Lithium vs Sodium: The Battery Face-Off | with Saiful Islam

Will your next phone, car or home battery still rely on lithium-ion? Materials chemist Prof Saiful Islam explores the batteries and solar cells driving the energy transition, from lithium-ion and sodium-ion to solid-state batteries and perovskite solar cells, with a few Ri style explosions along the way.

Ten years after his Christmas Lectures (and that world record lemon battery), Saiful explains how supercomputer modelling, working hand in hand with experiments, is helping design better energy materials atom by atom. He looks at how electric vehicles and solar power have grown since 2016, and what could come next.

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In this lecture:
• How lithium ions move through a battery, and why it matters for charging speed
• Why researchers are moving away from cobalt, and what lithium-rich cathodes could offer
• Sodium vs lithium: pros, cons and a live reaction with water
• Solid-state batteries and super-ionic conductors
• Perovskite solar cells: rapid efficiency gains, but can they last?
• The surge in global solar capacity
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Chapters:
0:00 Why new materials matter for energy
3:05 Energy vs power: Faraday's candle and an explosive demo
7:28 Crystals, ion conduction and modelling materials with supercomputers
13:34 Lithium-ion batteries and the electric vehicle boom
18:26 Inside a lithium-ion battery: how lithium ions move
25:10 Future cathodes: lithium-rich materials and recycling
30:03 Sodium-ion vs lithium: audience face-off and alkali metals in water
37:42 Solid-state batteries and super-ionic conductors
39:53 Christmas Lectures 2016 and the world record lemon battery
45:26 Perovskite solar cells vs silicon
53:17 The solar boom: terawatts and developing countries
54:57 Hydrogen, a Tesla coil finale and the future of green energy
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Saiful Islam is Professor of Materials Science at the University of Oxford and presented the 80th TV anniversary Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2016 on the theme of energy, which included a world record lemon battery. His research encompasses materials for batteries and solar cells, and he has been involved with Faraday Institution projects on lithium batteries. He has received several awards including the 2025 Royal Society of Chemistry Energy & Environment Prize, the 2022 Royal Society Hughes Medal and the 2020 American Chemical Society Award in Energy Chemistry.
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This was filmed at the Royal Institution on the 3rd of October 2026.
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