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Everything Electric Podcast
Battery Deep Dive: 5-Minute EV Charging, Solid State & How Batteries Are Quietly Running the World!
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Everything Electric podcast. We've got something a little bit different for you this week. I was at the Latitude Festival last weekend, so that's a big music and culture festival here in the uk, out in East Anglia. And one of the things I was doing on stage was with our Everything Electric's very own Robert Llewellyn. So he joined me on stage with the battery expert, Professor Saifal Islam from Oxford University. And we were talking about batteries and so we thought we'd share that with you as this week's podcast. It will sound a little bit different because obviously we're on stage in front of a live audience, but the brilliant thing about it is that, you know, these. We're at a music festival, we're sitting on stage talking about batteries and there's an audience who chose to spend their leisure time at a festival listening to what we had to say. Because this is, you know, mainstream now. People are interested, they know it's out there, they want to know what's going on. So they came to listen to us. Later on, everyone went to listen to David Byrne and that was Saturday at a UK music festival. So I think that was just brilliant. So we've got the audio of that conversation for you now, but the video isn't ready quite yet. It will be on The Cosmic Shambles YouTube channel in a few weeks, if you want to see the three of us sitting on a very pretty stage in front of the audience. So it was a great fun discussion. We covered a huge range of stuff. I hope you enjoy it. And before we get started with that, here's a quick ad break.
- [01:40]
B
Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun packed test drive Tastic events in the UK and Australia. Next up, Everything Electric Greater London and then Sydney. All events include a B2B EV day and commercial vehicles too.
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C
Right, Batteries, batteries. We're all in the middle of a field and it's summertime. Let's talk about batteries. So batteries are, to most of us, just a black box, right? They're just these magic little packages that have somehow followed us around in our lives and they're just a thing with a shape and energy comes out of them. But now things are starting to change, right? They're increasingly running the world. It's becoming obvious that the shape of the future is going to depend on what batteries can do and how we can use them. So we are going to spend this session talking about batteries. What's coming, What's Happening. We're going, what's going on? Who's doing what and what the future holds. And this is a special event here in the Shambles Forest tent because it will also go out as a podcast for the Everything Electric Show. So if you love it so much, you want to listen to it again, you will find it on the Everything Electric channel in a couple of weeks time. So, joining me on stage here to talk about batteries, we have a fabulous combination of two. On the far side is Robert Llewellyn, of course, from Red Dwarf, Scrappy Challenge now, the Everything Electric Show. And then just here in the middle is Professor Saif Al Islam from the University of Oxford, who is a battery chemist. You may have seen him doing the Royal Institution Christmas lectures back in 2016 all about batteries. So we've got a fabulous combination of different perspectives, the theoretical chemistry and the. I know, gadget geek, tech keen geeks. One of those things. One of those things, yeah. So before we start with all the sensible bit, because, you know, there is a sensible bit, we're going to start with lemons, because we have with us on stage a world record holder. Ooh, right. What world record have you got and how do you do it?
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D
I didn't know that she was going to squeeze it in so early.
- [03:52]
C
Sorry, I've forgotten about you and your puns. I'm regretting this now.
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D
So, part of the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, we had to show how a battery worked. And one of the best school experiments of how a battery works is when life gives you lemons, you make a battery. So you can actually put in, in this case, a copper nail and then a zinc nail or a zinc wire, and then you actually can connect them with an electrical wire and actually generate a voltage. But when I gave that lecture, I said, or the rehearsals, I said, I don't want to just do one battery, I wanted one lemon. I don't want to do a few lemons. I wanted to go large, very large. And we actually got a world record by using 2016 lemon slices and generated or squeezed out 1200 volts. So that was a world record at that time. However, there was a group in Denmark that broke my record a couple of years later. So obviously, as you can imagine, I felt very sour and bitter about that. Sorry again. But anyway, the Royal Society of Chemistry approached me very recently, actually, before one of the cops, and said, we want to do something for schools, you know, about energy. And I said, quick as a flash, I said, I want my bloody record back. So only a few records we use now 3,000 lemons and generated 2,400 volts. So now we've got. We've regained the world record. It's on YouTube. If you type in 3,000 lemons, we've got that world record. It's. Despite my academic research, it's still one of my proudest moments. I've got this world record.
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C
Very good. And then, just to make all this fair, Robert had a lemon story. So let's. Do you have a lemon story?
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B
Yes, I do have a lemon story. We. Red dwarf in 20, I think 16, 20, 17. We made an episode called Lemons. And I won't tell you the plot because I know you're all desperate to watch it and you can watch it on iplayer, but we had. We went back in time, we accidentally met Jesus, but we met Jesus of Caesarea, not Nazareth. We didn't know the difference. And we needed to generate some electricity in the story. So we made a prop battery. It wasn't meant to work, you know, it was a prop on a TV show, but it generated. It was. So I was amazed. I was the only member of the cast that was amazed that it did generate a small voltage. And the. Our head, our camera director, had a voltmeter and he clipped it on him. Oh, my God, it works. And then Danny, John Jules, who plays the cat in Red Dwarf, in case you haven't watched it, asked how many batteries we'd need to drive my electric car. How many lemons we'd need to drive my electric car. And Ed, the camera guy, who's clever, worked it out and it was about seven and a half tons would generate enough electricity to keep it going. So you'd have to have a trailer with seven and a half tons. But because the car is not. That was a Nissan Leaf, very old Nissan Leaf. It wouldn't. It would be. Yeah, it was. It was kind of interesting. But that was the.
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C
I see a wonderful future somewhere where battery cars have got so small and light that SEIFL's next world record could power your trip.
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B
I mean, I'm sure you could do it. It would be. We maybe, maybe should have think about that.
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D
Just the end, the lemon story, just to give you a feeling for the incredible voltage. But we did the maths about the actual amount of current, the current density going through. We worked out the actual number of volt, the kind of watts. You know, the things that we know about lighting a bulb is only 2 watts.
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C
Yes.
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D
So actually the amount of power generated was tiny.
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B
Yeah.
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C
But it looked good. Okay. Yeah, so let's, let's just. I mean, you've probably got a feel for where this is going, but just very briefly, I want to introduce the two of you or just, you know, give a bit of context as to why you're on stage rather than anyone else in the. In the cosmic shambles. Green room. So the Everything Electric show is why you're here. What was fully charged for anyone who wasn't in the audience before? Just give us a very quick 30 second. What is the Everything Electric show? What do we do?
