In this blog, Rishi Srivastava, co-founder of Offgrid Energy Labs, which has developed an alternative battery chemistry that it will start producing in Britain in July, argues that to ensure energy security, Britain must look to globally abundant materials for its energy storage needs.
For seventy years, British governments have written energy security plans against the same recurring threats: oil shocks and gas shortages. The vocabulary is so familiar to ministers that they reach for it without thinking: Diversify supply, build up storage, maintain the strategic reserve, lean on allies.
The UK’s net zero transition plans use much the same vocabulary. This is a mistake. The threat has changed form.
In 2024, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) paid more than £1 billion for wind farms to deliberately shut themselves down. It was annoying that the wind was blowing and that the customers existed. The problem was that Britain had no way to move electricity from where it was generated to where it was needed, or to store it for the hours that mattered. And the money being burned is rising, with coercive payments now growing faster than renewable energy generation itself.
The answer is energy storage at scale. The roof and floor schemelaunched in 2024, is the most ambitious long-term storage policy that any major economy has introduced. The June 2025 Industrial Strategy £452 million earmarked for the Battery Innovation Programme. The January 2026 Gigafactory Policy Commission, co-led by the Faraday Institution, framed the question with rare honesty: Britain needs indigenous battery production at scale, and before 2030. If this gets done right, Britain has a real strategic asset. If you miss this window, it buys security from the very supply chains it is trying to escape.
What is not clearly stated in any of these reports and policies, however, is what kind of battery there is. The assumption is lithium-ion, easily accepted as the standard chemistry of the energy transition, refined to extraordinary cost efficiency, deployed at gigawatt scale on every continent. There’s no doubt that it’s a remarkable technology, but in its current industrial form it’s also one of the most concentrated supply chains in modern economic history.
Three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion cells are made in China, along with 90% of the world’s graphite anodes and two-thirds of the world’s active cathode materials. China’s processing of battery-grade cobalt, nickel sulfate and lithium carbonate is dominated to a degree that exceeds anything OPEC achieved at the height of its power. Export controls on graphite and gallium have already been activated over the past two years. The pattern is not subtle.
A UK electricity grid that solves the problem of renewable energy integration by purchasing lithium-ion batteries at the target scale limit and floor will have a strategic energy source with a supply chain through a single jurisdiction by 2030. The same jurisdiction whose State Department is trying to assess its intentions regarding Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Strait of Malacca chokepoints.
We should not solve an old dependency with a new one. The instinct to do exactly this is strong, because lithium-ion is there, it works and it’s cheap. However, for once Britain has the rare privilege of seeing the trap before it falls into it.
The Gigafactory Policy Commission is the first formal recognition that production sovereignty, not just consumption, is the measure that matters. The question now is whether the cap and floor, the expansion of data centers, the industrial backup market and the rollout of EV charging stations will reward existing technologies or technologies that provide the highest level of energy security.
There are alternative battery chemistries built on metals and materials that Britain and its allies actually produce, tailor-made for the six- to 16-hour daily cycle window in which the renewable economy really lives, and that can be manufactured at meaningful scale on British soil. Several are at the point where commercial application, rather than laboratory validation, is possible in the very near future.
The Faraday Institution’s own published position notes that the long-duration storage layer is “not currently being addressed in Britain.” It is addressable and the chemistry exists. The intellectual property is largely owned by UK-based companies. What is missing is a procurement architecture that values sovereignty alongside cost, and not in a distant future, but now, in the windows that are about to open.
Britain doesn’t need to import the next dependency and the energy transition doesn’t require it either. The history of British energy policy is really the history of learning the same lesson too late. The lesson is being presented again and we must take the opportunity to learn the answer now.
Energy security and the promise that it will be achieved through domestic renewable energy is a key part of the government’s Clean Power 2030 action plan. Taking its name from the goal, the Clean Power 2030 Summit focuses on the industrial, economic and political needs of the renewable energy industry as it scales up to meet the government’s target. Tickets are still available for the Clean Power 2030 Summit. View the full agenda on the event website And book your ticket to attend. Our readers can get a 20% discount on tickets with the code SPP20.
