Professor of Physical Chemistry, Humboldt University Berlin. Sodium-ion batteries with Prussian blue electrodes — built from abundant, cheap materials, without lithium or cobalt. The energy storage breakthrough that makes the transition democratically available.
Philipp Adelhelm stayed with batteries when they were a dead topic. A Stuttgart kid who read Al Gore and watched his father throw sodium into water, he chose chemistry that might help with climate change, back when everyone else was betting on hydrogen.
Decades later the bet is paying off. Sodium-ion swaps lithium for an element vastly more abundant: no cobalt, no copper, no supply chain a single country can choke. Think of a battery as a parking lot for ions, and we have learned to build the cheap, durable kind.
Asked to picture a Tuesday in 2040, Adelhelm keeps it grounded: batteries so long-lived they go invisible, cheap enough for everyone, streets gone quiet and clean as combustion engines disappear, the car downstairs quietly storing the day's sun. Pushed on whether solved energy means utopia, he refuses to pretend he knows.
Episode 1 of The Sovereign Stack.