- [07:57]
B
So the everything electric shows, two channels on YouTube and one of them focuses very much on electric cars or electric vehicles in general, the other one on electric tech. So a lot for the home, what you can do in your house. Solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, all those various bits of technology that have emerged in the last 10, 15 years. And so that's what the, the YouTube shows are. We also do live events. The next one's in Twickenham in a few weeks time and then after that in Sydney. We've done them all over the world. And those facilitate test drives because we've discovered, along with the automotive industry, that if people get in an electric car and drive it, they realize it's just a car, not some weird other thing. And so then they, you know, we've done. We've just. We've just passed 175,000 test drives globally, which is bonkers, really. I don't know.
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C
Anyway, you've had a lot of discussions about batteries over the years and seen a lot of discussion about cool facilities and cyphil. You know, what does a theoretical materials chemist do in the battery space? Like what, what do you actually get involved in?
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D
Well, I suppose, in short, if we want better batteries in the future, and we all do, you would love to have your mobile phone charged for a week rather than just a day or a month. So we're trying to look at new materials. So really a lot of the new technologies require basic material science and we're trying to develop new materials. But to develop new materials, you need to understand how materials work at the fundamental level, at the atomic level, often. So my work is around modeling and designing new materials and seeing how they work at the atomic level. So really we are a virtual microscope. We try and peer into these very complex materials and see if we can make them better.
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C
And it's moving really fast, isn't it? So just, I think it's worth just dwelling for a moment on how quick the progress has been. So, you know, Robert, I think you had a Nissan Leaf for 2011 or something. You replaced the battery. Was it 10 years later? Yeah, just in 10 years. Just describe the difference between those two batteries.
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B
I mean, it was, I think it's fair to say, and it's not being that cruel to Nissan, that their initial electric car, they were one of the first people to make a electrical from the ground up, was not brilliant and the battery technology was not perfect and they didn't heat it or cool it, which is now the norm with electric vehicles. So it was limited. But what happened was it had a 24 kilowatt hour battery that weighed x kilograms, I can't remember, and took up X space. And then 10 years later you could put a 40 kilowatt hour battery in the same space that was 12 kilograms lighter. So it was lighter and had more, it could contain more electricity. So the car went from, I'm gonna say, to be generous to Nissan, between 65 and 70 miles on a charge. On average. If you drove fast, if you went very, very slowly down a hill, it would go for a thousand miles. It was easy, but if there was a headwind or you were going any speed, it wasn't good. And now it does. My daughter drives the car literally every day. It, it does about 125 miles on a, On a charge for a Nissan Leaf is amazing.
- [11:02]
C
Long way. Yeah. So these are. And actually there was a, I think some kind of, I don't know if it's an official world record or not, but Mercedes Benz in August last year, almost a year ago, drove 1,205 km from Stuttgart to Malmo in Sweden without stopping on a single charge using a new solid state battery. And we'll come to what solid state batteries are in a bit. But 1200 kilometers on a single. I mean it really, these, it feels like these, these, these, you know, the car makers are obviously all competing with each other, but. And we don't need necessarily 1200 kilometers, but, but they're, they're sort of. There is this world in which they're kind of competing to break these records. And it's amazing. It's amazing. Twelve, like a thousand kilometers. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?
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B
Well, I mean, now there are the, the really the largest trucks that are allowed on the road in Europe. I think this is quite, quite extraordinary. And now on average doing about 300 miles. So 450. 450 kilometers on batteries.
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C
So these are like the big trucks
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B
you see on the biggest trucks, 44 ton articulate, we would call them. Articulated lorries or semi trucks in North America and that's become a really big thing. And they charge, they charge faster than the drivers are allowed to have. They have to have a 45 minute break every four hours. I believe that's the law in Europe, but the same in Ukraine. And those trucks can charge in about 25 minutes. So they charge in 25 minutes and they've got to hang around longer. So all the sort of nonsense about, oh, I don't want to hang around while the thing charges, you have to stop, which is good for the driver and normal car driver should do the same.
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C
You know, it's very bad, so it's not the limit.
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D
Yes, one thing you should know about this range anxiety. There used to be much more range anxiety, but there's interesting stat from the Department of Transport and I think around Europe that actually 80% of UK car journeys are less than 50 miles. I mean most of them are to do with actually 50% are less than 5 miles just going to the school run or the supermarket. So the range anxiety was really in the early days where people worried about charging. But now people have seen from their neighbors that actually you can rely on electric vehicles just for normal driving, even for your daily commute. So I think that the next challenge actually will be can we charge faster and infrastructure in terms of charging.
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C
We'll get to that. And I think, I mean we should probably provide a bit of context here, which is that of course we've gone from batteries to cars in a very short period of time. But that's because if you look at what, where batteries like, if you look at the uses of batteries maybe 20 years ago, it's all consumer electronics, batteries in whatever you put batteries in Walkman's or whatever, probably some other things as well. But if you look at the battery use this year, it's almost all moving things of one sort or another. There's a tiny bit which is static large batteries for storing grid energy or domestic energy and then there's this tiny fraction of which is all the batteries that we have around and we're, you know, that sort of in our pockets or our homes or whatever. So really if you're. Batteries have gone very quickly from being a consumer technology to a vehicle technology. So if you. That's why we're straight in on the vehicles and they're also cheaper. So I think lithium ion batteries are 93% cheaper than in 2010 or something. So all of this is going on. So when it comes to. So let's get to capabilities and what batteries can do and what they might be able to do. Because you can measure a battery in lots of ways, right? There's the energy density, which is how much energy you can fit in the space in a car you've got available for a battery. There's the cost of it, there's the materials. How accessible are they, how easy are they to use? There's the speed of charge and discharge, there's the length of its lifetime, how long it will last. So there's all these different ways. And I think it used to be thought that sort of more energy was always better, but actually there's all these different things which become more important once the actual total amount of energy isn't the thing. So let's talk about how good batteries are and where's the biggest progress being made so saiful on all of those things. Obviously, there's a lot of different things in there. Where is the focus? Like battery designers now, which one of those are they focusing on the most?
