“We are increasing the electricity we use as fast as we are decarbonising" - Battery expert Isabella Stephens
June's Rebel Interview with Isabella Stephens from Intercalation, and vote on July's book.
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Happy Monday, Rebels! This is issue 2 of 2 this month, where we’ve been understanding the theme RAW.
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Today we’re back with a Rebel Interview; where we chat to an expert about our monthly theme.
Isabella Stephens is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham with the Faraday Institution working on sustainable battery materials and is the Managing Editor or
, a top Substack publication in the energy space, offering technical insights and assessments for energy storage technologies to help bridge knowledge gaps across the industry, academia, and government to uncover the truth in the battery industry.What’s Buried Beneath the Convenience of Modern Life?
Q: As someone working at the intersection of research and real-world innovation, what do you wish more people understood about the battery industry & supply chains behind it?
A: Every day you hold and use multiple batteries, interacting with the culmination of decades of scientific progress. I believe batteries have the power to change the world. They sit at the intersection of mining, science and manufacturing. They are not a straightforward story of minerals to technology, it’s science interwoven with countless different communities and ecosystems, which all comes together to form this incredible piece of technology embedded in the user’s life.
Something important to note though is that we are not comparing against a world with no harm. Historical progress has brought with it various different social problems. Energy has a history and present of causing injustice and harm - you only have to look at ongoing cases like the damage Shell caused extracting oil in the Niger Delta to see how dirty our fossil fuel system has been.
It is important that we build battery supply chains that do not relocate that harm to other communities, and we’re going to have to work really hard to do that. However, it’s important to acknowledge that we’re not starting from a point of perfection.
Q: Phones are with us every minute of the day, but we rarely stop to think about what’s inside them. What materials are doing the heavy lifting in our devices, and at what cost?
A: Think of a battery like a static seesaw - when you charge your phone you push the lithium ions up the slope, and then when using the phone the lithium ions roll back down freely. Lithium ions are positively charged, so moving them around necessitates that something negative is moved around too - in this case it’s electrons in your electrical current.
Lithium normally comes from rocks in Australia, which are often refined from rocks into lithium products in China. This is a carbon-intensive process. The other main source of lithium is from brines in South America. Salty water brines are pumped up to the surface and left in pools for the sun to evaporate the water and concentrate the brine. This uses a lot of water in a way and is often detrimental to local communities for their farming and way of life.
The other main components in a battery are cobalt - mainly sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo - nickel, manganese, and graphite. Nickel is extremely toxic, and has also resulted in some serious deforestation in Indonesia, as companies dig up the rainforest in order to access the rich ore below. Natural graphite has a very concentrated supply chain in China, Mozambique and Madagascar. More ethical mining practices requires centring the communities where this extraction takes place, and focusing on their needs as well as making sure value from extraction goes back to them, via education and infrastructure as well as jobs.
The good news about all of these materials is that unlike oil and gas they can be recovered and used again and again. We might not be doing it at scale in Europe yet, but in China the recovery rates for nickel, manganese and cobalt are at 99.6% and 91% for lithium, and the Chinese battery company CATL has stated that by 2042 it will not need to source any new minerals from the ground.
Q: You’ve worked with Northvolt and Vianode, and now you’re deep in academic research. What are the biggest tensions you’ve seen between sustainability goals and the messy realities of how battery supply chains operate?
A: Two overlapping challenges come in the form of scale up and profitability.
Making a spaghetti bolognese for 2 people might be easy, and for 20 people manageable, but requiring bigger pots. To make the same dish for 200 or 2000 people, you’d need a whole different kitchen. The first time you made it for 2000 people you might even get the timings and measurements wrong, leaving a lot of food inedible. The same principle applies in science. Scaling up is expensive and logistically challenging, and requires a lot of patience.
So many excellent initiatives in the battery space struggle because going from making things at a small scale to a big scale is just a massive engineering challenge, requiring consistent funding and investors who understand this. The losses at scale are also much bigger - mistakes get more and more expensive, and need experienced engineers which we are short of in Europe.
Profit requirements can also hinder a lot of great ideas. Science doesn’t work as quickly as other industries like software which turn profits on multi year timescales rather than over several decades. This means less investors are willing to take these kind of risks, and many great scientific ideas won’t get off the ground.
There are some government grants and other more patient forms of investment, but much less than is needed, particularly in Europe.
Q: A lot of our members care about how they consume — they’re cutting down on meat, switching energy providers, flying less. Where do battery materials and personal electronics fit into the bigger picture of conscious living?
A: A really big use case for batteries is personal transport. One of the best efficiencies we could make for our own cost of living, health and the planet would be to radically improve public transport and make it safer to walk and cycle wherever possible. In cities, cars spend around 90% of their lifetimes just sat still. That’s an awful lot of mineral extraction for a precision piece of engineering to just sit still.
To make a really big difference for the planet, as well as making our communities less polluted and healthier places, we need to push to remove the car dependency that has choked us for decades. Just look at the strides that Paris has made in a very short space of time, removing space for cars and prioritising people. It’s much easier to understand why we need to do all that mining for a bus that carries 50 people, rather than a car that often carries just one person.
