It's a battery life

About a year ago, the battery of my laptop died. It wasn’t a quick death. First it swelled, turning my touchpad in a rather interesting bump. Then it died. We disposed of it responsibly and bought a replacement battery since I’m quite attached to my electronics and would only change them upon confirmed, undisputable death.

Imagine my frustration, however, when about a month ago my laptop switched off in the middle of an Energy Realities podcast. There was no warning of any sort, it just shut down. A couple of inadvertent experiments revealed the cruel truth: the new battery had died, too, barely a year into use.

The case of the Slav Laptop Battery is one of many suggesting lithium ion technology is not all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t need to repeat all the scores of reports of EVs bursting into flames for no discernible reason and of ship operators refusing to transport EVs for reasons of fire hazard.

The latest in the long series of unfortunate incidents was, of course, that accident on the California highway, where a truck carrying EV batteries overturned, a fire ensued and blocked thousands of people in traffic for hours because putting out a battery fire ain’t like putting out a regular fire.

Now imagine my disbelieving laughter when I saw this headline: Millions of EV Batteries Could Retire to Solar Farms. To be fair, I saw that headline months before the latest battery news but still, imagine. Batteries are bursting into spontaneous fires, they barely last a few years but yes, of course, let’s reuse EV batteries at solar installations because it makes a wonderfully neat circular sense.

Indeed, it does. Battery storage is all the rage. Everyone seems to be working on some sort of a better battery… and then along comes Rystad Energy and dumps on all of us the news that investments in battery tech was about to drop this year — for the first time since 2020. Whatever could possibly give, right?