone that will run for the whole day without needing more juice.
0:49.3	But also because batteries are powering more of our lives and are crucial to making renewable power reliable.
0:56.5	And their job is not done yet.
0:58.3	As batteries have become cheaper, people want to put them in all kinds of places.
1:02.9	And that means they need to come in all kinds of shapes.
1:06.5	You can fold them, they're flexible, they're bendable.
1:09.2	So just to kind of prove a point, we've made like donut-shaped batteries before and fun things like that.
1:14.2	That's Christine Ho, the founder of Imprint Energy.
1:17.8	She's making 3D-printed foldable batteries which can be used as smart labels.
1:23.5	Think of the last time you ordered something online and got a million updates about where it was.
1:28.5	Each of those updates came from a person interacting with and scanning that package.
1:33.5	A smart label powered by imprint's battery can send the messages itself.
1:38.7	So these are almost like a cell phone that's been flattened out.
1:41.7	And a cell phone that you can kind of attach to almost anything
1:44.4	and in that case you can actually track where this is anywhere in the world that's got cell phone
1:49.2	coverage. That connectivity might not seem important if it's just about a pair of shoes. But being
	...

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