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D
I suppose it depends. There's a good question in terms of different factors, different applications. So I think for me, one of the areas that needs to be improved is sustainability. So can we move over to more sustainable materials? So a big question about resources. People are talking about limited lithium resources. One of the big elements in your battery right now is cobalt, and it's actually used in electric vehicles as well. Cobalt is expensive, it's toxic, but also there's some ethical concerns about its mining. So an area that we're looking at is can we move away from unsustainable materials? And that's where iron and manganese, which are more sustainable, but also can we move over to beyond lithium? So I would say lithium ion technology would be with us. And it's an area that I'm still researching in trying to improve energy density. But can we go beyond lithium and beyond cobalt? And that's some of the big challenges.
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C
So it's about the materials themselves that we've got.
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D
In my field, definitely the material science, as I mentioned earlier on a lot of these green energy technologies rely basically on materials science and chemistry. If you look at solar power, my other area, they rely on materials. Can we develop better materials? So I would argue that we've got to think about in the long term is obviously we're trying to reduce carbon emissions, but can we develop better sustainable materials? And one of the areas is to do with sodium ion and solid state, which you touched on.
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C
Get to those. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So when. So basically, how much are there before we dig into the specifics on all of these things. Are there fundamental limits on how. Like, how close are we to the fundamental limits on how good a battery can get? You've got basic principle of a battery, which is that you've got the two electronic connections, the anode and the cathode. And then you need a separator, you need some stuff in the middle. And are there any fundamental limits on. Is there a theoretical limit on how small a battery could be, for example?
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D
Not necessary. So you're right, Helen, that if you view. Let's view a battery. I haven't described what a battery is. So battery is just an electrochemical sandwich. So just like a sandwich, you've got two bread slices. In this case, it's a couple of electrodes, and in between, just like a sandwich, you've got a sandwich filling, a meat or a cheese if you're vegetarian. And that sandwich filling allows lithium ions. So when you're using your phone right now or your laptop, lithium ions are going one way. And then when you're charging your phone or laptop tonight, the lithium ions are going the other way, but you're giving it to electrons. So the fundamental limit really is how much lithium you can stuff into those bread slices, into those electrodes. So that's the kind of limit. Currently the limit really is on the positive electrode side. The negative electrode is. It's cheap old graphite, just carbon. So if we can stuff in more lithium into the other side, the positive electrode, we can get much higher energy density. You can store more energy into that unit mass or unit volume, so you can make it smaller and lighter, which is why we've been successful in these portable electronics. It's revolutionized our lives. And if you think about it, when I was going to concerts, seeing the Smiths at festivals like glastonbury in the 80s, you would just wave your hands about and watch the. The bands nowadays, everybody, I'm sure David Byrne tonight, everybody be holding up their portable devices and filming it. And that has changed in the last 50.
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C
You might not be allowed to do that. I think there might be some rules about that.
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D
The fact that you can. You can actually have your device with you.
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C
Yeah, it's small enough to carry around with you. So basically, we're not near the end of the battery store yet. Batteries have farther to go. And one of the things, One of these limits that. There's certainly a lot of interest in the car world, as you said, Robert, is charging. And we had recent. Was it two. I can't remember Was it a month ago? Byd?
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B
Yeah, very recently.
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C
Just tell us about. Because that was a really big splash. I think my impression was it surprised a lot of people.
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B
Yes.
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C
So just tell us what it was that they did.
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B
Their claim was that they could charge a car from, I think it was 10 to 70%. And this is a car with a large battery. So you're talking 250 plus miles of range in five minutes. And this is called flash charging. It's a, it's the luxury brand that BYD make that Denzer. So it's a high end luxury expensive car. It's not, it's not one of their cheap models but that charges. So if you think when you saw the first time you would have seen a rapid charger at a say a motorway services and add a big cable on it, that's 50 kilowatts. That charges at 50 kilowatts. The more recent ones that are around now 250 kilowatts, 350 kilowatts and 350 kilowatts sort of became the gold standard. That's the fastest you can do. Their charger is 1500 kilowatts. So it's 15 1.5 megawatts. It charges the car in, in in about five minutes. And all the people I knew who were skeptical and were doubting and the automotive industry is going this is just more of that nonsense. But they all went to see it, they all watched it charge. It charges in under five minutes. It adds 250plus miles of range in that time. And if you, if it's really cold it takes seven minutes. So it is slower when it's very cold. But they're talking minus 15 degrees centigrade. So really icy cold. It will take slightly longer and the
- [21:19]
C
limit isn't so much it going up and down the wire. Although you do, you know, you need to pay attention to that. It's what the battery can take, what
- [21:25]
B
the battery can take, which is. So these are blades, batteries and this is BYD sort of patented blade battery. And that's all I know, I know the shape of them. I don't know what's inside. But it's a long blade rather than a round cylinder. It's a long. So they have hundreds of these blades in the, in the car. So and also, I mean the other thing that they've announced is, and catl as well, where I went to visit in China last year, they're talking about batteries that will, I mean they've definitely outlast the car. I mean, I think that's the big change that we all need to kind of grok and tell people when they're going, what about the batteries? What about the car? Worry about the car. If you're buying a second hand electric car that was made in the last, say two or three years, the battery will be fine, the car might, the wheels might fall off, the steering might not be any good, the brakes will be worn out, the lights don't work. You know, check the rest of the car out, the battery will be, will
- [22:14]
C
outlast the car, becoming really reliable and they're lasting better than people thought. Even the early batteries are lasting a lot longer. So that's not. Yeah. Again, another myth. If anyone tells you, oh, you know, the battery's going to go in three years, it really doesn't. And I think the charging thing is interesting partly because I think again, most people don't need that, but it shows what's possible. Like we were just as you. I don't know about you, but 10 years ago in. At first I remember someone turning up with a 1. I can't remember what it was. I basically thought it was some number of 100amp charge. I mean, I basically thought it was a controlled explosion.
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B
Yes.
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C
No one's gonna do that. And you remember that megawatts, that's what you measure like massive great big wind turbines in like it's a unit that is like it's a factory level. Yeah, units rate of power.
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B
I mean, I think it's important to explain that the way they manage to do that without literally, you know, breaking the local grid is they have a massive battery on site that's part of the charger and that is charging 24 hours a day. They're making money out of that because they charge it on cheap electricity at night and sell that electricity for more in the day. But that's the buffer between the grid and that charger. To be able to dump that much electricity in in a few minutes requires very, very big wires going across a local neighborhood. So, you know, that's how they've got around that, that problem.
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C
So saifl, what's happening? Like, why is this hard for the battery? Say someone turns up, you know, they've developed a battery. Here it is. Someone, you know, someone over here has this colossal great big charger. What is it that might happen in the battery that might go wrong and what can you do to engineer to stop it happening? Like, what do you have to do to allow a battery to take this colossal torrent of power.
