Cohort 1 (2021): Lithium-Ion Fundamentals to the Factory Floor

When our first battery course cohort convened in the spring of 2021, the industry was in the middle of a growth spurt that few sectors experience. Gigafactories were being announced almost monthly, electric vehicle sales were climbing, and grid operators were starting to treat storage as a serious asset rather than a science project. Cohort 1 brought together engineers, strategists and newcomers who wanted to understand the whole value chain, not just one slice of it. This is a recap of what that group explored.

From cell chemistry to the factory floor

The sessions started where the industry starts: inside the cell. Our lithium-ion battery basics lecture laid the groundwork, walking through how a cell actually stores and releases energy, why the choice of cathode and anode materials matters, and where the practical trade-offs between energy density, power, cost and safety sit. That foundation mattered because everything else in the cohort built on it.

From there the focus moved to customization. One of the recurring threads was that there is no single "best" cell. A cell tuned for a power tool looks nothing like a cell tuned for a long-range vehicle or a stationary storage rack. The cohort examined how designers dial in a chemistry and a format for a specific application, and how those decisions ripple through cost and performance.

Then came the part of the story that is often invisible to outsiders: making the things at scale. Two of the strongest sessions dealt with the factory itself. One looked at factory line performance and precision, the discipline of running a battery production line where tiny variations in coating thickness or alignment translate into yield losses and safety risks. The other looked at data and optimization in manufacturing, the growing practice of instrumenting a line so heavily that engineers can catch drift before it becomes scrap. Together they made the point that battery competitiveness is won or lost on the factory floor as much as in the lab.

Storage, mobility and the bigger system

If the first half of the cohort zoomed in, the second half zoomed out. A session on energy storage as a key enabler of the energy transition reframed batteries as infrastructure. The argument was straightforward: as wind and solar take a larger share of generation, something has to smooth the gap between when power is produced and when it is used. Batteries are one of the few technologies that can respond in milliseconds and be sited almost anywhere, which is why storage kept coming up as a system-level enabler rather than a niche product.

The mobility side got its own strategic treatment. Rather than treating electric mobility as a battery problem alone, the cohort explored the strategic perspectives that shape it: how automakers think about sourcing cells, why battery supply has become a boardroom issue, and how the pace of electrification is set as much by industrial policy and capital as by chemistry. The provocatively titled opening session, framed around whether the market really wants a "faster horse," pushed the group to question incremental thinking and ask what genuinely new demands electrification places on the battery.

Closing the loop and building careers

Two threads gave the cohort its character beyond the technical content. The first was end-of-life. A session on closing the loop looked at what happens to batteries when they stop being useful in their first application: reuse, second-life storage, recycling, and the policies starting to govern all three. Even in 2021 it was clear that recycling and end-of-life management were moving from afterthought to design constraint, partly because of raw-material economics and partly because of tightening regulation, especially in Europe.

The second thread was about people. The cohort included sessions explicitly aimed at turning battery enthusiasts into industry leaders and at telling the "battery biography," the long arc of how the technology arrived at this moment. These were not soft filler. They gave the group a shared language and a sense of where they fit in a fast-moving field, which is exactly what a first cohort needs. The biography session in particular helped, because it showed that today's lithium-ion dominance was neither inevitable nor sudden. It was the product of decades of incremental materials work and a handful of pivotal application wins, and understanding that history made the group better at judging which of today's claims are real and which are hype.

Why the wide lens mattered

It would have been easy to build a first cohort around a single hot topic. Electric vehicles alone could have filled the whole program. Instead the curriculum deliberately refused to specialize too early, and that choice paid off in how the group thought. A person who has only studied cells sees a chemistry problem. A person who has only studied policy sees a regulatory problem. Cohort 1 was built so that its members would see the same battery from several angles at once, which is what the industry actually demands of the people who lead it.

The provocatively framed opening session about whether the market wants a "faster horse" set that tone. It was a reminder that incremental improvement, a slightly better version of what already exists, is not the same as answering the real need. Electrification does not just want cheaper cells. It wants cells that enab