Skip to content

Subscriber Only

Sparklines

This Is the Dawning of the Age of the Battery

They’ve already transformed consumer electronics, but the bigger changes are yet to come.

Eliiy Power Co. Unveils New Lithium-Ion Battery Plant — Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

By

Nathaniel Bullard

December 17, 2020, 10:00 AM UTC

The lithium-ion battery that billions of people carry daily in their mobile phones is a Nobel Prize-winning scientific achievement. We’ve been living in the age of the lithium-ion battery ever since the 1990s via our camcorders, laptops, smart watches, and drones.

In the last decade, these little batteries have started to transform the transport and electricity sectors as surely as they did consumer electronics. New data shows how far batteries have come in a short time, and hint at how much further they’ll go.