- [23:53]
D
So the charging is related to how fast those charged ions, the charged lithium ions are going from one side to the other. And how fast those lithium ions are going is limited depending on the material you're using. And also if you charge too fast and too high, you can actually degrade the electrolyte. So there is a safety issue. So currently the battery in your phone and the electrolyte and the electric vehicles have that. When I mentioned the electrochemical sandwich, that sandwich filling is currently a liquid and it's a very flammable liquid. It's a salt, but in an organic solvent. So the problem is if you charge too fast, you can get degradation, you can get, and you can actually get as very rarely now because of battery management, you can get the odd fire. So safety is an issue. And considering how many electric vehicles are out there compared to the internal combustion engine, you know, we've come a long way. So actually I feel it's very an optimistic story by nature. I'm an optimist and from 15, 20 years ago, when Robert was talking about the first electric vehicles, to now. And also the power of your mobile phone, because your mobile phone isn't really a phone, it's a mini supercomputer, considering what you can do with it. I mean, it's more powerful than the computers that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon back in 1969 when I watched it as a six year old. So it's actually very, very power hungry. So basically it's about lithium ions moving very fast and that can slow down the charging.
- [25:34]
C
But then the point is that actually these are very sophisticated things. It's not just a sandwich. It's a sandwich with a sort of control system doesn't let you do it like put enough power in fast enough to cause damage. So actually the protections are in place so that, that can't be a problem. So just coming, I mean, we talked a little bit about the materials and the kind of weird stuff that we have been making batteries out of. And I think one of the trends we've seen is that, you know, there are these what people call rare earth or critical minerals that are these, they're very weird. Some of these things are very weird compared with normal life. But actually it feels like the focus on battery chemistry now is, is entirely to make it less weird. Right. So instead of having cobalt and manganese, you have lithium ion phosphate. Right. Much more common elements. And using, I mean carbon as the anode is a very, it's a very common material. And so it feels like and we'll come to sodium ion in a bit. And sodium is just common salt. Is that fair that this is about like making batteries less weird? Because there's a kind of superpower if you can make a battery out of kind of ordinary things.
- [26:41]
D
I mentioned sustainability. Maybe less weird means maybe less. Less unsustainable. Yeah. So if we can't. I mean, the classic is iron and silicon. We've been looking at materials made of iron and silicon, so that's a great. I would love to have a paper saying batteries made from rust and sand. So if you can. It'll be really low cost, it'll be very sustainable. I don't know about less weird. I mean, the complexity. I love chemistry because it is weird. But there are. If we can move away from. Also the geopolitics of some of these materials is complex as well. I don't want to go down that route, but I don't.
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C
We'll come on to that later. Don't worry. You're not getting away with that.
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D
Are we going to come on to recycling?
- [27:24]
C
Yes. That was the next question.
- [27:31]
B
This episode is brought to you by Hankook. The Hankook ion tyre is built exclusively for electric vehicles, engineered to deliver what EV drivers need most confident grip, quietness, energy efficiency and long mileage. As the official tyre partner of Formula E Hongkook proves its EV technology is at the highest level of performance and brings that same innovation to every ion tyre on the road.
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C
I was going to ask Robert first because I. I guess battery. I mean, I think eight years ago, a lot of people were asking about recycling. Then it became apparent that batteries were lasting a long time and we didn't need to worry about it quite yet. I remember, I think the last shoot I did for everything electric before the pandemic was at a mechanical battery recycling place in Germany. And maybe you've been to more since, but I feel it's sort of. There's two questions is, can we recycle what we've already made and will we be able to recycle the batteries that are coming now? Have you been to any good battery recycling places?
- [28:36]
B
Not really. I mean, not really yet. And I want to. I mean, my dream is to eventually be allowed to go back into America to go to redwood materials, which is kind of, I think, one of the companies the forefront. There are certainly big ones in China, but redwood materials are achieving quite extraordinary levels of percentages of recycling the materials. Like they're in that high 90% of everything that's in a battery pack. They're managing to reuse. And currently new Teslas are containing quite large amounts of materials that were recycled by them. So the guy who set up Redwood Materials, J.B. straubo, was one of the founders of Tesla and one of the early people there, and he left and set up a battery recycling company. And they really struggled to start with because they didn't have any batteries to recycle. So they were using flip phones and old laptops and things like that because the car batteries weren't wearing out, as you said. But so it's a very. It's a growth industry. But I think what is. What I have seen more of is the second life. So when a electric vehicle battery, say, is at 70%, so you've lost quite a lot of the initial range of where it was. You just repackage it into a box, you put it next to it. I mean, which station? A very big city in Belgium. The name's gone out of my head. No, it's in. It's in the Netherlands. Not Antwerp? No, because Antwerp have got it. It's. Anyway, there's a big football stadium in the Netherlands. They've got. The whole roof is covered in solar panels that charges a load of old car batteries. Outside the stadium, they run their night games 100 powered by.
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C
Wow.
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B
By those batteries. So, you know, I mean, we're talking megawatts of batteries. It's not. It's not.
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C
Well, it's also the case, isn't it, that it's not just about what you can do? Because when I went back in 2020, went to that mechanical battery sector they would do, they were sort of chopping it up in really clever ways. And then they'd separate the bits into, you know, there was a sack for the cobalt and a sack for the lithium and a sack for all the things. And I said, well, what, you know, what do you get paid to do this? Who do you sell them to? And they said, oh, they sort of line them up by price. And they said they only sell the top three. So they sell the copper, they resell the copper, the cobalt and maybe it was the nickel. And they said everything else we could, but because it's a bit more expensive, because it's so cheap to extract the raw material, nobody wants to buy the recycled one because it costs a little bit more now. Maybe that's changed now, but I was like, no, you're going through all this effort, you're doing exactly what you're supposed to do. You're lining them up. I've got My bag of lithium and then just nobody wants to buy it. So it wasn't actually a technical problem, it's a market problem.
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B
Yeah, I think that has changed since then. I think now it is a. It's.
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C
Manufacturers want to say that they're using recycling.
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B
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that going on.
- [31:22]
D
Yeah. I think, as we know with lead acid batteries, there was a big legislation about recycling. I think that will come with lithium ion batteries, that there might be legislation to shift it to make it more, as you say, more market friendly or more economical. But you're right, a lot of it to do with cost because that's why electric vehicles have been successful recently. It's just the cost have come down. Maybe it's economy of scale, but it's a real opportunity. It's not my research area recycling, but I can see it's a real big research and commercial opportunity.
