On March 25, the "One World" Forum hosted by the Hong Kong Institute of Sustainable Technology kicked off the Hong Kong Financial Events Week. The theme of this forum is "The Crossroad of the Earth-Investing in Innovation, Welcoming a Sustainable Future".

Taking advantage of Hong Kong's advantages as a financial and innovation center in the Asia-Pacific region, leaders from all walks of life brainstorm and dialogue together to provide suggestions for achieving sustainable development.

Dr. Zeng Yuqun, Chairman and General Manager of Ningde Times (CATL), delivered a keynote speech entitled "Promoting Global Sustainable Development through Open Innovation". Dr. Zeng gave a speech in English for 13 minutes and 29 seconds. This article is a literal translation based on the speech video. It was not reviewed by myself and is only for reference by industry insiders. If there is any infringement, please contact to delete it.

The full speech is as follows:

Good morning, everyone!

I feel I made a mistake in attending this summit. Because everyone is talking about capital and how to create human resources advantages. I am thinking about how to really promote open innovation and strive to create more technologies that can help climate change.

Now that we are here, let me report on our views from a technical perspective on how to help achieve a sustainable future through open innovation.

Everyone here has a lot of assets, and I think we all want to use them longer.

Therefore, protecting the global environment is really important to everyone! Please increase investment in renewable energy.

In the past, we could only burn known energy sources, such as coal and oil. Our families, our villages, and our society are all bound by energy.

Now we can go far through power transmission.

We started developing energy storage, which means we can store electricity in the morning and use energy at night. As a result, we can move energy quickly in time, not just in space.

Another important thing is circulation, which is circular economy. For example, solar energy that everyone is talking about now. Anyone starts discussing how to recycle solar cells. Everyone is investing in wind turbines.

But for CATL, we did actual operations on batteries. Because from an economic perspective, recycling is beneficial.

We continue to invest a lot of money in research and development because we believe technology can help us.

If you can't reduce the price of solar cells from 100% to 5% now, you can't create releasing, high-energy electricity at an affordable cost.

So CATL's approach is to invest heavily in research and development.

We have more than 20,000 technology-focused professionals working on batteries that are more efficient, safer, reusable, affordable, recyclable, and recyclable.

That's why we have nearly 30,000 patents. The number of patents increases by 15,000 every year.

Please allow me to do some product promotion here, such as Shenxing fast-charging batteries. Our batteries charge very quickly. When you drive an electric car, the owner is always worried about charging slowly and not getting enough energy.

Now, 10 minutes, 400 kilometers.

A cruising range of more than 1000 kilometers can be achieved on a single charge because its energy density is almost twice that of the original.

There is also condensed state batteries, which are still very expensive now, but are very suitable for the aviation industry because their energy density far exceeds that of all current power batteries.

Our demand for energy storage systems is 15,000 cycles of a single battery for more than 20 years.

Why 20 years? Because 20 years is as long as the life of a solar cell.

This way, you don't need to replace anything throughout the life cycle of your solar power station, so that every storage space can be truly affordable.

So how does CATL do this?

Because we're trying to solve the problem.

Everyone is talking about carbon emissions, and our CATL is one of the sources of the problem.

Start with me, start with us.

By 2025, we want to truly achieve zero carbon emissions. Core business is carbon neutral.

By 2035, the entire value chain will be carbon neutral.

Where to start?

Our approach starts at the factory.

Now that we have practiced it, we already have four factories that are zero-carbon factories.

Last year, we recycled 100,000 tons of used batteries and 13,000 tons of lithium carbonate.

When the price of lithium carbonate is high, you can make huge profits.

But if the price drops to around $10,000 per ton, we can still make a profit.

This means that the recycling system must be very intelligent and the recycling technology must be very good.

If you can do it, this means you can save about 90% of your lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese.

Suppose one day you can really own a fully circular business. After a few years, you won't have to worry about battery raw materials. This time may be 10 to 15 years.

We always wonder if we can get factories to zero carbon emissions.

Why can't we make it possible for a car, an island, or a city?

The most important thing is not only hardware technology, but also software technology.

You need to digitize all energy, create consumption, intelligently manage energy, and have power plants help reduce carbon emissions.

In addition, it is also important to ensure better economic returns, which is more economical than just connecting to the grid.

Another way we practice carbon emissions is to build Lighthouse Factory.

What does Lighthouse Factory mean? That is, large-scale intelligent manufacturing.

If your battery is not good enough, it can cause a fire. People will worry about the reliability of this new technology.

This is why we are working hard to increase the defect rate from PPM to PPB.

One in a billion defects, not one in a million defects.

Many people here may not be familiar with "Six Sigma" because it is the term of industry insiders.

The industry's Six Sigma standard typically reduces defect rates to PPM levels. We call this the one part per million defect rate.

But why should we increase the defect rate to one in a billion, or the PPB level?

Because when batteries are loaded into cars, for example: A car holds a hundred batteries in series. A million cars multiplied by 100 batteries is 100 million.

So 10 million cars times 100 is 1 billion.

If we can make good batteries, we can reduce fires or accidents in terms of car safety.

How good is it? 1000 times better.

We can reduce the probability of fire in electric vehicles to one in ten million, while the proportion of fire in fuel vehicles is about one in ten thousand. Therefore, electric vehicles not only perform better in terms of exhaust emissions, but also perform better in terms of safety performance. Good, a thousand times better than fuel vehicles.

Another problem is energy storage.

People say it's simple, but it's actually very complicated.

The reason is that our one-gigawatt energy storage system contains 15 million battery cells.

In this case, if your quality control level is only one million and the number of battery cells in the energy storage system reaches one million, you will be in big trouble.

Because this means there is a defective battery in every energy storage system you have.

So we must do everything we can to ensure that we go from PPM to PPB.

This is why it is very difficult to make a good battery, a reliable battery, a safe battery, and a cost-effective battery. We need a lot of technology to achieve this goal.

When you design a product, investors may need to ask another question.

Can this product be recycled and reused?

If you design a product that is not conducive to recycling and the circular economy, then this is not a good target for our investment.

This is the most important thing.

Because for the entire planet, if you continue to rely on mining to obtain raw materials, it is over.

So, we need everything that can be recycled.

When you invest in a new project, you must keep this in mind.

Then people will say that recycling can also cause a lot of problems.

The recycling process may pollute the environment and have a great impact.

So the design of the recycling process and material recycling is another challenge.

There are too many challenges here, especially global and geopolitical issues.

China now has a lot of technologies about solar cells and batteries.

But it is difficult to really use these to fix and accelerate worldwide decarbonization efforts.

People value their own short-term interests too much.

So we must work together.

But some people don't want that because they want to protect their industries. So that's why we need to unite.

We need to ensure that these new technologies are popularized.

CATL actively carries out internal and external open innovation and is willing to share our technology with different people.

We are working on the LRS (Technology Licensing) model with American customers, and we will also use this approach to help other battery manufacturers and even our European competitors. We want to share efforts and share results.

So we are also willing to do this with people who want to make good batteries in their own area.

Basically, that's what I want to say. But we have demonstrated our capabilities, our awareness, and our willingness to share technology with all those who want to produce batteries in our region.

The only thing we want to speed up is that we don't have time to wait because environmental issues don't wait for anyone. Humanity has never before needed a global consensus as it does today. We must 'truly' reach a consensus, use open innovation to promote technological progress, and actively respond to the challenge of climate change.

Thank you very much!

final statement

This literal translation is only to allow more industry insiders to understand the content of this speech. Without authorization, readers should refer to the English speech version for official quotes.