By Martino De Mori

In today’s high-stakes energy landscape, time has become the scarcest commodity. Picture a factory forced to delay electrification because the batteries it needs are stuck in a decade-long validation cycle. Or a promising green technology abandoned—not for lack of merit, but because it took too long to prove itself. Amid the urgency to curb emissions, cut costs, and reduce energy dependence, the silent race that could determine it all is the one to develop, test, and scale energy technologies faster. Because in a world rushing to electrify everything from cars to cement kilns, time isn’t just money — it’s industrial competitiveness, climate credibility, and strategic independence.

And nowhere is this need for faster, more efficient processes more evident than in battery development — a critical link in the energy transition. “Every new battery concept must be tested under hundreds of conditions, over long periods, to understand how it ages, how safe it is, and whether it performs as promised,” says Billy Wu, Associate Professor of Electrochemical Design Engineering at Imperial College London. “It’s easy to build a hero cell. Scaling that to industrial production, with consistent quality and safety, is what takes years.” As technologies evolve and costs shift, a battery that takes ten years to validate may never reach the market. "Many promising ideas die, not because they don’t work, but because they take too long to prove," he adds. In battery development, time is more than a constraint — it’s a form of power. The faster a company can move from lab to market, the greater its strategic and economic advantage. And in this race, Europe is struggling to keep pace with Asia. “In countries like China, new battery designs go from concept to deployment in just a few years,” says Wu, “They’ve built an ecosystem that allows rapid iteration and production, not just technical innovation.”

In this context, speed doesn’t just accelerate progress — it protects ideas. The longer the testing phase, the higher the cost and the risk. Reducing time-to-market is no longer just a technical challenge: it’s a condition for survival. As Monica Frassoni, founder and President of the European Alliance to Save Energy (EU-ASE) points out, energy-efficient processes offer a tangible advantage: “If I reduce my energy demand, my production costs go down — and companies know this very well”. She adds that although some industries claim they’ve reached their limits, “there’s still room to grow, especially by electrifying processes and making them more efficient.” That’s exactly what THOR, an EU-funded project, aims to change. Led by Lise Daniel at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), THOR is building a digital twin to simulate battery behaviour in real time — across performance, safety and lifetime. “Battery development today can take up to ten years just relying on physical tests,” Daniel explains. “Our goal is to reduce that by a factor of three, at least for lifetime evaluations. It’s impossible to test every battery design physically, or to reproduce every real-life condition. That’s why we need virtual testing.” Instead of running thousands of physical batteries through years of thermal and mechanical stress, THOR’s model can simulate degradation and failure scenarios virtually. It learns from real data but explores conditions too expensive or dangerous to reproduce in the lab.

The project has already passed its first milestone: Varta (industrial partner of the Consortium) has produced prototype cells with a common chemistry and format, optimised for model development. Next come module and pack prototypes, models and eventually a user-friendly interface to make the digital twin accessible to battery developers and end users. The idea is not to eliminate physical testing, but to make it smarter, faster, more targeted. “We want to test less, but learn more,” Daniel says.

The real innovation behind her project lies in integration. Until now, most battery models have been developed in silos — one for lifespan, another for performance, a third for safety. But predicting the safety of a battery after ten years of use? That’s still out of reach for most. “We want to bring all three dimensions together,” says Daniel. That means combining physical testing, physics-based models and AI to build high-predictive, adaptable tools. And that’s where researchers like Billy Wu see big potential. “A digital twin should be a real-time model of a specific battery, not just a generic cell,” Wu explains, “That means integrating how it ages, how it’s used, and what sensors are telling us in the field.” Wu mentions diagnostic tools like ultrasound and X-ray tomography that can detect internal battery flaws, alongside AI models that learn from massive datasets to predict failure before it happens. “We can’t go fully virtual,” he says, “but digital twins can drastically cut the time and cost it takes to know if a design is worth scaling.” By cutting development times, projects like THOR also promise a sustainability boost. Fewer prototypes, fewer materials wasted, more efficient validation. That means enabling not just faster innovation, but more resource-efficient manufacturing. And in a landscape where over 90% of battery production still comes from Asia, every advantage counts.


“Reducing energy demand is the first step to reducing production costs. It’s also the most effective way to gain resilience and speed in a global energy transition,” stresses Frassoni. Still, in a world that needs to electrify everything from transport to industry, delays in innovation can paralyse industrial growth and climate action. Europe has already made measurable progress, she acknowledges: “Without the measures in place, we’d be consuming almost 30% more energy today.” Yet the challenge is moving from success to ambition. “We could save 30 billion euros by 2030 and 70 billion by 2050, just by applying existing efficiency laws,” she notes.
However, “we're falling short on the targets for energy efficiency improvements. While we’re nearly on track for emission reductions and renewables — 54% out of a 55% goal — efficiency is lagging behind (just 8% instead of 11.7%). And the current political climate risks stalling that progress. We need to keep moving forward. As Frassoni stresses, “we must maintain the current legislative framework and push hard on financing and organisational programmes for industrial energy efficiency.

That’s why strengthening support for the battery sector has become a strategic priority in Europe’s decarbonisation roadmap. A recent Transport & Environment report urges the EU to combine speed with sovereignty in its battery strategy, recommending clear investment signals, direct funding, and stronger “Made in EU” provisions to support top-tier projects. Monica Frassoni notes that the industrial electrification process is also a key to long-term savings and competitiveness: “Reducing energy demand is the first step to reducing production costs. And digitisation bridges renewables, efficiency, and automation.” She warns, however, that “if we miss the 2030 targets, it will be much harder to maintain credibility for 2040 and beyond.” The coming years will be critical. Global demand for batteries is set to quadruple by 2030. Whoever can deliver faster, safer, more sustainable solutions will lead the transition. Europe knows that in this race, there’s no time to lose.


Project website: www.thorbatteries.eu
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thor-eu-project/
Mastodon: https://mastodon.energy/@THOR