The Future of Battery Technology: When Incremental Gains Aren’t Enough

Oct 10

As we peer into the future of climate tech, one thing is clear: Batteries are essential for electrification and the energy transition. It’s the backbone that enables renewables, electric mobility, and grid stability.

Yet, squeezing another percentage point out of today’s cell designs isn’t enough to take us where we need to be. Instead, we need smarter, more adaptable battery technology to make a game-changing leap forward.

Let’s take a big-picture view to consider why we need to go beyond an “incremental improvement” mindset and explore how to focus our attention and resources on the bigger challenges ahead.

The limitations of incrementalism

The battery industry focuses a lot on incremental performance gains. That’s understandable since every percentage matters when margins are tight. But when you zoom out, this approach feels shortsighted.

A 1 or 2% efficiency bump might be meaningful in the lab, but it does little against the sheer scale of global energy storage demand. Meanwhile, new chemistries alone won’t save the day if deploying them at scale means retooling supply chains, infrastructure, and safety standards.

Then, we have to address the hidden costs of waste. Many battery packs are retired while still having significant usable capacity. Discarding them not only adds to e-waste but also accelerates the need for more mining, manufacturing, and logistics.

The bigger challenges ahead

It’s time to take a step back, examine the real hurdles through a wider lens, and identify opportunities for meaningful breakthroughs.

The environmental impact of electrification

Rapid electrification has led to heavy reliance on mining and resource-intensive production. Without a systematic method to minimize wastage and optimize resource usage, the environmental impact of batteries risks undercutting the very goals they’re meant to serve.

Second life potential of retired battery packs

Retired EV and grid packs often still retain 60-80% of their original capacity. Repurposing this capacity could reduce waste and extend return on investment. However, rigid battery architectures and the inability to measure the state of health (SoH) of each cell make it challenging to maximize second-life applications at scale.

System-level wastage and inefficiency

Operators scrap an entire battery pack when cells degrade unevenly. Although most cells are still usable, conventional battery technology’s monolithic nature and inability to measure granular SoH or mix cells of different ages and characteristics make it impossible to maximize the useful life of each cell.

An upgrade from “conventional wisdom”

These systemic challenges can’t be solved by squeezing another percentage point of performance out of a battery pack. Yet, they determine whether batteries can truly scale as the enabler of renewable energy and electrification.

As climate tech evolves, we must consider batteries not as static units, but as dynamic, reconfigurable systems. Tanktwo’s software-defined battery (SDB) technology allows us to treat storage capacity as programmable assets:

The ability to mix cells of different chemistries enables operators to transition to a new battery chemistry gradually, instead of undergoing a wholesale overhaul with costly downtime and high upfront investment.
Granular SoH data and the ability to mix cells of different ages and characteristics make scaling second-life applications economically and logistically feasible.
Modularity increases adaptability as operators can switch out faulty cells or parts of a pack without scrapping the entire battery unit.
The capability to reroute cells automatically (thanks to our Dycromax™️ architecture) enables operators to reconfigure batteries on the fly to meet shifting requirements or bypass faulty cells without accessing the hardware, halting operations, or impacting performance.

We need a mindset shift, treating batteries not as a disposable commodity, but as an asset we can manage and optimize at a granular level. Just as software redefined industries from finance to healthcare, it can redefine how we use and reuse energy storage assets efficiently.