James O’Malley on how battery technology has revolutionised the fight against climate change
As the politicians made clear at last month’s COP26 [United Nations Climate Change Conference], in Glasgow, now is the time to act on climate change. We need to cut carbon emissions, and knowing this, it is easy to be pessimistic: Will people really be prepared to make changes in their lives? Can we really remake society to be much greener than it is now?
Strangely, I’m feeling optimistic. Especially compared to if you’d asked me a few years ago. And that’s mostly because of one factor: Batteries. It isn’t obvious but over the last decade or so, just as we’ve watched our computers get faster and screens get thinner, batteries have dramatically improved too.
According to the European Patent Office, the number of battery patents filed grew by an average of 14% every year between 2005 and 2018. In other words, battery innovation is exploding. Energy storage is getting better and better, as more companies are discovering new chemistry and processes to make them work more efficiently.
And the results of all of this work are astonishing. According to Bloomberg, energy density — the amount of power that can be stored in the same sized battery — has tripled in the last decade. And the cost of batteries has dramatically fallen too.
Today, battery power per kilowatt hour costs around only 10% of what it did a decade ago. And the expectation is that the costs will continue to fall, both as battery chemistry improves and because manufacturing lots of batteries on a massive scale makes the production of individual batteries cheaper.
More information: https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/lifestyle/technology/how-battery-technology-can-save-the-planet