Love this project. The UK government announced the ‘Faraday Challenge’ yesterday (24/07/17), investing £246 million in the research, innovation and development of battery technologies to make the UK’s energy system smarter. I’m pleased the UK is finally joining the ‘electric’ revolution as highlighted by this useful investment.

Design, research and innovation is something the UK is very good at and hopefully we can create the next generation of ‘battery power’ allowing the UK to compete head-on in the smarter tech world we now take for granted. Who knows – maybe a UK start-up will come to compete head on with the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg et al. It’s not just electric cars that run on battery power!

This new government initiative will make it easier for you and I to generate our own ‘smart’ power with solar panels or renewable energy systems and store it in batteries at home. This type of technology is already here but the current storage devices are expensive and only deliver short bursts of energy.

With the advent of new battery designs it will allow the technology to become cheaper and permit energy to be stored for longer. The batteries will have greater capacity and be smaller – this will make it more attractive for homes to take up. This is also more likely to happen if the government introduce tariff reductions as they did with the initial roll out of solar energy installations.

This is a great announcement and hopefully in time the UK can lead the world in ‘smart battery’ technology.

I will be searching for investment opportunities in this area and will let you know what I find.

Faraday was an English scientist, inventor and pioneer who contributed to the study of electrolysis, electro-chemistry, electromagnetism and electromagnetic induction. His efforts really helped shape the use of electricity in technology and lead to the invention of the electric motor.