- [31:55]
C
Well, there's also been this idea of battery passports, hasn't there? I'm not sure if it's for car batteries, but the idea that when the first manufacturer makes their battery, they write down what's in it, where did it come from, and then you kind of keep a record of. Is it the eu maybe? You know more than the eu?
- [32:09]
B
No, I don't. I wish I did, but I have heard of that, that they. They're trying to kind of keep track the materials that are in so that
- [32:15]
C
as it goes into the house or whatever, you actually have a record of where it's been. So you've got more confidence, it's safer, you can trace it back. So I think that's coming for at least some things in the eu. And once you've established it, I think it will become normal. Okay, let's get a little bit onto battery types because I think for people who don't think about batteries all the time, there's a whole load of horrible things from the horrible words from the periodic table, and they sort of get tossed around like confetti. And it's really hard to separate out what's going on. But there's two. There's two battery technologies in particular that I would like us to have a chat about. And the first one is, let's do sodium ion batteries first. So seiful. First of all, just tell me, why do we go from lithium ion to sodium ion? Like, why is sodium an option for making a battery?
- [33:02]
D
Well, when I talk about sodium, I like to ask, how many in the audience have heard of sodium ion batteries?
- [33:10]
C
Pretty well informed.
- [33:11]
D
Not very half.
- [33:12]
C
Third to a half.
- [33:13]
D
So why sodium? So actually it's called beyond lithium, but I like to say, as somebody heard this morning, is actually below lithium in the periodic table. If you remember your school chemistry, sodium sits in that group one below lithium, so actually has the same sort of chemistry as lithium, so actually can be used in batteries. The disadvantage. Well, I'll talk about the advantage first. The advantage of sodium, it's incredibly abundant. If you think about the stuff you sprinkle on your chips, on your pasta, or in my case, before a tequila shot, it's salt. So there's a lot of sodium out there, so it's very abundant, so it's going to be cheaper. The downside, because it's below lithium in the periodic table, it. It's actually larger and heavier, so means that it probably won't be used in your mobile phones in the near future because how much sodium you can stuff into your battery will be less than lithium, but it can be used for maybe larger applications. So the big applications in my area is to do with renewables, solar. So when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, we need energy storage. In fact, we've got solar panels in our house and we've got a lithium ion phosphate battery. We've got a battery with it. But sodium could be used for these really large solar farms or these wind farms. Sodium is much, much cheaper. So sodium ion batteries could be used in grid storage.
- [34:44]
C
So basically, if you don't need them to be moving around, they can do it. And actually, Robert, we've seen just this year, eleven Energy. So if you've been or about to go, they come to our shows, they're doing like, they're really. I mean, it's 11 because 11 is the number of sodium in the periodic table. So. Yeah. What. What are they up to?
- [35:01]
B
I mean, what. We just saw two installations of their sodium ion home batteries in. In Stroud in Gloucestershire. There were two we went to visit and I mean, they are just white boxes on the wall. You know, there's, as always, when you're trying to make a television show, something visually stimulating and you want to do. You've got to cover a battery. It's a box. There's not a lot to see. It did have a green light at the end. Yeah, that was brilliant. We got a close up of that tiny little green light. So. But I mean, that was the. The advantages, as I understand it from the. The company that have done this is partly cost, but mainly longevity. So they're talking about five to 6,000 recharge cycles. So you're talking 25, 30 years use as a home battery. And then the recycling of a sodium ion battery is not as challenging, I think because partly because it's a lot of salt. And are you going to reuse that salt? Probably not. I mean this is what we don't know. I mean that was, that was under discussion.
- [36:00]
C
But you know, but they're also better at low temperatures. Right.
- [36:02]
B
And they're very good at. Sorry, that is very important. Yeah, they're very good at. So you have them outside your house if it's really cold, they're partially affected, but nothing like as much as lithium.
- [36:11]
C
So and people, somebody's had a go at putting this in the car. Right. There's, I mean I think they have
- [36:16]
B
in China there are sodium.
- [36:17]
C
Yeah. So it can in theory, if you, if you don't want some kind of, I don't know, Ferrari style super thing, you could in principle put it in a cheap car.
- [36:25]
B
Yeah. And they're talking about more like in buses and trucks and large vehicles that we saw an earth mover at the Shanghai Motor show, like a big bulldozer thing.
- [36:34]
C
Right.
- [36:34]
B
That had sodium ion batteries. Massive thing. Yeah.
- [36:37]
C
Which is because I think that's, I mean that's the critical point is it is when, you know, we talk about them on things like the everything Electric show, here's this company, it's got this idea, it's got investors but when it actually starts turning up as a product on the market, then you've kind of turned the corner and you're into this is now just going to be driven by price. And does it work?
- [36:53]
B
Yeah.
- [36:53]
C
And if it does work and it feels like, it feels like sodium ion batteries are coming. Right.
- [36:57]
B
I think so. I think that out of all the new battery chemistries, that's the one that's repeated quite recently commercially and it's now being mass catl are churning them out, you know, big time.
- [37:07]
C
Anything else on sodium?
- [37:08]
D
Yeah, well, just say about the vehicles already. I think in China largely they're used in e scooters and small vehicles. So you're right, it's not just a big grid storage or next to a solar panels in a house. They're going to be used for light vehicles and they'll be much cheaper, there'll be lifetime be longer and hopefully more sustainable as well.
- [37:32]
C
Okay. So that is the sodium ion battery bit and then the other thing that, you know, we hear the phrase that's knocking around in the battery world in new technologies is is solid state batteries. So to get what this is, let's go back to your sandwich. What's a solid state battery?
- [37:47]
D
In fact, I'm glad I brought up the electrochemical sandwich. So I mentioned the sandwich with the two bread slices, the two electrodes in between. I mentioned that there was a liquid electrolyte in your phone right now, in terms of safety, if you could replace that flammable liquid with a solid, you basically have an all solid state battery. And that's what the all solid state batteries about. There's another advantage is that you can replace one of those bread slices, one of the negative electrode. Instead of using graphite, you can use the holy grail, which is lithium, and then you get much, much higher energy density. Just to give you an idea, you'd get probably more than five times more energy stored compared to your current lithium ion battery. In a solid state battery, the current limitations is because it's a solid, the ions moving through a solid happens to be not as fast as lithium ions moving through a liquid naturally. But there's been massive, massive advances. So I'm again very, very optimistic that within 5, 10 years you'll hear more about solid state batteries being used in applications. So that's, that's the background behind a solid state battery.
