The Faraday Conference 2025: Energised for action
Intercalation Station has covered the Faraday Institution conference each year since 2023, and this year we sent in Cambridge PhD researcher Jess McConnell to get the happenings.
The Faraday Institution is an organisation at the centre of the UK battery network. It is a major influence in the UK’s industrial and academic progression in the sector, and every year they organise a conference for all the cool battery kids to hang out together.
This year the conference drew in over 600 people from the battery community, a crowd of 75% academics, 20% industry, and 5% government representatives. And their reach has expanded, nearly half of the attendees, representing 29 countries, had never been to a Faraday conference before.
The University of Warwick hosted this year with the support of The Warwick Manufacturing Group, and clearly having learned from previous conferences, they delivered a high calibre of hospitality. Busses to the conference dinner held in the highly underrated Coventry cathedral (watch out Durham!) and a star guest appearance from Robert Llewellyn, of Red Dwarf and The Fully Charged Show fame, ticked all the boxes.
Robert wasn’t the only big name in the building though; Faraday got in Prof. Shirley Meng who delivered an engaging talk on sodium-ion, anode-free and solid-state systems. A highlight was hearing from Prof. Sir Stanley Whittingham in the introduction keynote speech. Personally, being able to chat with the Nobel laureate over a sizeable lunch bowl makes the whole conference worth it. His keynote speech at the start of the conference heightened expectations of what was to come: “we need to stop talking and start doing”. He followed this with enforcing that we “can’t build new old factories”, which drove home that “doing” isn’t just breaking ground and setting brick and mortar. New gigafactories need to be evolved far beyond what could be imagined just two decades ago, they need to be the innovation not just at the centre of it.
The irony of starting an academic conference with a call to action isn’t lost on me. We then all sat, listened, and talked for the following three days. I got the chance to speak with many people across the community, rookies and veterans alike.
For newcomers to the energy storage sector, Faraday offered a digestible mixture of battery focussed talks and sector overviews. It put well known researchers, suppliers, and contributors of all kinds in front of them and let them engage. And if asking questions in a lecture theatre of hundreds was intimidating, the conference set attendees up with a way of asking questions through a conference app using their phones without the need to raise a hand or stammer into a microphone. The accessibility kept going as live streams with captions was also provided through the app. Everyone new that I spoke to felt welcomed and that’s an impressive achievement.
Yet it appeared harder to impress some other regular attendees of the sector, one overview of supply chains and UK targets seemed to be enough for them, but the policy talks kept going. Talks on start-up pathways and tips for spinouts began to feel more like being ushered away from academia for some. Several attendees came to hear about novel research but walked away unsatisfied due to too many tight-lipped industry speakers. In a different light though, is this the action Whittingham was calling us to? Should we be getting involved more with policy? Should we be spinning out and pulling in funding to create the jobs that we would want to apply to? It can’t be forgotten that for a developing sector to flourish, every step of the TRL path needs treaded in multitudes for there to be success.
Which brings me to Faraday’s intended message of the conference: “Energising the UK Battery Ecosystem” – a title not chosen on a whim. Partial pun aside, the title enforces how this sector needs to be invigorated in the UK and that this “ecosystem” is just like any other. Everything - research, funding, policy, supply chains, workforce – needs to come together to create a thriving ecosystem, without one the rest will falter. And Faraday used this conference to bring them all together. Overall, the Faraday Conference 2025 did what it said on the tin and more, but it maybe didn’t satiate the thirst for research that some academics have at conferences. Regardless of how much I am drawn by research, as a PhD researcher looking to the future, I recognise that it’s extremely important to think beyond the fundamentals. All that being said, I’ll see you at The University of Nottingham next year!
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Where’s the meat? For a paid subscription to Intercalation I’d expect much more from an important conference summary. Who cares how many attendees there were or the make-up of the audience? That’s fine, but you didn’t even post an agenda - Who presented what? You tease us with Meng, but what were her key points? You didn’t even summarize key topics that were discussed. At the very least I want an agenda and a snapshot of the conclusion slide from each presentation. No summary comments needed.