How to overcome the hidden holdup of the battery revolution

With 11 battery business bankruptcies and over $15 billion erased in the process in the past year alone, it’s clear that something is short-circuiting the development of the next big energy innovation in the U.S. and Europe.

If the West wants to make cars, drones, robots, and even an energy grid that’s competitive with global economic rivals, it needs to build a better battery industry. That’s why investors sunk billions of dollars into companies like Natron and Northvolt, two of the largest battery innovators to go bust in the past year.

The common explanation is that the chemistries these companies developed just didn’t work. But it’s really a kink in the way that battery technologies meet the messy, sprawling world of actual products that caused the problems at both businesses.

Solving this problem is critical for countries looking to ensure both their national security and economic influence in the 21st century.

Economists and political pundits alike recognize batteries as the foundational component of “the electric stack.” The key for both military success in the age of drone warfare and industrial success where the same technologies are crucial inputs for digital phones, robotics, cars, and everything else.

Shape the wrong battery question

For decades, the battery industry has been asking one misleading question: What chemistry will win? Will it be lithium-sulfur with its abundant materials and dazzling energy density? Or sodium-ion with its improved safety and reduced environmental impact?

In labs and companies around the world, researchers are answering that question. New chemistries are unlocking power, speed, longevity, and sustainability that once belonged to science fiction.

But walk outside the lab, and the story changes. These marvels are useless if they can’t integrate into the drones, robots, vehicles, and consumer devices of the real world.

The obsession with picking one “winning” chemistry has blinded the industry to the harder, more urgent question: how to make every chemistry usable.

The cost of misconnection

Think of a city with perfectly designed skyscrapers but no roads to connect them. That’s the battery industry today. We celebrate the skyscrapers, the breakthrough chemistries, while ignoring the infrastructure needed to link them together.

Unique-voltage chemistries demand unique integration. This means all these new innovations are far from plug and play. The chemistry companies are focused on the physics to make these technologies a reality and predicting all end applications is nearly impossible.

Each chemistry forces its own integration hurdle, a costly re-engineering of electronics, chargers, and certification. The science dazzles; the economics kill the dream.

And this isn’t just an engineering inconvenience. It’s a bottleneck for everything the future promises. Without solving integration, fleets of delivery drones won’t take off, data centers won’t decarbonize, and cities will keep choking on fossil fuels. Without integration, the world’s most promising chemistries will remain forever trapped in pilot projects and white papers.

Rethinking the connective tissue

The next revolution in batteries won’t come from another chemistry. It will come from a new way of thinking about connection.

Integration cannot be an afterthought. It is the single point that will enable the mass adoption of a variety of batteries that will power our future products. Advanced battery management systems (BMS), DC conversion, intelligent controls, dynamic voltage alignment aren’t just technical tweaks. They are the bridges that allow tomorrow’s chemistries to cross into today’s markets.

This shift sounds subtle, but it rewrites the mass-adoption playbook. Instead of asking, “Which chemistry will win?” the industry can ask, ”How do we make every chemistry usable?” The answer would unlock a world where new batteries are judged not just on performance or environmental impact, but also on their ability to connect, seamlessly, to everything.

The future needs battery flexibility

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Electrification remains humanity’s best shot at a low-carbon future. The next generation of chemistries offers an escape: abundant materials, lower carbon footprint, higher performance. But these breakthroughs will only matter if we design for flexibility first.

Integration isn’t the boring plumbing of the battery world. It is the revolution within the revolution. Like the internet, the quiet infrastructure will decide whether innovation thrives or dies.

If we can get this right, the future will arrive not as a single triumphant chemistry, but as a network of possibilities. And in that network lies the power to turn science fiction into daily life.

About the author

Charles Welch is co-founder and CEO of Proper Voltage, which said it makes batteries better by integrating any battery chemistry into any technology quickly and efficiently. He has over a decade of expertise in aerospace engineering and battery innovation.

Prior to Proper Voltage, Welch led the Applied Research Battery Group at Northrop Grumman, where he developed cutting-edge energy systems and earned Innovator of the Year in 2015. Outside of engineering, Welch contributes to wildlife conservation, designing advanced technologies to support field research efforts. For almost seven years, he has worked as a contractor for the San Diego Institute for Conservation Research.