By Sameera Panchangam, Ph.D., Senior Grant Consultant, BW&CO
On October 28, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) published a National Strategy for American Leadership in Batteries and launched a lab-led scale-up consortium called the Battery Manufacturing Accelerator (BattMan). Neither comes with a startup grant amount or a deadline. Both tell battery companies what DOE wants built in the United States, and that should shape the next project a startup takes on.
What DOE announced
The strategy sets two goals: a continuous domestic battery value chain by 2030, and technology and manufacturing leadership by 2035. It names the middle of the supply chain (cathodes, anodes, electrolytes and separators) as underinvested, and it also prioritizes refining, recycling, equipment manufacturing and the pilot facilities needed to validate new technology. Read DOE's battery strategy.
BattMan, launched by DOE's Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI), is led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) with Argonne, Oak Ridge and the National Laboratory of the Rockies. Its announced work includes real-time process monitoring, digital twins and closed-loop control, and it is now setting up industry and university partnerships. Read DOE's BattMan announcement.
Which companies this is for
A domestic cell factory depends on the materials, equipment and data that feed it, so the strategy reaches well beyond cell developers. For each type of company, the useful question is what a manufacturer would need to see before buying.
Materials and component developers: show consistent specifications and compatibility with the customer's process, and know how much material the customer needs for qualification. A cathode precursor developer, for example, should show particle size distribution inside the customer's specification across consecutive batches.
Recycling and refining companies: connect feedstock variability to recovery economics and saleable output. A black-mass processor should show what happens to nickel recovery when the incoming scrap changes chemistry, and name the buyer who will take the output at that purity.
Equipment developers: compare the equipment with the incumbent line on throughput, energy use and scrap rate, and count installation downtime against it. An electrode drying system is a good example.
Software and metrology companies: measure the improvement against the manufacturer's current method, including the cost of integrating and maintaining the system. An inline inspection tool should show which defects it catches that end-of-line testing misses, and what the operator does when it flags a false positive.
Cell developers: tie performance results to manufacturing yield and cost at the scale of the next customer decision. A solid-state developer should state which steps run on existing roll-to-roll equipment and which need new tooling.
The strategy itself acknowledges the low margins and massive scale that make midstream manufacturing hard. Strategic value does not replace a reason to buy: a competitive cost, a performance advantage in a specific application, or supply assurance that changes a purchasing decision.
Look at what sits on either side of your innovation
The gap founders miss most often is upstream and downstream of their own technology. A company with a lower-energy process for separating a critical mineral will usually describe the process well and stop there. The questions that decide whether a funder or customer commits sit around it. Where does the feed come from, is that source domestic and under contract, and can it supply the volume the process needs? What does a kilogram cost by this route against the delivered price of the imported material, at commercial scale and current energy prices? Who buys the output, in what form and at what purity?
Those answers depend on other organizations: a mine or recycler for feedstock, a toll processor for an intermediate step, an offtaker willing to commit in writing, a lab that can run the qualification analysis. Reviewers fund the version of the project that names those partners and what each one does.
Set your own metrics
A notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) or request for proposals (RFP) sometimes fixes the thresholds an award must meet, such as a cost per kilowatt-hour or a cycle life at a stated temperature. When it does, those numbers are the specification.
More often the solicitation describes an outcome and leaves the numbers to you. Reviewers then look for a measured baseline for the current method, the value the project will reach, how it will be measured and who will measure it. "Improved performance" without "improved from what, to what, and by how much" reads as a project that has not been planned.
A credible target names a specific gap in current practice, uses a number someone outside the company could check (recovery yield, defect rate, cost per unit of output, batch-to-batch variation), and fits the proposed scope and budget. An overstated target hurts as much as a vague one: a reviewer who doubts the number discounts the rest of the plan, and an award won on a number you cannot hit becomes a reporting problem at the first milestone. Set the numbers first. The experiment, the equipment and the budget follow from them.
BattMan may answer an expensive scale-up question
PNNL describes BattMan as a chemistry-agnostic platform for cost-focused research and manufacturing scale-up, with facilities and expertise open to its members. Explore BattMan's capabilities. For a startup, it may be a way to test a manufacturing question on lab equipment before paying for dedicated capacity. Before budgeting around it, confirm the equipment available, how projects are selected, what the company contributes, and the data rights and intellectual property terms. Early-stage chemistry teams do not need a pilot line yet, but they should design with manufacturing limits in mind.
Defense is a second, separate case
The Department of War's Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) program lists batteries as an investment area, with the stated aim of boosting domestic manufacturing of batteries and their components and reducing reliance on foreign sources. Read the IBAS program description.
That can give some companies a second funding rationale, but it needs its own case. A DOE project explains its contribution to an energy or manufacturing mission. A defense industrial-base project has to tie the work to a specific military battery requirement, the demand behind it and the domestic production gap. Lab results can inform a defense pursuit; they do not satisfy a defense customer's qualification requirements on their own.
What to do this quarter
Write a one-page validation project. Name the target customer and the decision that customer needs to make. Describe the current production constraint, the evidence you already have, and an experiment with a pass/fail threshold against a stated baseline. Assign an owner and estimate the resources. Then check whether BattMan has the capability you need, whether a published DOE opportunity supports the work, and whether a separate defense case exists.
Spend the next dollar on the evidence that would get a customer or funder to commit. "Complete a pilot" is not that milestone. "Repeatable batches meet a named customer's specification at a documented production cost" is.
Battery founders: which has been harder to get in writing, a feedstock source or an offtaker?
Send us your one-page validation project. BW&CO will tell you whether BattMan, a DOE opportunity or a defense industrial-base case fits it. Book a call
About the author
Sameera Panchangam, Ph.D., is a Senior Grant Consultant at BW&CO, based in Holly Springs, North Carolina. A molecular biologist with a decade of laboratory research experience, she now writes and manages grant proposals for small businesses. Read Sameera's profile
Program names are used for identification only. BW&CO is not affiliated with or endorsed by DOE, PNNL, the national laboratories or the Department of War.