Insights

The United States has produced a remarkable share of the world’s battery breakthroughs. It has been less successful at manufacturing them. The…

RES has won planning consent for its first battery storage project in Northern Ireland. The Ballyross scheme is a modest milestone in…

Volkswagen’s $7bn Canadian battery plant has moved its start to 2029. Construction continues, the capacity plans stand, and the company says it’s…

Silicon has promised denser, longer-range batteries for a decade, but its tendency to swell kept it out of the mainstream. In 2025…

The European Commission has selected cylib’s battery recycling project as a Strategic Project under the Critical Raw Materials Act. It is a…

North America built formidable battery-manufacturing capacity for the electric car. When a vast new market appeared almost overnight, the industry was ready,…

Britain's gigafactories get the headlines. The more interesting story is everything being built around them: the suppliers, the researchers, the grid connections…

Lithium-ion battery prices fell to a record low in 2025, to $108 a kilowatt-hour on average. The striking part is that they…

cylib has appointed Roland Harings, the former chief executive of the recycling group Aurubis, as chairman of its Advisory Board.

Innovate UK’s latest Battery Innovation competition is offering up to £25 million to develop the next generation of British battery technology, from…

The battery world spends most of its worry on lithium. But the material that may be hardest to bring home is the…

GM’s battery chief, Kurt Kelty, has set out a goal: a battery supply chain built on domestic materials rather than Chinese ones.…

For decades the battery industry built one long, global supply chain. A recent thesis from Sorfin Yoshimura argues the next era looks…

cylib and Porsche have made battery cells from cathode material that is 100% recycled, and recovered from Porsche’s own worn-out batteries. A…

Battery Council International has announced its inaugural NextGen Leadership Award: thirty rising figures from across the battery industry, chosen by their own…

The Battery Ledger’s most recent piece argued that lithium, sodium and lead each have a job, and none has to beat the…

For a decade the battery story was about building gigafactories. The next chapter is about building their mirror image, the plants that…

The second Battery Production Days, the conference for scalable battery production, takes place on 20 and 21 October 2026 in Aachen.

Sodium-ion needs a market that already believes in the plug. China has built one, the US is moving at several different speeds,…

Two things are happening in sodium-ion right now. They are usually written up as one, and the difference is the whole point.

Every compliance summary cited 18 August 2026 as the day the EU's new battery labelling rules took effect. The date is real.…

China has taken the lead on the first international rules for solid-state electric-vehicle batteries. The step is real, and narrower than most…

A century-old battery keeps its place on the grid's list of options. Not out of sentiment, but because grid storage rewards what…

The most rigorous failure data in the industry shows storage safety improving at a pace few expected. The story is in who…

Much of finance still files batteries under auto parts. The asset filing its own accounts on the grid suggests a different category.

Underwriters price what they can see. The storage industry's safety record has improved dramatically, and remains mostly invisible.

The people who respond to battery incidents are the last to be shown the statistics about them. A reading of the record,…

Before a battery powers anything, it travels. The rules for that journey are stricter than almost anything that awaits it at the…

Miners know the argument about recycling. Lead is the industry that already ran the experiment, and the result should change how the…

Three significant Western moves into lithium were made by companies with long histories in lead. The pattern says something about where battery-making…

Everyone planned for EV batteries wearing out. The data says they're outliving the cars, and that quietly changes what a battery is.

It seems so. The battery fleet is helping make evening electricity cheaper in the biggest US markets, and the remarkable part is…

Between every anode and cathode sits a film thinner than a human hair. One company in Oregon has spent decades mastering it,…

A chemistry researched since the 1970s, written off repeatedly, is now in a mass-produced car and carries the largest storage order ever…

Everyone is watching the carmakers race to solid-state. Almost nobody is watching the company making the ingredient they'll all need, and its…

Everyone measures the battery future in kilowatt hours of traction pack. The battery contracted furthest into the future might be the one…

For fifteen years "a good battery" has meant whatever a car needs. The customer arriving now has different priorities.

