Cohort 16 (2026): Critical Minerals, AI Battery Design and Battery Swapping

Cohort 16 gathered in April 2026 and spent its time following the battery value chain end to end, from the mineral in the ground to the asset earning revenue on the grid. Where earlier cohorts often circled a single hot topic, this one explored how the pieces connect: how critical mineral supply, artificial intelligence in design, manufacturing scale-up and BESS financing are becoming one continuous problem rather than separate specialisms. The sessions kept asking a version of the same question. Where does value actually get created, and where does it leak away?

Securing the front of the chain

The cohort opened at the raw-material end, and the mood was pragmatic about supply. A lecture on market trends in critical minerals and battery recycling set the frame, and it was reinforced by office hours on lithium projects in the Americas and their role in closing the 2035 supply gap. The sessions treated mineral security as a timing problem: demand curves and new mine lead times do not line up, and the gap between them is where price risk and geopolitics live.

Recycling entered here not as an afterthought but as a supply source. A lecture on urban mining at scale reframed spent batteries and scrap as an ore body sitting inside cities, and participant talks on industrialising battery recycling for European supply chain resilience and on turning pre-treatment lithium-ion cells into a competitive advantage showed how recovery is being pushed upstream into a genuine feedstock strategy. Our cohort explored recycling and mining as two taps feeding the same tank.

Intelligence and integration in the middle

The middle of the value chain, cells and packs, is where the cohort saw the most technical change. Artificial intelligence for next-generation battery design was a full lecture, and it returned in a case study on building a European battery advantage through AI-driven R&D. The argument was concrete: machine learning is compressing the discovery and qualification cycle, letting teams explore chemistries and predict aging faster than trial-and-error allows.

Integration got equal weight. A deep dive into cell-to-pack integration, along with battery management systems, aging and safety, sat next to a lecture on the qualification roadmap from cell to market. The cohort explored how packaging decisions, BMS design and qualification testing determine whether a promising cell ever becomes a shippable product. Manufacturing anchored the block, with a lecture on the latest lithium-ion manufacturing trends and office hours on gigafactory ramp-up lessons, controlling manufacturing data, and why building complex products is genuinely hard. One participant even walked through funding a 3D-printed battery startup, a reminder that the middle of the chain is still open to new entrants. The manufacturing conversation was honest about how unforgiving scale-up is. A talk on gigafactory ramp-up lessons from a global manufacturing leader stressed that hitting yield targets on a new line is where many ventures stall, and a session on controlling manufacturing data framed that data as the asset that separates a plant that learns quickly from one that repeats its mistakes. The cohort explored quality and cell testing as inseparable from the qualification roadmap, since a pack that cannot pass qualification never reaches a customer no matter how clever its chemistry.

New shapes of demand

Beyond the familiar EV and grid applications, our cohort explored where new demand is forming. A lecture on the rise of swappable energy examined battery swapping as a model that decouples the pack from the vehicle, changing ownership, financing and utilisation at once. Electrifying aviation appeared as a lecture on batteries and integration for flight, a demanding application that stress-tests energy density and safety. Office hours on batteries in intralogistics and a case study on mobile energy storage on demand, including deploying mobile BESS for remote digital displays, showed storage escaping the fixed-site model entirely. The chain does not just serve cars and grids anymore. These applications matter to the value chain because each imposes different requirements back on the cell: aviation demands energy density and rigorous safety margins, intralogistics prizes fast charging and cycle life, and mobile storage rewards ruggedness and easy transport. The cohort explored how this diversity of demand pulls cell and pack design in several directions at once, and why no single product wins across all of them.

Where the money and risk sit

If Cohort 15 leaned into BESS revenue, Cohort 16 leaned into BESS as a business to build and de-risk. Lectures on mastering BESS from concept to commissioning and on the BESS blueprint of business models and deployment framed storage as a project-development discipline. The office hours drilled into the financials: contracted revenue for utility-scale BESS, the sensitivity of cash flows to core valuation assumptions, and de-risking deployment across technology, contractual and market dimensions. Case studies on de-risking BESS across two continents and on permitting and fire safety for a well-known megapack product grounded the theory in real projects.

The cohort also read the strategic map. Talks on first-mover advantage in renewables across Chile, South Africa and Ireland, on Chinese battery and EV investments in Europe, and on hybridising renewable assets with storage placed the value chain in a shifting geopolitical and market context. A case study on the strategic repurposing of an EV gigafactory closed the loop back to the start, asking what happens to industrial capacity when plans change. Across four weeks, our cohort explored a battery value chain that is maturing fast and still full of open strategic questions.

Key Takeaways

• Critical mineral supply was treated as a timing problem, with lithium projects in the Americas framed against the 2035 supply gap.
• Urban mining and recycling were positioned as a real feedstock source, not disposal, with European supply-chain resilience a recurring goal.
• Artificial intelligence is compressing battery design and qualification cycles, a theme spanning both a core lecture and an AI-driven R&D case study.
• Cell-to-pack integration, BMS, aging, safety and the qualification roadmap determine whether a good cell becomes a real product.
• Gigafactory ramp-up, manufacturing data control and the difficulty of complex products were central manufacturing threads.
• New demand is forming in battery swapping, electric aviation, intralogistics and mobile BESS, pushing storage beyond fixed sites.
• BESS was framed as a project to build and de-risk, with cash-flow sensitivity, contracted revenue and permitting and fire safety at the centre.