- [38:57]
C
And have you had any interesting conversations
- [38:59]
B
about solid state battery loads? And I mean, I was always worried that solid state batteries, a similar technology to carbon capture and storage and nuclear fusion, you know, yes, if it worked, when's it going to happen? You know, so it always seems to be a few years ahead. I mean, Toyota have made a very big announcement very recently that they, because they're sort of so behind with electric vehicles that they're bringing out a solid state battery electric vehicle in 2028. So they put that date down and we'll see if that actually happens.
- [39:28]
C
It does feel as though there is definitely, I mean, there's always competition in the market, but it does feel that now it's a different kind of competition. They're sort of, they want to do the new cool thing. Like they want to demonstrate that it works. It's not just that they're having a project because it used to be they'd announce a big project, but now it's like, actually no, we're going to, here's the car and here it works. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about who is doing this, because we hear, I mean, I've already heard, you know, China Catl. Is that in Taiwan or is that China?
- [39:55]
B
China, yeah.
- [39:56]
C
China, yeah. So there's a lot of this technology which has been concentrated in China. Right. That's where most of the batteries that we get and Elliot for the Everything Electric show is out there covering all of, all of this stuff. But there's, there's a. So let's talk about first about how far ahead China is. Because it does feel as though, Robert, they are, I mean you've been, you've been to Shanghai, you've been to, they're almost, it's almost like a different age. Right. They can see they've got different view of the future and they're sort of already in it.
- [40:26]
B
Yes, I mean it's very, it's very hard. I didn't, I saw, you know, a very small area of Chinese life, but it was very hard not to be slightly overwhelmed by all because of the scale. I think the scale is the most important thing. But I mean Shanghai is just a colossal city and I, I mean I'm sure it's not, it's nowhere near 100. But the vast majority of transport is electric in the, in the city. All the public transport, all the taxis, definitely the air quality. And it didn't used to be, used to be terrible. It used to be terrible partly because they had coal burning power plants right in the middle of Shanghai which they've got rid of. Those have all gone and there's loads of arguments that they built more coal burning power plants outside the city which are still using, but they have invested in renewables on a scale we cannot even begin to think. I think it was 2024 that the world total of solar installation doubled and it was all in China. So they literally doubled everything. We'd been putting every, we've been putting solar panels on roofs for the last 30 plus years and it doubled overnight in one year with what they've done. So they are very committed to it
- [41:36]
C
and we should actually, you know, just, we were talking in our previous session about the importance of optimism and being hopeful and there is actually this massive thing just in the global carbon budget last December, which is that. So China's emissions have been going up because their economy is expanding. And you know, obviously that involves using more energy, but their emissions are flat and that, that is such a big deal, partly because they manufacture a lot of stuff for the rest of the world and that's a big chunk of everyone's emissions. But actually they're installing like their economy is still growing, which is what everyone seems to want. And, but, and their energy use is still growing, but their emissions are about to start going down. And that is such a big deal because you, I mean in Europe we've already decoupled the size of our economy from our energy use. But then we're not doing the big industrial, we're not making all the things. But they are. And I really think that's important that I think in the coming global carbon budget, November, December this year, look out for it. I think emissions will have flattened off or starts gone down and that's just huge. But it's because of the speed that China is pushing this technology.
- [42:45]
B
Yeah, well, I mean globally, if you just think of what's happened in the last few years globally, the oil, the sales of, of crude oil have dropped by 2%. Not because of a recession, not because of a war, not because of a pandemic, because there's now enough electric vehicles on the roads that aren't buying oil, that aren't buying liquid fuels that that's actually made the dent. And I mean, I think we're probably likely to see a renewed effort on behalf of the fossil fuel industry to spread as much negative stuff about that as possible. But I mean that's the first time I've ever been aware of it. And I mean a huge amount of it is in Asia, that change. So the biggest change, you know, I wasn't surprised to see the electric cars in China. What really blew me away was the scooters was the two wheel because there's millions of them and it's just overwhelming how many there are. And we stood outside a little convenience store in a little side street in Shanghai and a woman in her 80s I think came up on her little scooter. She lifted the saddle, she twisted the battery, pulled it out, shoved it in a thing in the wall, took another one out, shoved it in, twisted it again, put the seat down, off she went. I reckon it took her about 22 seconds to completely refuel her scooter. And there is a cost to that and that's. But there's apps that do it. It's like, and that is not a flash new installation. It's actually a bit scruffy. There was a load of, there was a load of chickens in a cage to the side. You know, it wasn't a sort of showpiece, greener than thou thing, it was just what people do. That's how you ride your scooter in Shanghai.
- [44:15]
C
Yeah, and it works.
- [44:16]
B
And it works.
- [44:16]
C
And the chickens are on board apparently. And I guess the thing, I mean that's one of the issues. What's One of the discussions that has come up with sodium ion batteries, I think, is that because China is so far ahead in making lithium ion batteries, but actually we do have SO11 energy. I think they're not manufacturing in the UK yet, but they want to. That's the problem because sodium is much more accessible than lithium. So we do actually have the supply chain for all the elements to make it in Europe. And so maybe that might. I mean, there's this idea, I think. I don't know what either of you think about, might break a little bit of the dependence on China.
- [44:49]
D
I suppose as a scientist, I want to always return to the science that the way we can actually advance is just by innovation. The fact that we've got lithium ion batteries in the first place was some of that research actually done in the UK by the great John Goodenough, who subsequently got the Nobel Prize in 2019 with Stan Whittingham and Yushina. So that was just from basic science. He kind of developed some new materials and that led to the commercialization by Sony. What the UK hasn't been very good at is we're very good at innovating, but we're not very good at converting that innovation into commercial success. So that's the other step. I mean, I'm not an economist and I'm just a humble scientist, but that's where an area that we need to be better at in terms of manufacturing, getting a manufacturing base back again. And that's the whole idea about these gigafactories in Europe to try and develop that. But that still needs innovation, new materials, that we're ahead of the rest of the world. And that's where I suppose the science that I'm trying to do fits in.
