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David Streuli Essay Mar 31, 2026

Battery underinvestment

For over a century, the most important technology in the world has been sitting right in front of us. Ignored.

A black-and-white linocut print of a 1900s London street. An angel descends over the sidewalk holding a prismatic futuristic battery that glows with the only colour in the image, while a crowd of men in top hats huddles around a smoking early gasoline car with their backs turned. A small child in a newsboy cap looks up at the angel.

Do you remember the streets in the 1940s, the roaring years in the UK, where the smog turned over the city?

Yes, electric cars were invented back then.

That could have been avoided with more capital signed over to battery tech.

Today it’s the same. We are lacking electricity, beyond what we’re lacking in oil.

Would humanity have lived on a better timeline if we had always chosen electrochemical batteries over oil?

I think yes. And I think we’re still making the same mistake. Historically, all of humanity has been underinvesting in electrochemical battery technology. 🔋

Energy unlocks everything. Everything is downstream of energy. ⚡

You want to recycle plastic at scale? Energy. You want to pull carbon out of the atmosphere? Energy. You want to desalinate seawater so a village in the centre of Africa has clean water? Energy. 🎯

Electric carriages date to the 1830s; electric vehicles outsold gasoline ones in the US around 1900. Electricity demand figures from the IEA.