Interviews

Dukosi Ltd

Q1: The Battery Show Europe 2026 placed strong emphasis on helping Europe scale battery production competitively. What do you believe are the biggest obstacles currently slowing Europe’s battery scale-up efforts?

Europe’s battery scale-up challenge is not defined by one single obstacle. The harder issue is execution, turning announced capacity into reliable, high-volume production while keeping projects financeable and competitive.

That message came through clearly during The Battery Show Europe 2026 keynote speech by ReCharge Director General Ilka von Dalwigk that Europe has seen more than 700 GWh of announced gigafactory capacity downscaled, delayed, or abandoned within 18 months.  That reflects not only the challenge of scaling production successfully, but also a necessary adjustment as manufacturers align capacity with more realistic market demand following the industry’s early growth phase.

Europe has strong engineering capability and policy momentum, but it now needs a more stable route from ambition to industrial delivery. That was echoed in conversations had throughout the show, where discussions were less about getting batteries to market quickly and more about addressing specific challenges around safety, reliability, performance and cost.

Q2: Cost competitiveness remains a major concern for the European battery industry. What strategies do you think manufacturers must adopt to remain globally competitive while maintaining quality and safety standards?

Europe is unlikely to remove every structural cost difference versus Asia, so manufacturers need to compete by improving the efficiency of the whole battery system, without compromising safety or quality.

That means looking beyond cell cost alone. A pack that is difficult to assemble, hard to validate, or expensive to service will carry hidden cost throughout its life. Battery monitoring is a good example. Traditional wired architectures add wiring, connectors, assembly effort, and additional failure points.

Dukosi’s contactless cell monitoring architecture helps simplify pack designs while still providing high-quality and accurate cell-level voltage and temperature data. That is where lifecycle competitiveness starts to become visible.

Q3: Supply chain resilience is a major theme across the industry. How is the battery industry adapting to ongoing raw material, sourcing, and geopolitical challenges?

Supply chain resilience is especially important in batteries because any weakness in raw materials or cell supply can quickly slow the electrification evolution. But the answer is not to make every region self-sufficient. The battery market is global and will remain global, so resilience needs to come from a more distributed supply chain and continued international cooperation.

There is also a practical efficiency point. One way to reduce pressure is to reuse or use less of what is difficult, costly, or risky to source. Dukosi’s contactless smart cell architecture supports this by reducing the connectors, components, and wiring associated with traditional wired designs by as much as 10x while optimizing the extraction of useable energy from each single cell. This helps reduce the raw materials needed to deliver the same energy output, while also enabling second-life use.

Q4: Battery safety continues to be a critical topic across EV and energy storage markets. What advancements in battery monitoring and system intelligence are becoming essential as battery systems grow larger and more complex?

When you look at what needs to evolve in batteries today, much of it comes down to moving away from module-level aggregation and toward true smart cells that generate accurate, actionable data at cell level. As the industry moves towards cell-to-pack architectures, making more efficient use of the available real estate becomes increasingly important.

Dukosi has shown that battery systems can be simplified to enable more scalable and cost-efficient architectures, while also supporting safer, more reliable operation over the lifetime of EVs and BESS.

By capturing the temperature of every cell directly, we have demonstrated that preventive safety is more effective than reactive safety. Operators can identify cell temperature anomalies much earlier than with a typical wired or modular battery system.

Q5: The conference agenda highlighted software, simulation, data, and AI as key focus areas. How do you see software-driven battery intelligence changing battery development and lifecycle management?

Software, simulation, and AI will play a larger role in battery development, but they are only as strong as the data that feeds them. A digital twin or AI-driven diagnostic system cannot compensate for poor source data.

That is why Dukosi focuses on the data layer inside the battery. DKCMS generates high-quality cell-level voltage and temperature data, supporting more accurate SoC, SoP, and SoH estimations.

For me, this is the important point – better battery intelligence does not start in the cloud. It starts with better measurement inside the pack – it starts with the cell.

Q6: Europe is investing heavily in localised battery ecosystems. In your view, how important is collaboration between OEMs, cell manufacturers, technology providers, and policymakers in achieving long-term industry stability?

Collaboration is essential because no single part of the battery value chain can solve the battery challenge alone. The industry needs alignment between those defining the application, those producing the cells, those enabling the system, and those setting the regulatory framework.

We see this in our collaboration with STMicroelectronics on a Battery Passport-ready proof-of-concept using DKCMS and STMicroelectronics technologies. It brings together cell monitoring, security, authentication, and cell-to-cloud data management.

That kind of collaboration matters because Europe needs battery ecosystems that can move from research projects into repeatable, bankable, high-volume production.

Q7: As gigafactories continue to expand across Europe, what operational or manufacturing challenges are becoming more visible at scale?

At gigafactory scale, the challenge is not just building capacity. It is making that capacity work reliably, safely, and competitively.

Battery manufacturing is technically demanding, and the ramp from pilot production to high-volume output is where many projects face the greatest pressure. Small inefficiencies can become major commercial issues when multiplied across millions of cells and packs. This is another area where collaboration across the value chain matters, with high-quality cell-level data providing feedback that helps manufacturers improve production processes and yields over time.

