Battery Deep Dive: 5-Minute EV Charging, Solid State & How Batteries Are Quietly Running the World!

26:24So it's actually very, very power hungry. So basically it's about lithium ions moving very fast and that can slow down the charging. But then the point is that actually these are very sophisticated things. It's not just a sandwich. It's a sandwich with a sort of control system. It doesn't let you do it, like put enough power in fast enough to cause damage. So actually the protections are in place so that that can't be a problem. So just coming, I mean, we talked a little bit about the materials and the kind of weird stuff that we have been making batteries out of. And I think one of the trends we've seen is that, you know, there are these what people call rare earth or critical minerals.

27:01They're very weird. Some of these things are very weird compared with normal life. But actually, it feels like the focus on battery chemistry now is entirely to make it less weird, right? So instead of having cobalt and manganese, you have lithium-ion phosphate, right? Much more common elements. elements and using I mean carbon is a carbon as the anode is a very it's a very common material and so it feels like and we'll come to um uh sodium iron in a bit and sodium is just common salt is it is that fair that this is about like making batteries less weird because there's a there's a kind of superpower if you can make a battery out of kind of ordinary things well I mentioned sustainability maybe less weird means maybe less less unsustainable yeah So if you can, I mean, the classic is iron and silicon.

27:51We've been looking at materials made of iron and silicon. So that's a great... I would love to have a paper saying batteries made from rust and sand. So if you can, it'll be really low cost. It'll be very sustainable. I don't know about less weird. I mean, the complexity... I love chemistry because it is weird. But there are... If you can move away from... Also, the geopolitics of some of these materials is complex as well. I don't want to go down that route. But I don't know. We'll come on to that later. Don't worry. You're not getting away with that. Are we going to come on to recycling? Yes.

28:24That was the next question.

28:31This episode is brought to you by Hankook. The Hankook Ion tyre is built exclusively for electric vehicles. Engineered to deliver what EV drivers need most. Confident grip, quietness, energy efficiency and long mileage. As the official tyre partner of Formula E, Hancock proves its EV technology is at the highest level of performance and brings that same innovation to every ion tyre on the road.

29:04I was going to ask Rob at first because I guess battery, I mean, I think eight years ago, a lot of people were asking about recycling and then it became apparent that batteries were lasting a long time and we didn't need to worry about it at the right yet. I remember I think the last shoot I did for everything electric before the pandemic was that a mechanical battery recycling place in Germany and Maybe you've been to more since but I feel it's sort of There are there's two questions as can we recycle what we've already made and will we be able to recycle the batteries that coming now? Have you been to any good battery recycling places?

29:37Not really yet. I want to I mean My dream is to eventually be allowed to go back into America to go to Redwood materials Which is kind of I think one of the companies the forefront there are certainly big ones in China but Redwood materials are achieving quite extraordinary levels of percentages of recycling the materials like they're in that high 90 % of Everything that's in a battery pack they're managing to reuse and currently new Teslas are containing quite large amounts of materials that were recycled by them. So the guy who set up Redwood Materials, JB Straubel, was one of the founders of Tesla and one of the early people there.

30:14And he left and set up a battery recycling company. And they really struggled, to start with, because they didn't have any batteries to recycle. So they were using flip phones and old laptops and things like that because the car batteries weren't wearing out, as you said. So it's a very... It's a growth industry. But I think what I have seen more of is the second life. So when an electric vehicle battery, say, is at 70%, so you've lost quite a lot of the initial range of where it was, you just repackage it into a box. You put it next to it. I mean, which station? A very big city in Belgium. The name's gone out of my head.

30:55No, it's in the Netherlands. Not Antwerp. No, because Antwerp have got it. But anyway, there's a big football stadium in the Netherlands. The whole roof is covered in solar panels. That charges a load of old car batteries outside the stadium. They run their night games 100 % powered by those batteries. So, you know, I mean, we're talking megawatts of batteries. It's not a couple. Well, it's also the case, isn't it, that it's not just about what you can do. Because when I went back in 2020, went to that mechanical battery sector, They were sort of chopping it up in really clever ways, and then they'd separate the bits into, you know, there was a sack for the cobalt and a sack for the lithium and a sack for all the things.

