How might batteries save humanity

His family could no longer afford the fees, so he was thrown out of school. But William Kamkwamba had to get back in. This was a matter of life and death. There was a famine in Malawi and the crops had failed.

His plan was to draw enough water from the village well and irrigate the fields using an old water pump he had found at the scrap yard.

However, there was no regular supply of electricity in Malawi – He would need to generate the electricity himself. If he could sneak into the school library, then he could do some research and find a solution. Luckily, some sympathetic teachers snuck him in. Then one of them lent him a small dynamo from a headlight on one of their bicycles.

After a lot planning and testing, he built a windmill that pumped the water out the village well and irrigated the fields.

But it wasn’t straight forward. The dynamo was too weak to power the water pump. So he stored the energy in a car battery, which once charged by the windmill, provided the voltage needed.

What this starving fourteen-year-old boy had done was amazing. He had shown the world how to make renewable energy sustainable. Plus, he had inadvertently created the first zero-carbon village in Africa without any government funding, while saving his village from starvation.

It was an incredible feat. It was also slight embarrassing because he had beat the global scientific community and world’s governments to it.

They should have started building this kind of infrastructure decades ago. But instead, they've focused more on generating renewable energy rather than storing it.

Huge amounts have been spent on wind farms, solar power plants and thermal solar facilities. They've run high-powered direct-voltage power-lines underground thousands of kilometres to bring this renewable energy to urban populations. Yet a lot of it has gone to waste because it can't be stored.

To understand how significant the problem of battery storage is, let's look at something we all understand: the terrible battery life of our smartphones.

To start, there are already lots of consumer grumbles about smartphones. Some complain that Apple is no longer innovating. And, although Samsung now makes foldable but slightly pointless smartphones, some of their handsets are known to spontaneously combust on aircraft.

The biggest grumble of all though is battery life.

It’s dreadful.

But what if I said that all of these issues are due to battery tech.

Let me explain.

18 years ago, when I was at university, I only had to charge my Nokia 3310 once a week. Nowadays, I charge my smartphone twice a day. I have to keep a spare charger in my laptop bag. It’s extremely annoying.

The problem is that battery technology hasn’t kept up. Smartphones are just too powerful for the batteries inside them.

The batteries are so bad that they’re holding back innovation. There are so many cool things smartphone manufacturers like Apple, could do, but can’t. The problem lies with the lithium-ion battery. It's the same old battery tech that was in my old Nokia 3310. The technology, although better than everything else on the market, is almost 30 years old. It just isn’t sufficient for the modern digital world.

Now if you open up the iPhone XS you will see how significant this problem is.

The whole phone is a feat of engineering because it’s been designed around this massive L-shaped battery. There’s been an unprecedented degree of miniaturisation on the main logic board. There are also more connectors and chips packed into this device than ever before. The battery ingeniously fits every nook and cranny.

But although it’s impressive, it isn’t innovation. It’s more of a “make do with what we have” by Apple.

As for Samsung’s flammable phones, well lithium-ion batteries run hot, especially when they're overloaded. They also use a liquid and highly flammable electrode. The solution would be a solid non-flammable electrode but we don't yet have a suitable solution in this space yet. If we did, then these solid-state technologies could also deliver significantly higher energy density levels and lower degradation over charging cycles.

It’s early days, but this is where the investment opportunities lie. Advances in battery technology could be hugely disruptive to our global economy. Perhaps the emergence of electric cars, will provide a catalyst for this change.

Most of the interesting investment opportunities lie firmly in the private equity space. Here, there are now plenty of smart researchers and academics that are focused on finding a solution.

The emergence of new battery technology offers incredible possibilities. And, I not just talking about smartphones.

If we had better battery technology, we would enjoy a much better quality of life. Our cities would be smog free because we would all drive electric cars. As a consequence, millions of lives would be saved from pollution-related respiratory diseases. And most importantly of all, we would finally have the means to replace fossil fuels.

That's how batteries might save humanity.