Two of the heaviest obligations in the Batteries Regulation are written as lists of materials. Sodium-ion uses almost none of them. Whether…

Stryten sells vanadium flow. Clarios is going sodium-ion. EnerSys is building a lithium plant for the Pentagon. East Penn sells lithium alongside…

While everyone else debates what battery recycling will become, one company built the future version, sold the old version, and moved on.…

For most battery metals, large-scale recycling is still being built. For one, recycling quietly became the main source of supply, and almost…

The EV was supposed to end the lead battery's century in the car. Open the bonnet of almost any electric vehicle and…

From 2031 the EU sets minimum recycled content for four battery materials. Three of them go up in 2036. One does not,…

The AI boom is the fastest growing power story in the world, and the batteries standing behind it are not all new.…

Dry cathode coating defeated the industry for a decade. Tesla says it now runs it in production. What we do not know…

The target has not moved in three years, which is more than most solid-state timelines can claim. But it is a range,…

Australia's first mandatory battery stewardship scheme starts on 1 October 2026, and it reaches whoever brings the battery into the state, wherever…

Most published guides give 18 August 2026. The Regulation attaches a condition to that date, and the condition has not been met.

The Commission has until 18 August 2026 to decide. Its own research body has set out the choice and declined to make…

Four states, four definitions of a covered battery, four sets of dates. There is no national scheme and no sign of one.

It would make three UL standards mandatory, but with modifications. Existing certification would not be enough.

Twenty-five per cent on cells, and on natural graphite, where the rate was zero. The second tranche landed in January 2026.

The advanced manufacturing credit now carries a foreign entity test, a domestic content test and a phase-out that did not exist before.

From 27 August 2026 every tonne of American black mass must be sold to an American buyer. The rule was written under…

Since February 2025 the Korean government certifies EV batteries itself, and every battery carries an identification number in the vehicle register.

Japan has moved a nine-year voluntary scheme onto a statutory footing, with volume thresholds that decide who is caught.

India is the only major market requiring recycled content to be recovered domestically. That makes it a trade measure as much as…

A vehicle must now be scrapped with its battery still in it, and no one may put a waste power battery into…

China is taxing lithium-ion and exempting sodium-ion and solid-state. Both sides of that are new, and the exemption expires in 2028.

Lithium is set forty points below the other four metals in 2027 and fifteen below in 2031. That closing gap is the…

The dates are in the regulation, but the obligation does not bite until the Commission adopts the methodology. Track the delegated acts,…

Recycling efficiency and material recovery are two different measures on two different timetables. Conflating them is the commonest error in reporting on…

From 2031 batteries must contain 85 per cent recycled lead but only 6 per cent recycled lithium. And e-bike batteries are not…

Due diligence on cobalt, lithium, nickel and natural graphite begins on 18 August 2027, two years later than the regulation originally said.

Every EV, LMT and large industrial battery needs a digital passport from 18 February 2027. Starter batteries do not, and the removability…

A 99 percent recycling rate, a closed loop built six decades ago, and a critical mineral designation that changes what the whole…

A cancelled federal grant is the headline. The filing itself lists falling material prices, a shrinking EV market and construction disputes alongside…

From 27 August, US black mass must be sold at home. The refineries to process it do not yet exist at the…

The company's own chairman is the most cautious voice in the story. The coverage keeps running ahead of him.

From 1 September 2026, China will tax lithium-ion batteries for the first time in over a decade. Sodium-ion and solid-state will pay…

Modelling suggests deliberately melting the boundaries between crystal grains could suppress the dendrites that threaten solid-state cells.

Recycled cobalt and mined cobalt are the same element. From 2031, the EU will require producers to prove which one they used.

Finding data is only part of the challenge. Understanding where it comes from, what it measures and its limits matters just as…

Two companies make more than half the world's electric-vehicle batteries. The finished cell is only the visible tip of the chain.

The industry that builds the world's batteries leans on a second industry that builds none.

The same battery material can be critical in Washington, strategic in Brussels and merely watched in London, all at once.

From February 2027, EV, LMT and larger industrial batteries need a passport. The conventional lead-acid starter battery does not.

Batteries matter to AI infrastructure in several concrete ways today. The largest role is an old one, not a new AI-specific technology.

European battery makers are buying secondary lead smelters. A Chinese storage company is selling one, and has explained why.

On the IEA's own evidence, the chemistry has diversified and the geography has not.

Lithium has taken the applications that reward energy density. Lead retains the ones that reward cost, cold-cranking power and a closed loop.

Mining is diversifying across regions. The processing stage that turns ore into battery chemicals has not kept pace.

The metallurgy is long established. What makes secondary lead smelting demanding is everything downstream of the furnace.

The government wants shared storage to reach the households that cannot install a battery of their own.

Demand more than triples by 2035 in both main scenarios. Whether the industry outside China can serve it is a separate question.

Circularity is a genuine strategic asset for lead. It is not the same thing as self-sufficiency.

The next stage of lead battery development is materials optimisation, not chemistry replacement.