31:35And I said, well, what do you get paid to do this? Who do you sell them to? And they said, oh, they sort of line them up by price. And they said they only sell the top three. So they sell the copper, they resell the copper, the cobalt, and maybe it was the nickel. And they said everything else we could, but because it's a bit more expensive, because it's so cheap to extract the raw material, nobody wants to buy the recycled one because it costs a little bit more. Now, maybe that's changed now, but I was like, no, you're going through all this effort. You're doing exactly what you're supposed to do.

32:04You're lining them up. I've got my bag of lithium. And then just nobody wants to buy it. So it wasn't actually a technical problem. It's a market problem. I think that has changed since then. I think now it is a... Manufacturers want to say they're using recycled material. Yeah, I think there's a lot of that going on. I think, as we know, with lead-acid batteries, there was a big legislation about recycling I think that will come with lithium-ion batteries that there might be legislation to shift it to make it more, as you say, more market-friendly or more economical but you're right, a lot of it to do with cost because that's why electric vehicles have been successful recently it's just that costs have come down maybe it's economy of scale but it's a real opportunity it's not my research area, recycling but I can see it as a real big research and commercial opportunity Well, there's also been this idea of battery passports, hasn't there?

32:57I'm not sure if it's for car batteries, but the idea that when the first manufacturer makes their battery, they write down what's in it, where did it come from, and then you kind of keep a record of it. Is it the EU? Maybe you know more than me. No, I don't. I wish I did, but I have heard of that, that they're trying to kind of keep, attract the materials that are in there. So that as it goes into the house or whatever, you actually have a record of where it's been. So you've got more confidence, it's safer, you can trace it back. So I think that's coming for at least some things in the EU. And once you've established it, I think it will become normal.

33:27OK, let's get a little bit onto battery types, because I think for people who don't think about batteries all the time, there's a whole load of horrible words from the periodic table, and they sort of get tossed around like confetti, and it's really hard to separate out what's going on. But there's two battery technologies in particular that I would like us to have a chat about. And the first one is, let's do sodium ion. batteries first. So Seifel, first of all just tell me where why do we go from lithium-ion to sodium-ion? Like why is why is sodium an option for making a battery? Well when I talk about sodium I like to ask how many in the audience have heard of sodium-ion batteries?

34:09Pretty well informed. Half third to a half. So why sodium? So it's well actually it's called beyond lithium but I like to say, as somebody heard this morning, is actually below lithium in the periodic table. If you remember your school chemistry, sodium sits in that group one below lithium. So it actually has the same sort of chemistry as lithium. So it actually can be used in batteries. The disadvantage... Oh, I'll talk about the advantage first. The advantage of sodium, it's incredibly abundant. If you think about the stuff you sprinkle on your chips, on your pasta, or in my case, before a tequila shot.

34:49It's salt. So there's a lot of sodium out there. So it's very abundant. So it's going to be cheaper. The downside, because it's below lithium in the product table, it's actually larger and heavier. So it means that it probably won't be used in your mobile phones in the near future, because the energy, how much sodium you can stuff into your battery will be less than lithium. but it can be used for maybe larger applications. So the big applications in my area is to do with renewables. Solar, so when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, we need energy storage. In fact, we've got solar panels in our house and we've got a lithium-ion phosphate battery.

35:32We've got a battery with it. But sodium could be used for these really large solar farms or these wind farms. Sodium is much, much cheaper. So sodium-ion batteries could be used in grid storage. So basically, if you don't need them to be moving around, they can do it. And actually, Robert, we've seen just this year 11 Energy. So if you've been or about to go, they've come to our shows. They're doing like, they're really, I mean, it's 11 because 11 is the number of sodium in the periodic table. So, yeah, what are they up to? I mean, what we just saw, two installations of their sodium ion home batteries in Stroud in Gloucestershire.

36:08There were two we went to visit. And I mean, they are just white boxes on the wall. As always, when you're trying to make a television show, something visually stimulating, and you've got to cover a battery, it's a box. There's not a lot to see. It did have a green light at the end. Yeah, that was brilliant. We got a close-up of that. Tiny little green light. But, I mean, that was the advantages, as I understand it from the company that have done this, is partly cost, but mainly longevity. So they're talking about 5 ,000 to 6 ,000 recharge cycles. So you're talking 25, 30 years' use as a home battery.

