Who will be the winners and losers from the battery revolution?
Sanjiv Tumkur, Rathbones' head of equity research, looks at how a revolution in battery technology could reshape the way we live.
The start of your day 15 years from now may be very different from this morning.
As you head to the bathroom, you note you are making money again from your solar panels, even as they instantaneously power your piping hot shower.
You see from the indicator that the store of energy in your solar-powered home battery has only dipped to 80% of capacity despite weeks of poor weather.
MSCI expands ESG range with five indices
After breakfast, your electric car slides silently to a halt outside the front door. Usually you catch up on emails during your 30-minute commute, but yesterday was a particularly successful day at work and this morning you feel like a treat.
So, as you have grown confident enough in your self-driving car over the past year not even to keep half an eye on the road, you switch on the immersive virtual reality player and play the latest episode of Robot Wars.
The minutes pass only too quickly before you stride into the office full of optimism — helped by checking the price of your investment in BBC stock — the British Battery Corporation, of course, not the broadcaster.
A revolution in battery technology could reshape the way we live to something resembling this. The disruption would radically alter the economics of some markets and potentially shift the balance of world power.
Oil-rich nations will become less powerful, while countries that invest heavily in renewables, like China, could have an advantage.
This is not speculation for the distant future either. What seemed like science fiction just a few years ago is now a reality and will likely be a part of daily life for many of us within the next decade or two.
Neuberger Berman hires head of ESG
Deja vu?
Talk of renewable energy has accelerated over the past decade, but even with more than $100bn of annual global subsidies they account for only 23% of global power generation.
Until now, renewable energy sources have not been cost-effective compared with the fossil fuels of oil, gas and coal.
And where alternative energies have been cost-competitive, such as hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass power (using wood, crops or manure), they have faced limitations: for example, mountains and geothermal vents are scarce.
Wind and solar energy have suffered from their unpredictability - what happens if the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine?
This 'intermittency' has made it difficult to rely on them as sources of energy, whether for households or for a country, and has limited their ability to contribute to energy generation.
Even if alternative energy had been more cost-effective and reliable, for a long time battery technology was too rudimentary to enable it to be effectively harnessed.
Rathbones poaches Investec's Tumkur as head of equity research
