Batteries in Emerging Economies: From Promise to Practice

By Dr Simon Batchelor (OBE), commenting on work by The Faraday Institution

This blog presents and builds on the document ‘Charging Ahead: Battery Ecosystems, Energy Transitions and Electrification in Emerging Economies’ an Ayrton funded report collated by The Faraday Institution through their ‘Battery Ambassadors’.     

Across Africa, South Asia, and the Indo-Pacific, batteries are increasingly positioned as central to the energy transition and have potential for enhancing modern energy cooking.  They appear in policy documents, donor programmes, and technology roadmaps as a critical enabler of renewable energy, electric mobility, and modern energy access. For instance, SEforAll and MECS recently published a white paper on battery swapping.

This Faraday Institution report ‘Charging Ahead’ offers a rich set of country-level snapshots of this emerging landscape.  Interestingly each case study presents a very context specific emergence of new technologies.   Taken together, these contributions reveal something more nuanced than a simple story of technological progress. They show an industry still forming, one that is uneven, fragmented, and shaped less by global narratives than by local realities.

This blog draws out those cross-country insights to answer a more grounded question: where are we actually at with batteries in emerging economies?

Batteries are being pulled by need, not pushed by climate

A striking pattern across all countries cited in the report, is that batteries are not being deployed primarily because of climate commitments. Instead, they are being pulled into energy systems by much more immediate pressures: unreliable grids, lack of access, and rising fuel costs.

In sub-Saharan Africa in particular, batteries are fundamental to making electricity usable. Solar generation without storage cannot meet evening demand. Weak grids cannot provide consistent supply. Mini-grids and solar home systems therefore rely on batteries not as optimisation tools, but as essential infrastructure.

This distinction matters. In many OECD contexts, batteries are introduced to improve efficiency or reduce emissions at the margins. In emerging economies, they are often the difference between having electricity and not. That shift in role has consequences, particularly as we consider eCooking.

In general in these contexts, batteries are cycled more intensively, operate in harsher environments, and are more sensitive to system design. It also means that failure is more visible and more consequential. Case studies in Ghana, for example, show both long-lasting systems and installations that fail within months, often due to poor quality components or inadequate system design rather than the underlying technology itself.

Alongside energy access, electric mobility is emerging as a second major driver. Kenya, in particular, illustrates how quickly battery demand can scale when it is tied to a clear use-case. Electric motorcycles, battery swapping networks, and battery-as-a-service models are expanding rapidly, driven by the economics of fuel savings and high utilisation rates. Here, batteries are not just technical components but part of an integrated commercial system linking users, operators, and financiers.  This could be very true for situations where unreliable grid (and planned load shedding) is holding back people’s confidence in eCooking – will they be able to finish a meal.  If batteries even for one meal are added to the setup (trickle recharged when the grid is back on), the meal can be finished and the fears are alleviated.

Grid-scale storage represents a third, but still nascent, demand segment. While countries such as Kenya and South Africa are beginning to deploy large battery systems to support renewable integration, these projects remain largely policy- or donor-driven. The underlying utility business case is still emerging.

The industry is defined by import dependence

If demand is growing, the ‘Charging Ahead’ stories’ supply side, tell a more constrained story. Across all countries in the report, battery cells are overwhelmingly imported. Local activity is concentrated downstream in assembly, distribution, and deployment rather than in manufacturing.

Even in countries with significant mineral resources, such as Ghana or Zimbabwe, there is little evidence of integrated value chains. Lithium, manganese, and graphite may be present, but refining and processing capacity is limited, and cell manufacturing is effectively absent. The result is a structural pattern: countries are either upstream (resource providers) or downstream (technology users), but rarely both.

This creates a “missing middle” in the value chain. Without domestic refining or cell production, most countries remain dependent on global supply chains for the core technology, even as they attempt to build local industries around it. The most realistic entry point, therefore, is not full manufacturing but assembly, importing cells and integrating them into locally adapted battery packs and systems. This approach aligns better with current capabilities and allows for faster development of skills, businesses, and services.  It reflects the work of Kachione and their assembly of Lithium Titanate cells into battery packs.

At the same time, the report suggests dependence on imports introduces new risks. Several country contributions highlight the challenge of substandard or poorly matched batteries entering the market. In contexts where performance margins are tight, quality issues can quickly translate into system failures. This reinforces the importance of standards, testing, and system-level design—areas that are often underdeveloped.

Market maturity remains early and uneven

Taken as a whole, the report suggests that the battery sector across these regions is still in an early stage of development. In many countries, activity remains project-based, fragmented, and heavily influenced by donor funding. Pilot projects dominate, and scaling is limited.

Kenya stands out as an exception. There, a combination of strong private sector engagement, clear use-cases (particularly in mobility), and supportive policy has begun to shift the sector from pilot to early commercial scale. Battery swapping models, PAYGO energy systems, and electric transport are beginning to create self-sustaining markets.

Elsewhere, progress is slower. Countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Nepal show important experimentation but limited scale. South Africa and Malaysia, with more developed industrial bases, are attempting to move further up the value chain, but face challenges of cost, competition, and scale.

This diversity suggests that there is no single pathway to a battery industry. Instead, countries are moving along different trajectories, shaped by their energy systems, economic structures, and policy priorities.