36:46And then the recycling of a sodium ion battery is not as challenging, I think, partly because it's a lot of salt. And are you going to reuse that salt? Probably not. I mean, this is what we don't know. I mean, that was under discussion. But they're also better at low temperatures, right? And they're very good at... Sorry, that is very important. They're very good at... So you have them outside your house if it's really cold. They're partially effective, but nothing like as much as lithium. So and people somebody's had to go putting this in the car, right? I mean, I think they have in China. There are so do we can in theory if you don't want some kind of I don't know Ferrari style super thing you could in principle put it in a cheap car.

37:25Yeah, and they're talking about more like in buses and trucks and large vehicles that We saw an earth mover at the Shanghai Motor Show like a big bulldozer thing Right had sodium. I mean that's the critical point is there is when you know We talk about them on things like the everything electric show here's this company. It's got this idea It's got investors, but when it actually starts turning up as a product on the market Then you've kind of turned the corn and you're into This is now just going to be driven by price and does it work? Yeah, and if it does and it feels like it feels like sodium ion batteries are coming right?

37:56I think so I think that out of all the new battery chemistry is that's the one that's appeared quite recently Commercially and it's now being massed see a Taylor churning them out. Yeah Yeah, big time. Anything else on sodium ion? Yeah, well, just to say about the vehicles, already, I think in China largely, they're used in e-scooters and small vehicles. So you're right. It's not just a big grid storage or next to a solar panel in the house. They're going to be used for light vehicles. And they'll be much cheaper. They'll be lifetime, be longer, and hopefully more sustainable as well. Okay, so that is the sodium ion battery bit.

38:34And then the other thing that we hear, the phrase that's knocking around in the battery world in new technologies, is solid-state batteries. So to get what this is, let's go back to your sandwich. What's a solid-state battery? In fact, I'm glad I brought up the electrochemical sandwich. So I mentioned the sandwich with the two bread slices, the two electrodes. In between, I mentioned that there was a liquid electrolyte in your phone right now. In terms of safety, if you could replace that flammable liquid with a solid, you basically have an all solid state battery and that's what the all solid state battery is about but there's another advantage is that you can replace one of those bread slices one of the negative electrode instead of using graphite you can use the holy grail which is lithium and then you get much much higher energy density just to give you an idea you'd get probably more than five times more energy stored compared to your current lithium-ion battery in a solid state battery the current limitations is because it's a solid the ions moving through a solid happens to be not as fast as lithium ions moving through a liquid naturally but there's been massive massive advances so I'm again very very optimistic that within five ten years you'll hear more about solid state batteries being used in application so that's that's the background behind a solid battery.

39:57And have you had any interesting conversations about this? Loads. And I mean, I was always worried that solid-state batteries were a similar technology to carbon capture and storage and nuclear fusion. You know, yes. It would be great if it worked. When's it going to happen? You know, so it always seemed to be a few years ahead. I mean, Toyota have made a very big announcement very recently that they, because they're sort of so behind with electric vehicles, that they're bringing out a solid-state battery electric vehicle in 2028. So they put that date down and we'll see if that actually happens.

40:28It does feel as though there is definitely, I mean, there's always competition in the market, but it does feel that now it's a different kind of competition. They're sort of, they want to do the new cool thing. Like they want to demonstrate that it works. It's not just that they're having a project, because it used to be they'd announce a big project, but now it's like, actually, no, we're going to, here's the car and here it works. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about who is doing this, because we hear, I mean, we've already heard, you know, China, CATL. Is that in Taiwan or is that China? China, yeah.

40:57So there's a lot of this technology which has been concentrated in China, right? That's where most of the batteries that we get. And Elliot for the Everything Electric show is out there covering all of this stuff. But let's talk first about how far ahead China is. Because it does feel as though, Robert, they are... I mean, you've been to Shanghai, you've been to business. They're almost... It's almost like a different age, right? They can see... They've got a different view of the future. and they're sort of already in it. Yes, I mean, it's very hard. I saw, you know, a very small area of Chinese life, but it was very hard not to be slightly overwhelmed by it all because of the scale.

