In a world hyper-focused on the latest developments in AI, another revolution is happening in another field, more shielded from the daily headlines, that could prove to be almost as transformative.
For decades, the battery was the tech industry’s perennial laggard. Computing power, connectivity and software raced ahead, while the humble battery improved a few percent a year. That gap is finally closing. And the stakes are huge: almost everything now runs on stored power, from the phone in your pocket to the car in your driveway to the grid itself.
It’s remarkable just how quickly batteries have become part of the world’s energy fabric. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reckons battery storage is now the fastest-growing power technology going: 108GW of new capacity was added in 2025, 40% up on the year before, leaving installed capacity 11 times higher than in 2021. Roughly 80% of that was utility-scale — giant installations that bank surplus solar and wind and release it when the grid needs it. Costs have more than halved since 2019, according to the IEA.
Like many FM readers, I have a small personal stake in this. I spent the worst of load-shedding relying on a solar system, an inverter and lithium cells bolted to a wall at home. It turned me into an amateur energy economist, watching an app decide when to draw from the grid and when to lean on the battery. It turns out this was a glimpse into the global energy future: storage slotting in between supply and demand, smoothing the gaps.
Eskom’s Hex project near Worcester — Africa’s first utility-scale battery, running since 2023 — stores 100MWh, enough to keep a town the size of Mossel Bay going for about five hours. The government has since procured nearly 7GWh of private battery capacity, due online by 2027/2028. The battery on my garage wall, in other words, has very big cousins.
The biggest prize that engineers are chasing now is the “solid-state battery”, the long-promised leap beyond lithium-ion chemistry, prized because it ditches the flammable liquid electrolyte and promises far more range as well as much quicker charging speeds.
The news is encouraging. Last August, a lightly modified Mercedes-Benz EQS, fitted with lithium-metal solid-state cells from the US firm Factorial Energy, drove 1,205km from Stuttgart to Malmö on a single charge, arriving with 137km to spare. Mercedes said the cells delivered about 25% more range for the same size and weight.
Chinese brands are driving this upscaling. The gains are real, and the technology is shipping in real-world products
Others are close behind. QuantumScape, a US-listed pioneer of the field, has shipped its QSE-5 cells to Volkswagen and ran them in a Ducati race bike on stage in Munich; in February it opened a pilot production line.
The technology is, however, not yet ready for mass commercial adoption. Mercedes and most rivals target mass-market production only by the end of the decade. China’s CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, also does not expect mass production before about 2030.
When Finland’s Donut Lab used the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January to claim a finished cell that beat everyone’s numbers, the industry scoffed — and independent testing over the past few months has yet to confirm the two figures that matter.
For now, one of the most exciting real-world battery developments is happening in Chinese-made smartphones from brands such as Honor and Oppo. This is the silicon-carbon battery — still lithium-ion at heart, but with the graphite anode partly replaced by silicon, which holds far more charge. The result is dramatically more capacity in the same slim phone.
According to Counterpoint Research, the average smartphone battery worldwide reached 5,291mAh in January, up about 400mAh in a year — the biggest annual jump in four years — and six of the 10 highest-capacity phones used silicon-carbon cells. Chinese brands are driving this upscaling. The gains are real, and the technology is shipping in real-world products, which is more than solid-state proponents can say (for now).
Technological advances — cells that keep getting cheaper, denser and quicker to charge — are remaking the phone in your hand, the car in the showroom and the grid that powers it all. And across it all, the country doing most of the remaking is China. The next, cheaper wave of innovation could prove transformative not only for China but for the world.
The breakthroughs that matter are rarely the ones announced on a Las Vegas stage. The battery revolution will not arrive with one dazzling launch. Indeed, it is arriving the way these things usually do — bit by bit, much of it unnoticed, until the day comes when we can no longer imagine life before.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