- [45:59]
C
So let's come back to battery uses, because I think, you know, we've gone through cars a bit and sort of, you know, the battery technology itself. But there's also where we're going to find batteries, because I really think that the shape of the world is going to be highly dependent on what batteries can do and how we use them. And so there's a few things that people have talked about for batteries, but whether it's actually going to happen is not clear. So one of them is planes and putting batteries in a plane, which is kind of a difficult use case. Right. I was in it years ago. I was in a little battery plane that it used the battery to take off and then it ran out of battery and then you basically used it as a glider. So it got you off the Ground and then there was this really disconcerting moment where the engine just stops.
- [46:45]
B
Yeah. Terrifying.
- [46:46]
C
It's really terrifying. I mean you sort of know it's going to happen but it's still, it goes so silent. It's this enormous shock. But we are doing a bit better now, I guess people are for short haul flights. People.
- [46:57]
B
Yeah, I mean I'm still fraction. I like to keep a healthy skepticism about those things. But I mean it does certainly there's an enormous amount of investment going into it and I think that where we'll see it. So one of the really big areas is vertical takeoff because of the safety record of helicopters now we all. And I've been in numerous helicopters with Jobs and I, I said to a guy who works in the helicopter industry, I, I know that when I get off an airplane, I just get off an airplane. When I've got out of a helicopter and it's landed, I make a sort of mental thank you that I'm still there because it took off and it flew and they're amazing machines but. And he said you're right to do that.
- [47:38]
C
Which is not really, you know, out
- [47:41]
B
of all everything that flies. Helicopters have the worst safety record by a long way. And what they're talking about with multiple rotor vertical takeoff and landing is unbelievable levels of safety and of double safety and of triple safety. And if that motor doesn't work, they've got this one and that, you know. So they're talking about like sometimes 16 rotors that take you off and then eight that pull you along.
- [48:02]
C
So I mean, because the game is that basically if you're in a plane and the engine's cut out, it will glide. But a helicopter does not glide.
- [48:07]
B
It doesn't glide.
- [48:08]
C
So. But if you have 16 absolutely independent things, the chances of them all breaking at the same time, very small.
- [48:15]
B
Yeah.
- [48:16]
C
And I guess people are talking about sort of vertical taxis and that's, you know. Yes, it sounds mostly it sounds expensive.
- [48:23]
B
It sounds very, very expensive. And that the ultra Hyper Elite will use them off the top of buildings and the rest of us will be crawling through a tunnel in a post apocalyptic doomscape.
- [48:34]
C
So we're not spoiling their view.
- [48:35]
B
Yeah, there is that aspect of it. Well, I sat inside a fully made up, sort of a fully made up version of a vertical takeoff. And it was amazing. But interior, it was like luxury seats with, you know, with magazines and you know, it was all gorgeous.
- [48:51]
C
Custom monogram.
- [48:52]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's very, very upper first class.
- [48:54]
A
Yeah.
- [48:55]
C
So in principle seifle I mean, this is one of the big questions is, could a battery, is there any theoretical reason why a battery couldn't one day power a bigger aircraft? So not the kind of light aircraft, the thing that Pippistrah's sense assessments, but might it ever be possible? Or is that just a fair question?
- [49:11]
D
So on the batteries we mentioned earlier, solid state batteries. So solid state batteries I mentioned were safer just because they don't have that flammable. So they're being talked about in small aircraft. So I think the first, actually, I think aircraft will follow the same trajectory as vehicles. So most of the early vehicles were hybrid. So the Toyota Prius was a hybrid with internal combustion engine with a bit of battery and then that battery power increased. I think this, I think they'll follow the same sort of trajectory in terms of there'll be hybrid kind of aircraft with hybrid internal combustion engine as now, but with batteries and those batteries will be solid state just because they'll be safer. And there's no reason why, in principle, just as we've found with, as Robert mentioned, cars going a longer range, that means higher energy density, that you couldn't get in for larger aircraft as well. I don't know whether it'll happen in the near future, but definitely the short haul type of flights within the uk.
- [50:21]
C
Well, I've definitely heard of one way of making them hybrid, I think, which is that. So a colossal amount of the fuel that you put in the tank of an aircraft is just takeoff.
- [50:30]
B
Takeoff, yeah.
- [50:30]
C
And so I think there's an idea around that if you use the batteries when you're flying and when you're landing, you might need a petrol, you might need a kerosene engine, jet fuel, just to, just to do the big power push at the start. Because of course the problem is that an empty battery weighs the same as a full battery. So you don't want to be flying all the way, but you can burn fuel, so you burn a bit of fuel to get into the air and then you fly the rest of the flight and battery. So I can imagine.
- [50:56]
B
Oh, that's it. Because I, I spoke to someone from Airbus Industry, admittedly a few years ago, it was during the flight of the first electric plane that flew across the Channel, which is built by Airbus Industries. It was a great little thing. Their dream, because of legislation and because of people who live near airports, is that they would have a, you know, let's go with an Airbus A380 that took off with electric power, it would absolutely drain the batteries, it would get to 10,000ft because it's megawatts, it's multiple megawatts, if not gigawatts of power it would need to get up there. And once it's up at 10,000ft, then a single jet engine pushes it across the Atlantic Ocean, right, using a fraction of the fuel that you would use on that journey now. And then, then when you are at 35,000ft, whatever, and you start to descend to land, you use the rotors that got you to take off as air brakes and as regen. So you, as you go down, you regenerate. And I mean, they were. He was being very realistic. Probably 10 or 15% of the energy that it took to get you up, but it would produce and it would, you'd be able to use that to slow you down and then you'd land. And the reason they wanted to do that was because then they could run airports 24 hours a day, because you could take off in the middle of the night with a fraction of the noise that a jet engine makes. And then you still fly. And then you land. You could also land very quietly, you
- [52:17]
C
know, so either way.
- [52:19]
B
And he said, I said, how long do you think? He says, oh, 50 years. So it's not imminent. I don't think that's all.
- [52:26]
C
Yeah, but I mean, it's really interesting that. And I think what's interesting about this is the thing about combustion engines is because you just put more petrol in, whatever it is, you don't have to really think about what it is you're doing. You just go, oh, we're just going to power it. You just kind of chuck energy at it. And you don't ever really have to question what you're doing. But once you start to say, what is it we're trying to do? What do we prioritize? Then you can be really clever and I think there's some kind of low hanging fruit when it gets. So let's just briefly. We will have a couple of minutes for audience questions, but just before we get there, let's just talk a bit about grid storage. We mentioned before that, you know, these battery types where you're not interested in it being light, you know, there's the potential for them just being static batteries. But I just want you to talk about batteries and the grid because I think there's a really interesting sort of, you know, people think about storage when, I guess, out in the public, you know, wind and solar, and you have to store that energy for when you need it in case the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. And I think the mental image is always that that's going to be like an extra little power plant, that the battery is going to be, you know, whoever it is, National Grid is going to build some big, like, stack of batteries. But actually what we're seeing is batteries, these batteries that we're talking about for transport also being used potentially for grid storage. Like, just talk to us a little bit about the. Like, how, how there's. Because there's a vision for how that's going to work. Right. And it isn't that the grid is going to deal with the problem, all of it.
