Enco Expert: Isobel Sheldon OBE, Battery Technology Leader
Isobel Sheldon OBE is an Enco Insights battery technology advisor. The founder of OakPolyTech, a consultancy to the battery and electrification industries, Isobel is also a non executive director at the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership and sits on the board of trustees at The Faraday Institution.
Isobel was previously Chief Strategy Officer at Britishvolt. She has also held a number of senior engineering roles with low emissions technology specialists including UKBIC and Johnson Matthey, where she was Engineering and Technology Director. Enco Insights spoke to Isobel about how she built her career and her vision for the future of the battery industry.
Enco Insights: You've worked in the battery industry across two decades. Can you tell us about your career to date and the sort of work and roles you do today?
Isobel Sheldon: My career in the battery industry has been a long one. I've been involved for over 20 years and I was pretty much right at the start of the electrification transition. I worked on developing plug-in hybrids and specialised in battery design, applications and engineering, so I understood the chemistry in the cell formats that were coming through that were going to be deployed into the future of electrification.
This work has led me to work with a number of automotive OEMs, a number of companies that have been involved in powertrain, but also in areas such as stationary energy storage. So quite a broad section of the battery industry as far as the electrification transition is concerned.
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Enco: What are the questions industry leaders ask you about lithium ion battery chemistry?
Isobel: The key ones that really stand out are questions like how are we going to set up a secure, localised supply chain in a sustainable way? Then how are we going to tackle the cost problem, making sure that we have products that go into applications that mean that people can afford to buy them when they go out to the showrooms?
I’m also asked about what's this market going to do in technology terms moving forwards, and how is consumer demand going to affect the technology that we deployed into this marketplace?
“The 80/20 rule definitely applies. You can learn 80% of the industry inside two or three years, but the final 20% takes about two decades. ”
Enco: What is the big issue facing the battery sector?
Isobel: Battery technology needs to improve quite dramatically because we need to go into areas like aviation and shipping - but current battery technology is not capable of providing those solutions. So there's a real technological challenge.
Related to that, once we go through this technological challenge, we've got to make sure that we keep control of costs. We need to make these changes, but do so in an affordable way so that we have mobility that's accessible to a broader section of the population.
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Enco: Why did you want to be part of the Enco Insights advisor network?
Isobel: So my personal motivation for joining the Enco Insights advisor network is because this energy transition is a global challenge and is so critically important to the future of our planet and the future generations that come behind us.
Some of the lessons and experience and learnings that have taken place in this industry over the last 20 years can be really critical to industries that are looking to enter into this marketplace and to grow and to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them.
The 80/20 rule definitely applies: you can learn 80% of the industry inside two or three years, but the final 20% takes about two decades. So there's a lot of learning, a lot of experience - and also a lot of scars that I can bring to the table.
This means I can make sure that those companies that are looking for opportunities in the energy transition, and looking to grow, can have a smoother route to market.