Technology narratives outpace deployment reality

Across the report, there is significant discussion of emerging battery technologies; sodium-ion, solid-state, flow batteries, and others. These are presented as promising future options, often with clear relevance to emerging economy contexts, particularly in terms of cost and material availability.

However, the deployment realities are much more concentrated on one or two chemistries. Lithium-ion batteries dominate across all applications, from solar home systems to electric vehicles to grid storage. Their global cost reductions, established supply chains, and proven performance make them the default choice.

Second-life batteries repurposed from electric vehicles, are one of the few innovations that appear both technically and economically aligned with local contexts. In lower-demand applications, they offer a cost-effective way to extend the life of existing assets while reducing waste.

The gap between technology narratives and deployment realities reflects a broader pattern. Much of the discussion around advanced chemistries remains aspirational, driven by global research agendas rather than immediate market needs. For now, the industry is less about breakthrough technologies and more about adapting existing ones to challenging environments.

We can perhaps note that MECS did some early unpublished (2019) battery enabled eCooking work with Aquion ‘Salt Water’ batteries, which have been around since the 1930’s and are sodium based, with a hope that we could point to less critical minerals.  However, the internal resistance of the batteries couldn’t cope with the large power draws of eCooking, and since then Sodium Ion batteries have been emerging which is a more promising longer-term use of sodium rather than lithium.

Finance, skills, and policy remain binding constraints

Across all countries, three enabling factors consistently shape outcomes: finance, skills, and policy.

Finance is the most immediate constraint. Battery systems are capital-intensive, and while funding is available through donor programmes and development finance, it is often not targeted specifically at storage. Instead, batteries are bundled into broader energy or infrastructure projects. Commercial financing remains limited, particularly for newer business models or unproven technologies.

Skills are a second major constraint. There is a shortage of expertise across the battery value chain, from design and installation to diagnostics and recycling. This affects not only system performance but also safety and lifecycle management. Without stronger technical capacity, scaling will remain difficult.  It is fair to say this is where Kachione has invested a not inconsiderable portion of their scarce resources.

Policy frameworks are generally supportive but incomplete. Many countries recognise the importance of energy storage, but few have detailed strategies or implementation mechanisms. Standards, incentives, and regulatory clarity are often still evolving. In some cases, policies aimed at protecting local industries such as import restrictions, may inadvertently slow sector development if not carefully designed.

Integration remains the missing piece

Perhaps the most important cross-country insight from ‘Charging Ahead’, is that batteries are not yet fully integrated into broader energy systems. They are often treated as standalone components rather than as part of a coordinated system linking generation, demand, and finance.

This is particularly evident in the limited connection between batteries and major demand sectors. Cooking, for example, remains largely absent from battery discussions, despite being one of the largest energy uses in many countries. Productive uses, agriculture, small industry, services, are also underdeveloped as drivers of battery deployment.

Electric mobility is the notable exception. There, batteries are embedded within a wider system that includes vehicles, infrastructure, business models, and financing. This integration helps explain why the sector is progressing more quickly.

The broader lesson from the report is that batteries do not scale on their own. They scale when they are part of systems that create and sustain demand.

Conclusion

So the emerging battery landscape in Africa and Asia is not yet a coherent industry. It is a collection of evolving ecosystems, shaped by local conditions and driven by immediate needs of reliability, affordability, and access. Batteries are already proving their value in enabling electricity where grids are weak, supporting mobility, and stabilising renewable energy systems.

In the context of MECS their most transformative role may still lie ahead particularly in how they intersect with cooking, one of the largest and most time-critical energy demands in these economies.

A central insight from the analysis is that batteries are being deployed to compensate for system weaknesses: unreliable grids, intermittent solar supply, and constrained infrastructure. This same structural challenge is most visible in cooking. Across many contexts, peak cooking times i.e. early morning and evening, coincide precisely with periods of low solar generation and maximum grid stress. The result is a persistent mismatch between when energy is available and when it is most needed.

Batteries are uniquely positioned to bridge this gap. In doing so, they shift from being enabling infrastructure for electricity access to enabling infrastructure for usable energy services. For cooking in particular, this distinction is critical. Cooking is not a flexible load: it requires relatively high power and predictable availability. Without storage, even electrified households may remain unable to rely on electricity for their most important daily energy use.

This points to a broader conclusion. The future of batteries in emerging economies will depend less on their standalone deployment, and more on how effectively they are integrated into systems that meet real demand. Electric mobility has demonstrated how batteries scale when embedded in a complete ecosystem of technology, finance, and use-case. Cooking may represent the next such system larger in scale, more universal in demand, and more tightly linked to daily welfare.

In that sense, the story of batteries in emerging economies is not just about storage. It is about how energy systems are being reconfigured around reliability, affordability, and the ability to meet essential, time-sensitive needs. Cooking can sit at the centre of that transition.

***************************************************************************************************************

Featured Image: Screen shot of front cover of ‘Charging Ahead’, with photo showing MOPO’s solar battery-swap charging station. Courtesy of MOPO.

AI Disclaimer: AI was used to enhance the cross-country analysis of the report, and then that was used by a human to write the blog.