- [53:52]
B
No. I mean. Well, it's an engineer at the National Grid, it's their dream that we would have, you know, connected, intelligently, connected vehicle to grid cars. Because at the moment, currently in the UK there's just over 2 million electric cars. Not a lot of people know that it's got to that level. And that is the equivalent, I think, of something like if you could take 1,1 kilowatt hour from the 2 million electric cars. I can't do the maths. It's a lot. And that's what they're talking about. They're not talking about draining it, but at a peak time, they would take a couple of kilowatt hours out of each car in a controlled way and then they would then replenish that later on when there's less demand. That is the equivalent of a couple of Hinkley Point C's. It's colossal amounts of power. It's enough to run very large cities or if not multiple cities, and that's with 2 million cars. If we had 20 million cars, we have, at the moment, there's about 32 million private vehicles in the UK. So it's an absurd fantasy, but if all of those were connected, you wouldn't need any other source of backup power. You know, you've got it already. It would not affect anyone. It wouldn't. And the really good place. I mentioned Utrecht in the last talk, but Utrecht has a very big vehicle to city organized grid thing. And it's made a phenomenal difference to their. The city's electricity costs because they're charging them up during the day, when it's sunny or when it's very windy, which they use. They have a lot of wind power and then they're running the city on that electricity at night. And this is multiple vehicles and we're talking thousands, in their case, thousands of vehicles that are all connected through a grid that they can control. So they're car share vehicles, they're not private vehicles. So when you see that starting to emerge, you go, this is, that is the most, in a way, the most exciting potential. The other quick one is what's happened in Australia. So the Australian government have helped fund people to put batteries in their houses. Thinking a few thousand people, I think they did 250,000 in the first few months. I mean it's, and it's absolutely affected the Australian grid. So their grid scale and everything is smaller than us. It's only, you know, 25 million people. So it's a much less the scale that we would need here. But it's, that really challenged the old coal industry. Basically no one wants to burn coal anymore because it's too expensive.
- [56:09]
C
And they can also trade. I mean it's amber energy, isn't it? So I think there's an episode coming up and it links to another episode on systems that will let you use the battery in your house to trade a little bit with the grid. So even if you don't have solar panels, you can take energy off the grid when it's cheap and sell it back to them when it's expensive and you make a profit. It's quite annoying actually, actually make a profit.
- [56:31]
B
So Sarah in Australia, who's got the same amount of panels that I have in my house in the UK for a start, generates twice as much just, just because it's sunny in Australia and I hate them all and, and I'm allowed to because I'm married to one and my children are Australian. But the, the, she made her elect her power bill last year. 2025 was two and a half thousand dollars in income. So she ran a house, she ran two cars and she got paid two and a half thousand. I said, you must have paid something for electricity. No, not a penny. And that is, I mean their system operates differently, their grid operates differently. But the fact is she's a power supplier. You know, they didn't give her two and a half grand for fun. They gave it because she supplied a huge amount of electricity to the grid.
- [57:14]
C
And I think that system is some parts, parts of that system are coming to the UK and I think in 10 years time, the episodes we've made about that in the past couple of weeks will be people go, what's the fuss about? Obviously you do this. Yeah, obviously. Why would you not. Right. Why would you have a battery just sitting there not doing anything? Because your car's parked, you know, okay, we are rapidly running out of time. We have time for one audience question, maybe two, depending on how long the first one takes. 1. I got a very stern face from the producer at the side. Let's have the lady in the turquoise shirt here with the red.
- [57:46]
B
Do we have microphones to give the
- [57:48]
C
one just coming round the corner. Corner here.
- [57:50]
B
You can shout.
- [57:51]
C
Stick your hand up. Nice. And that's the one. Nice and clear. One very short question, please.
- [57:56]
D
Hi.
- [57:57]
C
Thank you. When will we see the end of the disposable button cell battery?
- [58:02]
B
Oh, I mean, it should have been 10 years ago. Do you mean things like what, a watch battery or it's like a CR203
- [58:10]
C
in particular, which you can buy rechargeable ones at the moment. I haven't tried them, but.
- [58:16]
B
No, I haven't tried them.
- [58:17]
C
Can you see the end?
- [58:18]
B
We have to very soon, I think, even equally. And as much as that is, I didn't realize this until we. We followed a project where someone built a Formula E car out of E waste, and it was powered by tens of many. I don't know, many thousands of. What's it called when you. When you suck? Vapes. Thank you. What's it called when you suck? Something could have gone really wrong. Vapes. The batteries in vapes are thrown away, Millions of them. It's absolutely shocking. And they're rechargeable batteries. They're tiny little rechargeable batteries. And so he wired up with some students, thousands of them, and that's what powered the car. The car did seven miles an hour. It wasn't like super fast, but, you know, it went along.
- [59:01]
C
Brilliant. Any comment on that, do you know? No. Insider?
- [59:04]
B
No. They should be recycled.
- [59:07]
C
Yeah, I think. And the more consumers make a fuss about it, the faster it will happen. Okay, I am now getting very stern looks from the side of the stage, so we are going to leave our battery discussion there. Thank you so much. To everyone that's ever joined. Please join me in thanking the brilliant Robert Llewellyn and Saifan Islam.
- [59:29]
A
So that was me, Robert and Professor Saifal Islam from Oxford University sharing our battery enthusiasm on stage with a live festival audience, which was just brilliant. And because this was recorded live at an event, I have to say this. This podcast was recorded live at The Latitude Festival 2026 in the cosmic Shambles forest of science and culture. It was produced by Trent Burton and engineered by Dominic Ray. Cosmic Shambles is a registered trademark of Trunkman Productions Limited and Latitude is owned. Is owned and operated by Festival Republic, part of the Live Nation Entertainment Group. So that's our podcast this week, all done now. And if you have been, thank you for listening.