A chemistry that genuinely beats the incumbent may not declare itself for thousands of cycles. That is the constraint Israel Temprano keeps meeting when companies bring their materials to Cambridge, and he treats it as a commercial problem rather than a scientific one.
Batteries have become so good, he says, that finding a differentiating factor is now hard. The measurement has become the slow step.
Temprano is a researcher in the Grey group at the University of Cambridge, where the speciality is developing techniques that look at a cell in situ, or in operando, while it is running. The alternative is to wait for the cell to fail. That can take months. With the latest iterations, which he describes as so good, it can take years.
Companies cannot build the techniques, but they want the output
The pull from industry is recent. Temprano dates it to roughly the last five years, and specifically to the point at which the Faraday Institution became a big thing in the UK.
His account of why companies come is unsentimental. They do not have the money, the space or the time to develop this kind of characterisation themselves. Once it exists, they are very interested in it.
The typical request arrives with a gap in it. A company has a material, it performs a little better than their regular one, and they cannot say why. Temprano's rendering of the ask: "can you look at this material? We know it works a little bit better, but we don't know why." Often enough they will not tell the lab what the material actually is.
What the group sells, in effect, is time. If a cell can be read while it runs, nobody has to sit out a months-long cycling programme to learn whether a change helped.
That matters more now than it did, because the schedule has tightened. Temprano calls the pace of development in the field ridiculous, and then reaches for a stronger word: "It's really neck-breaking." New products keep arriving at the door. The bottleneck is not the supply of ideas, it is the lag between having one and knowing whether it was any good. As he puts it, they need to speed it up, and that is where his group comes in.
The complexity keeps receding
The money arrived because the EV market grew, and the effect on research has been less straightforward than more funding usually implies.
More people wanted to learn about batteries. The more the field learned, Temprano says, the more it realised it needed to look at finer detail, because cells turned out to be far more complex than anyone assumed at the beginning. Each layer of understanding exposes the next question, and answering it needs another technique.
Which is why consortiums keep appearing. The Faraday Institution in the UK, the ALISTORE European Research Institute across Europe, and a range of other groupings, all built on the premise that the problem has to be attacked from several perspectives simultaneously. Technique development, the corner Temprano came in through, is booming for the same reason.
What a PhD is actually for
Temprano is careful about the line between academic and industrial work, and he pushes back on the assumption that a doctorate is simply early-stage commercial research done cheaply.
One of the main outcomes of a PhD, he argues, is the education itself. The point is to become a leading expert in one very particular field, which demands depth, and which by design prevents the researcher from being exploratory or from working on more applied problems. That constraint is the product, not a side effect.
Postdoctoral work is where the research can move closer to a commercial setup. It is the stage at which the narrow expertise becomes portable.
His own case makes the argument. Temprano came to batteries after a postdoc at Cambridge in catalysis: fundamental surface science, looking at how the surfaces of catalysts reacted with the products they were meant to form. Batteries were a good deal more applied than what he was used to, which is part of what made the jump interesting. What carried across was a strong background in physical chemistry and in technique development, and that is what opened the door.
He started by developing characterisation techniques, including gas analysis, aimed at studying cells as they run rather than waiting for them to fail. Then he moved into the Grey group.
Where the next gains sit
Asked where the technology goes, Temprano begins from a position that is unusual for someone who spends his working life on its shortcomings.
Batteries are already extremely good and extremely durable. In EVs, he notes, they last longer than the cars do. Against that baseline, the room he sees is in fast charging and in bringing material costs down, which mostly means designing out cobalt.
His first prediction is not about chemistry at all. A large share of near-term improvement, he thinks, is an engineering problem: battery management, and how much can be extracted from the chemistries already in production. That alone will improve the current generation a lot.
On the chemistry side, the interesting frontier is the anode and the electrolyte together. How much lithium can be intercalated, and how quickly it can be done, is where he expects super fast charging to be won, and he expects that to improve massively.
On cathodes he expects movement towards LFP, which takes the nickel and the cobalt out of the mix. That, he thinks, is going to be a big thing.
Spin-outs are now coming out of the group, and companies keep arriving to ask what happens next.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.