Some people will always need cars, especially in rural places. There is an obsession about bigger and bigger battery sizes, to go hundreds of miles in one charge. But the bigger your car battery, the more minerals will have been mined to make it.
Whilst I really understand the problem of range anxiety, especially since the charging infrastructure is not great yet in the UK, we do also have to remember human limitations. How far can you drive before you need to pee? The ideal (and reasonably sized) battery pack would give you that range plus a little further.
Q: You write about how colonial legacies, corporate secrecy, and geopolitics shape the raw materials economy. In your view, who holds the real power in today’s energy transition — and what does that mean for the rest of us?
A: I’ll condense my answer into two key points: energy demand and China.
China has invested a lot in the battery and energy space, and is decarbonising at a rate the UK can only dream of. In 2024, more than half of all solar capacity in the world was installed in China. The country is also the lynchpin for refining a lot of metals from rocks into useable starting products. Politicians in European countries can talk about geopolitical independence all they like, but the harsh reality is we are not going to be able to save the world without working very closely with China. We need to form close geopolitical alliances with in them order to shape the future together, so that we can decarbonise fast enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. There are other examples of countries that hold certain material specialisms - like Taiwan for semiconductors - and this is really going to have to be a global effort rather than a localised and tariff driven effort.
The other real problem we have is energy demand. We are increasing the electricity we use as fast as we are decarbonising1, effectively wiping out many of the gains made. A lot of this demand is coming from AI and datacentres. AI is going to change the world and the way we do work, but I really hope that it does not cost us the Earth first. There’s a lot of people writing about this, one I’d recommend checking out is Ketan Joshi.
Q: Some Rebel Book Club members might be reading Cobalt Red and thinking, “This is too big to fix.” What innovations or ideas give you hope that we can build more just and sustainable systems?
A: History is full of problems that at some point were too big to fix. Women’s suffrage and many other examples were decades long struggles. Progress historically has been non-linear.
Looking to China and the progress being made there in batteries is absolutely astounding. The pace is incredible, with the technical strides outpacing expectations and transforming everything from how we think about charging infrastructure to recycling capabilities.
The price of lithium ion batteries has recently also dropped significantly to less than 100 $/kWh in China - this is really significant because the capital required to install stationary storage systems is getting less and less. This also means that electric cars are getting closer to being the same price as petrol and diesel cars, and price is a big deal in getting lots of people to make the switch.
As with a lot of things in the energy transition however, the technology is not the limitation. We can develop the best technology in the world, but without the political will to implement it, we still won’t save the world. Just look at how much money the oil and gas giants still get in subsidies all over the world despite their products being a) now a very expensive form of energy and b) the main cause of climate change.
It comes back to the same question: whose voices matter, and why? For battery minerals, the consumer paying a high price for a battery is listened to. A lot of the movement away from cobalt has been about making consumers feel immune from participation in human suffering, rather than addressing the root cause. I hope that we can work with and listen to people in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, in order to work towards a truly free Congo, rather than an isolated one.
That won’t happen without widespread knowledge and understanding, but through a human lens rather than a minerals one. It’s not cobalt the metal that’s the problem, it’s the exploitation of both the people and resources of Congo. Books like Cobalt Red and Material World are really important to reveal the truth, and movements for liberation in all forms represent hope that it can happen for everyone.
Q: Are there any companies — small or large — that are genuinely doing things differently when it comes to battery sourcing or manufacturing? Who should we be paying attention to?
A: Profit margins are tight in these industries - so following the regulations and subsidies are often where you’ll find the big innovations and things to watch. This is either because companies have a little more wiggle room to dream big, since the subsidies mean they don’t have to worry about a tight budget, or because they have to get smart to comply to regulation and do things more efficiently.
The next big change for batteries is the EU ‘Battery Passport’, which will be a QR code on every battery sold in the EU. These QR codes will enable the tracking of a battery’s entire life cycle, from carbon footprint to the working conditions the minerals came from. This will make it much easier to recycle batteries, as well as directly linking the sourcing to the product. These kind of regulations are changing the game, such as legislation that requires a certain amount of recycled content in batteries sold in the EU.
Q: Finally: when you think about what’s buried beneath the convenience of modern life, what’s the question you come back to most often?
A: What do we actually need? What were we sold as indispensable when actually, life without it is just fine? If we knew the true cost of everything, and felt it ourselves rather than outsourcing it to other parts of the world, what would we still decide was worth it?
This is not to say that we shouldn’t have modern convenience - but rather how much is consumerism and how much is convenience? What does a good life look like, and does that leave enough space for everyone and the other creatures we share this planet with? Whose voices get valued the most in answering these questions?
Lots of big questions there, but I think battery materials represent a really material intensive symbol of this wider problem. If we get this right, and listen to the stories of communities all around us as well as far away to shape change, this could have a huge positive impact.
We hope you enjoyed learning from Isabella about batteries, supply chains and energy innovations as much as we did.
On Monday 23rd June we’ll meet online to discuss Cobalt Red and what we’re learning and thinking about as community this month on this theme!
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Thanks for reading as always, we’ll be back in two week’s time with July’s Theme for You to Think About!
In 2024 the world added 858 TWh of renewable electricity generation, whilst electricity consumption increased by nearly 1,100 TWh. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2025/ and https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/key-findings
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