41:38I think the scale is the most important thing. But, I mean, Shanghai is just a colossal city, and I mean, I'm sure it's not... It's nowhere near 100%, but the vast majority of transport is electric in the city. All the public transport, all the taxes, definitely. the air quality and it didn't used to be used to be terrible it used to be terrible partly because they had coal burning power plants right in the middle of shanghai which they've got rid of those have all gone and there's loads of arguments that they built more coal burning power plants outside the city which are still using but they have invested in renewables on a scale we cannot even begin to think i think it was 2024 that the world total of solar installation doubled and it was all in China.

42:23So they literally doubled. Everything we'd been putting, we'd been putting solar panels on roofs for the last 30 plus years, and it doubled overnight in one year with what they've done. So they are very committed to it. We were talking in our previous session about the importance of optimism and being hopeful and there is actually this massive thing just in the global carbon budget last December, which is that so China's emissions have been going up because their economy is expanding and obviously that involves using more energy, but their emissions are flat. And that is such a big deal, partly because they manufacture a lot of stuff for the rest of the world, and that's a big chunk of everyone's emissions.

43:02But actually, their economy is still growing, which is what everyone seems to want, and their energy use is still growing, but their emissions are about to start going down. And that is such a big deal, because in Europe, we've already decoupled are the size of our economy from our energy use, but then we're not doing the big industrial, we're not making all the things, but they are. And I really think that's important. I think in the coming global carbon budget, November, December this year, look out for it, I think emissions will have flattened off or stopped going down. And that's just huge.

43:40But it's because of the speed that China is pushing this technology. I mean, globally, if you just think of what's happened in the last few years globally the oil the sales of crude oil have dropped by two percent not because of a recession not because of a war not because of a pandemic because there's now enough electric vehicles on the roads that aren't buying oil that aren't buying few liquid fuels that is that that's actually made the dent and I mean I think we're probably likely to see a renewed effort on behalf of the fuel industry to spread as much negative stuff about that as possible but I mean that's the first time I've ever been aware of it and I mean a huge amount of it is in Asia that change so the the biggest change you know I wasn't surprised to see the electric cars in China what really blew me away was the scooters was the two wheel because there's millions of them and it's just overwhelming how many there are we stood outside a little convenience store in a little side street in Shanghai and a woman in her 80s I think came up on our little scooter she lifted the saddle she twisted the battery pulled it out shoved it in a thing in the wall, took another one out, shoved it in, twisted it again, put the seat down, off she went.

44:50I reckon it took her about 22 seconds to completely refuel her scooter. And there is a cost to that, but there's apps that do it. And that is not a flash new installation. It's actually a bit scruffy. There was a load of chickens in a cage to the side. It wasn't a sort of showpiece greener than thou thing. It was just what people do. That's how you ride your scooter in Shanghai. Yeah, and it works. And it works. And the chickens are on board, apparently. And I guess the thing, I mean, that's one of the issues, that's one of the discussions that has come up with sodium ion batteries, I think, is that because China is so far ahead in making lithium ion batteries, but actually we do have, so 11 Energy, I think, they're not manufacturing in the UK yet, but they want to.

45:33That's the plan, yeah. Because sodium is much more accessible than lithium. So we do actually have the supply chain for all the elements to make it in Europe. and so maybe that might, I mean there's this idea I think, I don't know what either of you think about it, might break a little bit of the dependence on China. As a scientist I suppose I want to always return to the science that the only way we can actually advance is just by innovation. The fact that we've got lithium-ion batteries in the first place was some of that research actually done in the UK by the great John Goodenough who subsequently got the Nobel Prize in 2019 with Stan Whittingham and Ushina.

46:13So that was just from basic science. He kind of developed new materials and that led to the commercialisation by Sony. What the UK hasn't been very good at is we're very good at innovating, but we're not very good at converting that innovation into commercial success. So that's the other step. I mean, I'm not an economist and I'm just a humble scientist, but that's where area that we need to be better at in terms of manufacturing getting a manufacturing base back again and that's the whole idea about these gigafactories in europe to try and develop that but that still needs innovation new materials that we're ahead of the rest of the world and that's where i suppose the science that i'm trying to do fits in so let's to come back to battery uses because i think you know we've gone we've gone through cars a bit and sort of, you know, the battery technology itself.