That is why system architecture matters. A battery that is simpler to assemble, easier to validate, and less dependent on complex wiring or connectors gives manufacturers a better route to scale without adding unnecessary production risk.

Q8: Recycling, second-life applications, and circular economy initiatives are major themes across the battery sector. What practical steps does the industry still need to take to make battery circularity commercially viable?

Global reuse and recycling regulations are steadily coming into effect. The EU Battery Passport will take effect in 2027, but most battery regulations still apply to the pack or module, not to the individual cells inside it. If a battery is disassembled or the BMS is removed, cells can lose their tracking data.

That limits circularity. Whole-pack reuse has a role, repurposing an EV battery for BESS is not always practical because the applications are physically and operationally different.

Projects like the Kia and Hyundai Motor Group battery passport trials show why cell-level data matters. Better SoH tracking, repair diagnostics, and lifecycle traceability can help make grading, reuse, and eventual recycling more commercially viable.

Q9: Thermal management and battery system integration remain complex engineering challenges. What innovations are currently shaping safer and more efficient battery pack architectures?

Thermal management depends on accurate temperature sensing and, in many systems, some form of liquid cooling. As fast charging and higher-power operation place greater thermal demands on packs, full-immersion cooling is also beginning to see commercial adoption.

We have shown that thermal sensing does not need to be complex. Dukosi Cell Monitors include an integrated thermal sensor that measures the temperature of every cell, giving designers more detailed, real-time temperature maps.

We have also demonstrated a more cost-effective approach to immersion cooling. Sealing a wired BMS is difficult and expensive, whereas Dukosi’s contactless communications allow the module to be fully sealed.

Q10: The Battery Show Europe attracts stakeholders from across the entire value chain. Which industry conversations or collaborations stood out as most important during this year’s event?

 e conversations at this year’s show centred less on bringing new battery technologies to market and more on solving practical engineering challenges. Manufacturers are looking for ways to improve performance, safety and sustainability while reducing cost as battery production continues to scale.

Many conversations focused on improving reliability by reducing the complexity of wiring, particularly in demanding applications such as commercial vehicles, rail and mining equipment. Dukosi’s contactless communications and cell monitoring technologies help address these challenges by simplifying battery design, reducing complex wiring and providing high-quality cell-level data to support safer, more reliable and cost-effective battery systems. We also discussed how our DK-NFLNK™ demonstrator provides a practical upgrade path for customers looking to enhance existing modular battery architectures.

Q11: Regulations and compliance standards are evolving rapidly across the battery sector. How are these changing requirements influencing battery design, manufacturing, and deployment strategies?

Safety remains a major global focus, and regulations are continuing to tighten. Without that pressure, many application developers may prioritise cost and risk trade-offs over stricter preventative design.

That is why a typical wired battery today still uses only a small number of temperature probes per module, leaving most cells unmonitored. By contrast, Dukosi places a temperature sensor on every cell, and our testing has shown that this materially improves safety.

Sustainability regulation is also pushing the industry toward better traceability and repairability. Over time, we hope regulation will support cell-level remanufacturing rather than defaulting too quickly to full recycling.

Q12: Energy storage applications beyond automotive are gaining momentum in Europe. How do you see the relationship between EV battery innovation and stationary energy storage evolving?

EV batteries and stationary energy storage have some common foundations, but they are becoming increasingly distinct industries with different use profiles.

Most consumer EVs use 400 V or 800 V / 1000 V systems, while BESS is already embracing 1500 V architectures. The use cases are different, the quality standards are different, and the commercial models and pressures are different. Even within BESS, commercial, utility-scale, and specialist applications such as marine batteries are starting to diverge.

The common thread is that all of these applications need better battery intelligence. The difference is that the way this intelligence is used will become more specialised by market.

Q13: What emerging technologies or industry trends do you expect will dominate discussions at The Battery Show Europe over the next few years?

For cells, I expect the current momentum to continue around solid-state batteries, sodium-ion, niche chemistries, and energy density. But the practical question will be how these technologies can be manufactured reliably and at scale.

For battery systems, I expect the focus to shift toward advanced BMS capabilities, especially cell-level data and measurements such as DCIR and EIS. Battery Passport readiness and thermal design will also become more important as systems become more specialised.

The headline discussion may still be about new chemistries, but the enabling technology will increasingly be better intelligence inside the pack that will also have an effect on cell developments in a closed feedback loop.

Q14: Looking ahead, what key developments will determine whether Europe can successfully establish itself as a global leader in battery manufacturing and electrification?

Europe’s success will depend on execution. The region has strong engineering capability, a growing end market, and increasing policy support, but it now needs to convert those advantages into competitive manufacturing at scale.

The bigger issue is confidence. Manufacturers and investors need to see a stable route from development to industrialisation, rather than a landscape where projects are slowed by uncertainty or stranded in pilot production.

Europe should not define battery leadership only by where cells are produced. It will also depend on the intelligence, safety, traceability, and lifecycle value built into battery systems.