By Kyle Proffitt
April 29, 2025 | Martin Freer, CEO of the Faraday Institution in the United Kingdom, gave one of the plenary addresses at last month’s International Battery Seminar. Freer discussed the wider UK battery strategy and how they are bolstering research and innovation alongside an energy transition.
The Faraday Institution, a research institute near Oxford, UK, was established in 2017 as part of a wider Faraday Battery Challenge. CEO Martin Freer told the International Battery Seminar audience how this institution is positioned within a wider electrification strategy in the UK.
The wider strategy includes three categories: design, build, and sustain. The design space is all about innovation, and this is where Faraday is most active. Freer said that currently in the UK, there is a clean vehicle mandate with a ratchet mechanism to 100% electrification by 2035; “after that point, no longer will you be able to buy an internal combustion engine vehicle.” Electrified transport is the largest segment of this energy transition.
The “build” category takes into account the need for gigafactories to make all the batteries. The UK is scaling up with a predicted need for 6 gigafactories by 2030 and 10 by 2040. Right now there’s just one active with a few others under development. “Sustain” indicates the need for a consistent supply chain and circular economy.
More Batteries
“Increasingly, we have opportunities that link into the transition that is happening in the energy system,” Freer said. The Clean Power 2030 plan of the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO) involves shutting down all coal burning plants and employing a large quantity of offshore wind generation to establish a clean energy grid by 2030. “Alongside that is a massive, massive opportunity in energy storage; the prediction is that we will need 25 GW of battery storage” to provide the necessary power in the short term.
The good news, he says, is that there is a queue of companies lined up that already exceed that number, at least in a planning stage. Additionally, the grid is going to need 25 TWh of long-duration energy storage for maintaining energy flow during constrained production. This includes things like pumped hydroelectric storage as well as long-duration batteries (10+ hours).
Freer put that 25 TWh in perspective by saying that if all the vehicles in the UK were run on batteries, they would sum to only a tenth of this quantity.
The Faraday Battery Challenge
The Faraday Battery Challenge, running since 2018, has supported the sector with 650 million pounds of investment. Within this, Freer said the Faraday Institution sits low on the technology readiness level (TRL), funding the university end of things. The UK Battery Industrialization Center supports mid-to-high-TRL projects, providing scale-up for companies to spin out their battery technology.
The Faraday Institution has set various battery targets for 2035 (relative to 2018 numbers), such as 4-fold increased power density, 2-fold increased energy density, 2/3 cost reduction, and additional measures of safety and recyclability. Their research program is divided into current generation and next-generation technologies. The current generation involves innovation around cathodes and cathode materials, manufacturing, degradation mechanisms, multi-scale modeling, and recycling.
Future generation technologies are higher-risk and include solid-state batteries, lithium-sulfur, and sodium-ion.
Faraday funds 25 universities and 500 academics with 146 industrial partners, including everyone from automotive manufacturers to recycling companies. Freer highlighted some of the programs they fund, including an International Battery Seminar Best of Show winner, Breathe Battery Technologies. Freer says Breathe’s solution for better BMS performance improves charging performance by about 30% and is now implemented in Volvo vehicles. Ultimately, Freer says Faraday has funded research efforts that have “taken cost down, driven up efficiency, driven up lifetimes, created improvements in battery technologies at the levels of 10 to 20 to 30 percent.”
Faraday is also committed to public engagement through the Royal Institution, and they are involved in training PhD researchers across several universities. Freer reported a satisfying statistic that 100% of their first PhD cohort is currently working in energy storage.