47:07But there's also where we're going to find batteries. Because I really think that the shape of the world is going to be highly dependent on what batteries can do and how we use them. And so there's a few things that people have talked about for batteries, but whether it's actually going to happen is not clear. So one of them is planes and putting batteries in a plane, which is kind of a difficult use case, right? that I've been, I was in it years ago, I was in a little battery plane that it used the battery to take off and then it ran out of battery and then you basically used it as a glider. So it got you off the ground and then there was this really disconcerting moment where the engine just cut out.

47:44I've been in my mind. It's terrifying. It's really terrifying. I mean, you sort of know it's going to happen, but it still goes so silent. It's this enormous shock. But we are doing a bit better now. I guess people are, for short haul flights, people are doing better. Yeah, I mean, I'm still fractionally, I like to keep a healthy scepticism about those things, but, I mean, it does... Certainly, there's an enormous amount of investment going into it, and I think that where we'll see it... So, one of the really big areas is vertical take-off because of the safety record of helicopters. Now, we all...

48:14And I've been in numerous helicopters with jobs, and I said to a guy who works in the helicopter industry, I know that when I get off an aeroplane, I just get off an aeroplane. When I've got out of a helicopter and it's landed, I'd make a sort of mental thank you that I'm still there because it took off and it flew. They're amazing machines. And he said, you're right to do that. Which is not exactly reassuring. Out of everything that flies, helicopters have the worst safety record by a long way. And what they're talking about with multiple rotor vertical takeoff and landing is unbelievable levels of safety and of double safety and of triple safety.

48:53And if that motor doesn't work, they've got this one and that one. So they're talking about sometimes 16 rotors that take you off and then eight that pull you along. Because the game is that basically if you're in a plane and the engine's cut out, it will glide. But a helicopter does not glide. It doesn't glide. But if you have 16 absolutely independent things, the chances of them all breaking at the same time are very small. And I guess people are talking about vertical taxis. Yes. Mostly it sounds expensive to me. It sounds very, very expensive. and that the ultra-hyper-elite will use them off the top of buildings and the rest of us will be crawling through a tunnel in a post-apocalyptic doomscape.

49:34So we're not spoiling their view. So, yeah, there is that aspect of it. When I sat inside a fully made-up version of a vertical take-off, and it was amazing, but interior, it was like luxury seats with magazines and, you know, it was all gorgeous. Plus some monograms. Yeah, it was very, very upper first class, yeah. So in principle, Seifel, I mean, this is one of the big questions, is could a battery, is there any theoretical reason why a battery couldn't one day power a bigger aircraft? So not the kind of light aircraft, the thing that Pipistrelle's, then Cessnas, but might it ever be possible?

50:09Or is that just... Yeah, that's a fair question. So on the batteries we mentioned earlier, solid-state batteries. So solid-state batteries I mentioned were safer just because they don't have that flammable... So they're being talked about in small aircraft. So I think the first... Actually, I think aircraft will follow the same trajectory as vehicles. So most of the early vehicles were hybrid. So the Toyota Prius was a hybrid with internal combustion engine with a bit of battery. And then that battery power increased. I think it'll follow the same sort of trajectory in terms of there'll be hybrid kind of aircraft with hybrid internal combustion engine as now, but with batteries, and those batteries will be solid state just because they'll be safer.

51:02And there's no reason why, in principle, just as we've found with, as Robert mentioned, cars going a longer range, that means higher energy density, that you couldn't get in for larger aircraft as well. I don't know whether it'll happen in the near future, but definitely the short-haul type of flights within the UK. Well, I've definitely heard of one way of making them hybrid, I think, which is that a colossal amount of the fuel that you put in the tank of an aircraft is just take-off. Take-off, yeah. And so I think there's an idea around that if you use the batteries when you're flying and when you're landing, you might need a kerosene engine, jet fuel, just to do the big power push at the start.

