The battery revolution that will let us all be power brokers

Companies are racing to find better ways to store electricity – and so provide us with cheaper energy when and where we want it

WE ONLY notice them when they are about to run out. Icons glow red, warnings flash. The curse of modern mobility: our battery’s about to give up.

It’s a trivial, everyday annoyance. But the ramifications go far beyond just laptops and smartphones. Humans rely on two things to control their environment: information and energy. Shrinking transistors and the rise of microprocessors have given us immense control over the first: the capacity to store and manipulate data that we hold in the palms of our hands would have been inconceivable a generation ago.

But with energy, we’re stuck in a rut. The development of electric cars stutters forwards thanks to the lack of ways to power them cheaply, efficiently and over long distances. And while we’ve made great strides in harnessing wind, wave and sun to generate cleaner electricity, again, the technology to store that juice lags ...