We have hit an era of 'anything goes' for energy storage. But it doesn’t feel like the future.

Call it the novelty factor, but in the battery world we seem obsessed with solving the front end and expending more time, resources, and brain power on coming up with goofy ideas for miracle cells and proofs of concept. And actually, the thing that’s great about innovation is that it doesn’t always have to be something brand new. A clever application of existing technology in a new way or scenario might not seem as exciting but often it can be even more impactful.

But sometimes it feels like our sector is most interested in the promise of progress.

So we’ve seen prototypes for crab batteries , big promises of soil energy storage, or radioactive but radiant diamond batteries . Some of them work! But few go on to have much wider impact.

As one commenter drily put it in their response to a recent YouTube clip about the next revolution in battery technology: “It's about time. It's been at least 6 hours since the last ‘game changing’ battery was announced.”

Don’t get me wrong: I spend a lot of time geeking out over this stuff too. And not just about battery tech. Ask me about insect proteins, or the various ways scientists are trying to make cows less gassy , and you’ll see how easily I can get obsessed with new green ideas.

But if we’re going to solve the duck curve problem of energy supply and storage, then we’ll need to carry innovations to scale. And time is running out. Unlike those crabs, scuttling sideways, we need to focus on taking steps forwards.

New ideas are exciting, but equally inspiring to me are the people who are digging deeper, taking proofs of concept to the next stage, considering how to scale new thinking with the right market fit. I count myself lucky to be surrounded by people at LiNa who’ve persisted in doing just that.

Sometimes, it requires taking a look back to see what you didn’t get quite right. The technology powering our business is older than I am; the way we’re deploying it is brand new.

The seed of the idea for what we now call LiNa traces back to South Africa in the late 1970s, when the first sodium-metal-chloride cells were developed by Anglo-American. The earliest designs were shaped around a long, complex ceramic tube that served as the battery’s electrolyte.

Initially, the idea was to put these batteries into cars, buses, and even submarines. NATO used the tech for its rescue subs; a partnership was struck up with Daimler-Benz (now Mercedes) to kit out vehicles with the new cells. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics a fleet of battery-powered buses was buzzing around.

But the consensus at the time was that electric vehicles were a niche not worth pursuing. The tech was shelved. We know now that this prediction was a little hasty. As for the new sodium batteries themselves, the problem was more a case of poor product-market fit.

The concept was revived years later, by General Electric in the mid-noughties — and cheered on by then-President Obama, as the company unveiled plans to use the tech to power hybrid trains.

But, again, efforts to commercialise ultimately failed. The cells’ original tube design, uncompetitive energy density levels, and the need to heat (and reheat) them to such high levels, made them a poor fit for being on the move.

The idea seemed destined for the dreaded innovation Valley Of Death — the place where bold ideas, abandoned and unnurtured, are left to wither. By 2015, another failed attempt to commercialise the technology — this time for back-up energy storage — might have been a death knell. The fundamental value and characteristics of the technology had been misapplied, or perhaps just misunderstood.

Of course, we know there’s a happier ending to this innovation story.

The big issue for the sodium cells was temperature (and the idea that the batteries should be in something that moves). Addressing both of these things, by considering stationary renewable energy storage and combining modern fuel cell advancements in ceramics to the proven stable chemistry of the LiNa batteries, opened up new thinking of how best to deploy the technology

All it took was a bit of persistence, a willingness to return to the drawing board, and some more smart thinking.

Which, actually, when you see it written down like that, is quite a lot.

But that’s my point: these things don’t come easy. Even penicillin — that accidental discovery so often held up as a great example of serendipity — took 20 years to take from mouldy petri dish to revolutionary medicine.

Now, the reason I’m giving this potted history is a) because it’s one that’s familiar to me, but b) because it’s so illustrative of the link between the fizz of excitement we all get when we see a headline about crab batteries, and all the additional, equally challenging, endlessly inspiring work that goes into taking the seed of an idea to a whole forest of production.

It’s a long time since that first academic paper on sodium-metal-chloride batteries was written; bringing these bold ideas to fruition, at scale, takes a lot of resilience.

It’s easy to be distracted by our intrigue and optimism for new ideas. But there’s a real value — and a pressing need — in seeing our wild ideas out to the end. Never mind warming, we’re now into the “era of global boiling ” according to the UN.