51:43because of course the problem is that an empty battery weighs the same as a full battery so you don't want to be flying all the way but you can burn fuel so you you burn a bit of fuel to get into the air and then you fly the rest of the flight on batteries so I can imagine that's it because I spoke to someone from Airbus Industries admittedly a few years ago it was during the flight of the first electric plane that flew across the channel which is built by Airbus Industries was a great little thing their dream because of legislation and because of people who live near airports is that they would have a you know let's go with an Airbus a380 that took off with electric power it would absolutely drain the batteries it would get to 10 ,000 feet because it's megawatts it's multiple megawatts if not gigawatts of power it would need to get up there and once it's up at 10 ,000 feet then a single jet engine pushes it across the Atlantic Ocean right using a fraction of the fuel that you would use on that journey now and then then when you are at 35 ,000 feet or whatever and you start to descend to land you use the the rotors that got you to take off as air brakes and as regen so you as you go down you regenerate and I mean they were it was being very realistic probably 10 or 15 percent of the energy that it took to get you up but it would produce and it would you'd be able to use that to slow you down and then you'd land and the reason they wanted to do that was because then they could run airports 24 hours a day because you could take off in the middle of the night with a fraction of the noise that a jet engine makes and then you still fly and then you land you could also land very quietly you know so either way and he said i said how long do you think he says oh 50 years so it's not it's not imminent i don't think that's yeah but i mean it's really interesting that the and i think what's interesting about this is the thing about combustion engines is because the it's you just put more petrol in whatever it is you don't have to really think about what it is you're doing you just go oh we're just going to power it you just kind of chuck energy at it and you don't ever really have to question what you're doing but once you start to say what is it we're trying to do what what do we prioritize then you can be really clever and i think there's some kind of low-hanging fruit when it gets so let's just briefly we will have a couple of minutes for audience questions um but just before we get there let's just talk a bit about grid storage we mentioned before that you know these battery types where you're not interested in it being light.

54:04You know, there's the potential for them just being static batteries. But I just want you to talk about batteries and the grid, because I think there's a really interesting sort of, you know, people think about storage when, I guess, out in the public, you know, with wind and solar, and you have to store that energy for when you need it in case the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. And I think the mental image is always that that's going to be like an extra little power plant, that the battery is going to be, you know, whoever it is, national grid, is going to build some big stack of batteries.

54:34But actually what we're seeing is batteries, these batteries that we're talking about for transport also being used potentially for grid storage. Just talk to us a little bit about how... Because there's a vision for how that's going to work right, and it isn't that the grid is going to deal with the problem, all of it. No. I mean, when it's an engineer at the National Grid, it's their dream that we would have, you know, connected intelligently connected vehicle to grid cars because at the moment currently in the UK there's just over 2 million electric cars not a lot of people know that's that it's got to that level and that is the equivalent I think of something like if you could take one kilowatt hour from the two million electric cars I can't do the math it's a lot and that's what they're talking about they're not talking about draining it but at peak time they would take a couple of kilowatt hours out of each car in a controlled way and then they would then replenish that later on when it is less demand that is the equivalent of a couple of Hinkley Point C's it's colossal amounts of power it's enough to run very large cities or if not multiple cities and that's with 2 million cars if we had 20 million cars we have at the moment is about 32 million private vehicles in the UK so it's an absurd fantasy but if all of those were connected you wouldn't need any other source of backup power.

55:53You know, you've got it already. It would not affect anyone. It wouldn't have. And they're a really good place. I mentioned Utrecht in the last talk, but Utrecht has a very big vehicle-to-city organised grid thing, and it's made a phenomenal difference to their city's electricity costs because they're charging them up during the day when it's sunny or when it's very windy, which they have a lot of wind power, and then they're running the city on that electricity at night and this is multiple vehicles and we're talking thousands of in their case thousands of vehicles that are all connected through a grid that they can control so they're car share vehicles they're not private vehicles so when you see that starting to emerge you go this is that is the most in a way the most exciting potential the other quick one is what's happened in australia so the australian government have helped fund people to put batteries in their houses thinking a few thousand people I think they did 250 ,000 in the first few months I mean it's and it's absolutely affected the Australian grid so their grid scale and everything is smaller than us it's only you know 25 million people so it's a much less it's the scale that we would need here but it's really challenged the old coal industry basically no one wants to burn coal anymore because it's too expensive and they can also trade I mean it's amber energy isn't it so I think there's an episode coming up and it links to another episode on on systems that will let you use the battery in your house to trade a little bit with the grid so even if you don't have solar panels you can take energy off the grid when it's cheap and sell it back to them when it's expensive and you make a profit it's actually actually make a profit so Sarah in Australia who's got the same amount of panels that I have in my house in the UK for a start generates twice as much just just because it's sunny in Australian I hate them all and I'm allowed to X I'm married to one and my children are Australian but the the she made like her elect her power bill last year 2025 was two and a half thousand dollars income so she ran a house she ran two cars and she got paid two and a half thousand I said you must have paid something for electricity no not a penny and that is I mean their system operates differently their grid operates differently but the fact is she's a power supplier.

