Summary

Aceleron is a Birmingham-based clean technology company that has built the world’s first circular economy battery. While most batteries are glued, welded and bonded together (making repair virtually impossible and recycling inefficient), Aceleron has taken a fundamentally different approach. Using a patented compression technology, every individual component of their battery can be accessed, repaired, replaced or upgraded without discarding the whole unit. The result is a battery with a lifespan of up to 25 years — comparable to keeping a car running with appropriate maintenance and servicing. Their flagship product, The Essential, is a lithium-iron phosphate battery that works across a wide range of applications, from home solar energy storage to leisure vehicles, marine, medical response vehicles, and light electric vehicles. Aceleron also takes back any packs no longer suitable for their original purpose and reuses them in second-life products. The company is already selling batteries in the UK, the Caribbean, and Kenya — with global demand growing. Like Framework, which applied the same principle to laptops, Aceleron is making the argument that the most important component of the clean energy transition doesn’t have to be disposable.

Story

Aceleron was founded by Amrit Chandan (CEO) and Carlton Cummins (CTO) after the two began dismantling and testing hundreds of battery packs and made a startling discovery: batteries are not designed to be maintained — and they often still have over 80% of their useful life left when they are thrown away. Carlton studied mechanical engineering at the University of the West Indies before completing a master’s degree at Brunel University in London, where he became fascinated by energy storage as the missing piece in the renewable energy puzzle. “The sun doesn’t stick around at night, the wind doesn’t blow when you want it to — the battery is a lovely energy bucket that allows you to fix that,” he has said. But the more he and Amrit looked at how batteries were built, the clearer the problem became: conventional batteries are treated as disposable consumer products, with no consideration for what their disposal looks like. In response, they developed and patented a compression-based battery design that removes all permanently bonded and fixed elements, making every part accessible for repair, replacement or upgrade. The company was founded with a dual mission: to reduce battery waste, and to make energy storage more accessible to communities in developing regions where energy security is directly linked to local development.

Pic credit: Aceleron (right) and Financial Express (top)