Tobias Hüppe moves from Northvolt to Skeleton

The battery manufacturer Skeleton Technologies has hired Tobias Hüppe from Northvolt to scale up its production. As Skeleton's new Chief Operations Officer (COO), Hüppe will be responsible for the growth of production.

Tobias Hüppe joins Skeleton Technologies with many years of experience in scaling battery production and building gigafactories, “particularly as a core team member and production manager at Northvolt”, as Skeleton emphasized. Hüppe previously held key positions in the automotive industry at Faurecia, Webasto and Edscha.

Skeleton’s previous COO, Dr Linus Froböse, will take on the role of CTO to drive forward technology and product development. He will also continue to be responsible for expanding the production of “Curved Graphene”, Skeleton’s patented carbon material, according to an accompanying press release.

In October, Skeleton Technologies announced that it had raised 108 million euros in its latest financing round from Siemens, existing investor Marubeni and Brazilian mining company CBMM, among others.

Skeleton is currently building a new plant for the production of supercapacitors in Markranstädt near Leipzig in collaboration with Siemens. Mass production is scheduled to start by the end of 2024. Siemens is primarily responsible for automating and digitalizing the planned factory. The output is expected to be up to twelve million cells per year. This would give the factory “an output 40 times higher than the existing site in Großröhrsdorf”, according to Skeleton.

At the same time, the company is developing its SuperBattery technology. This is a new generation of ultracapacitors based on the aforementioned “curved graphene”. The battery is intended to transfer the high performance and long service life of ultracapacitors to a graphene battery.

Due to their low energy density, graphene batteries are not suitable as traction batteries (Skeleton specifies 60 Wh/kg). However, as the ‘SuperBattery’ can be charged in just 15 seconds and is designed to withstand “hundreds of thousands of deep discharge and charge cycles”, it can be used in combination with a lithium-ion battery as a buffer for peak power loads for charging and discharging. As these are usually the most demanding tasks for traction batteries, the buffer battery could be used to reduce the size of the cooling system.

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