58:09You know, they didn't give her two and a half grand for fun. They gave it because she supplied a huge amount of electricity to the group. And I think that system is, some parts of that system are coming to the UK. And I think in 10 years' time, the episodes we've made about that in the past couple of weeks will be, people will go, what's the fuss about? Obviously, you do this. Yeah. Obviously. Why would you not? Why would you have a battery just sitting there not doing anything because your car's parked? Yeah, yeah. Okay, we are rapidly running out of time. We have time for one audience question.

58:36or maybe two depending on how long the first one takes one I've got a very stern face from the producer at the side let's have the lady in the turquoise uh shirt here with the red where have we got where's we have microphones to give one just coming around the corner here you can shout stick your hand up nice and that's the one nice and clear one very short question please hi thank you uh when will we see the end of the disposable button cell battery oh I mean it should have been 10 years ago do you mean things like what a watch battery or we have to very soon I think even equally and as much as that is I didn't realize this until we followed a project where someone built a formula e car out of e waste and it was powered by tens of a hundred many I don't know many thousands of when you suck vapes thank you what's it called when you suck something could have gone really wrong vapes the batteries in vapes are thrown away millions of them it's absolutely shocking and they're they're rechargeable batteries they're tiny little rechargeable batteries and so he wired up with some students thousands of them and that's what powered the car now the car did seven miles an hour it wasn't like super fast but you know it went along it for you any any comment on that do you know no insider no it should they should be recycled yeah I think it's just and the more consumers make a fuss about it the faster it will happen okay I am now getting very stern looks from the side of the stage so we are going to leave our battery discussion there thank you so much to everyone the temp joining please join me in thanking the brilliant Robert Llewellyn and Saifel Islam.

1:00:28So that was me, Robert and Professor Saifel Islam from Oxford University, sharing our battery enthusiasm on stage with a live festival audience, which was just brilliant. And because this was recorded live at an event, I have to say this, this podcast was recorded live at the Latitude Festival 2026 in the Cosmic Shambles Forest of Science and Culture. It was produced by Trent Burton and engineered by Dominic Ray. Cosmic Shambles is a registered trademark of Trunkman Productions Ltd. And Latitude is owned and operated by Festival Republic, part of the Live Nation Entertainment Group. So that's our podcast this week.

1:01:08All done now. And if you have been, thank you for listening. We learned how to love dogs from the dogs that loved us and waited for us to get home from school. They were the dogs that raised us. We returned the love with Pedigree Dog Food. It was good then, and it's better now. Every bowl has 100 % complete nutrition, supporting six health essentials, and now it includes vitamin good bites, a nutrient boost your dog will love. Pedigree. Good then. Better now. Some people like working twice as hard just to stay right where they are. And in Ohio, we really don't get it. Because to us, owning a home in your 30s, working in tech without the traffic, and still being able to make it to your kid's soccer game sounds pretty good.

1:01:58In fact, Ohio is the second most affordable state to buy a home. Your move. Learn more at yourmoveohio.com.

1:02:10Skincare means Sephora. Makeup, same. They've got the products, expertise, and the brands that fit your lifestyle. But when I talk about hair care, do you make the same connection? Well, you should. Sephora is just as trusted for hair whether you're looking to repair, strengthen, hydrate, or add shine. You'll find brands like Kerastase, K18, and Gisu. Plus, the guidance that helped you choose what's right for your hair. And with free shipping and same-day delivery, great hair care is easier than ever. Shop hair at Sephora today.