About:Energy Secures £2.3m Government-funded Project to Help Pack Designers to Predict Battery Lifetime and Total Cost of Ownership Before Hardware is Built
- About:Energy
- Apr 21
- 4 min read
Through the Cellect consortium, About:Energy, McMurtry Automotive, and Minviro are delivering a suite of 40+ degradation and life cycle assessment models that allow engineers to optimise cell selection from day one. The result is longer-lasting battery systems, lower total cost of ownership, and more sustainable product development.
London, April 2026 — About:Energy, the battery data and software company behind The Voltt platform, has secured a £2.3m Innovate UK-funded Battery Innovation Programme project in consortium with high-performance battery pack and vehicle manufacturer McMurtry Automotive and life-cycle assessment specialists Minviro. The Cellect project will transform how engineers select, qualify, and deploy battery cells across aviation, drones, motorsport, defence, and robotics.
Battery cell selection sets the performance ceiling and cost floor for any pack programme. The choice of cell determines usable energy, power capability, thermal behaviour, and how the pack ages in service. Get it wrong, and no amount of downstream engineering fully recovers the position. Yet it remains one of the least well-supported decisions an engineering team will make. For large OEMs, establishing how a cell behaves over its lifetime can require multi-year testing campaigns costing £10–20m per cell type. For most in-house pack design teams at OEMs and third-party electrified product manufacturers, that scale of investment is not feasible. Teams work with incomplete data, and few ever test how a cell truly behaves over its lifetime. The cost shows up later, in oversized packs, missed warranty targets, and programmes that take longer and cost more than they should.
Over 24 months, the consortium will develop and validate degradation models for more than 40 high-performance lithium-ion cells across 21700, 46XX, and pouch formats, integrating those models into The Voltt alongside existing electrical and thermal models. For the first time, engineers will be able to compare cells not just on beginning-of-life performance, but on how they age, total programme cost, and environmental impact, all before a single prototype is built. Minviro will deliver life-cycle assessment outputs through its XYCLE platform, and McMurtry Automotive will validate the models against real-world duty cycles from its Applied Technology programmes spanning high-performance automotive, marine, and UAV and aviation applications, ensuring the platform is grounded in what matters on a live programme.
The Voltt is already an established part of the cell selection workflow for pack design teams across high-performance sectors. Cellect extends it from a beginning-of-life comparison platform into the first tool in the industry to combine validated degradation models, life-cycle assessment, and total cost of ownership analysis across a broad commercial cell library, driven directly by what customers have asked for most.
The environmental dimension of the programme has a specific regulatory context. Battery PEFCR (Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules), as well as The EU Battery Passport, which comes into force in February 2027, will require use-stage degradation data as part of environmental footprint declarations. Pack designers who cannot produce that data will face compliance risk and reduced access to European markets. By coupling degradation predictions with LCA outputs at the cell selection stage, Cellect positions The Voltt’s users to meet those requirements as part of their standard design workflow rather than as a separate and costly compliance exercise.
“We are building the infrastructure the UK battery supply chain needs to move faster, design more precisely, and demonstrate environmental compliance before the pack is built. Degradation is the most requested feature from our customers, and the most under-served capability in the market. Cellect changes that.”
Gavin White, Co-Founder and CEO, About:Energy
“At McMurtry, we develop battery systems where performance and reliability are non-negotiable. Cellect gives us early access to validated degradation models for cells critical to our programmes, and the reduction in development timelines we expect is substantial. It directly supports our ability to grow our external battery business.”
Chris Martin, Head of Battery, McMurtry Automotive
Programme targets include reducing the time required to generate meaningful comparative degradation data from multiple years to under three months per cell and shortening cell selection and validation timelines for pack designers by up to 50%, compared to the time many would previously spend obtaining samples and running tests in-house. The speed gains come from the consortium's modelling infrastructure, ensuring outputs remain transferable across real-world applications. McMurtry expects to reduce its own battery development cycles from 24 to 12 months, with associated development costs cut by up to 50%.
As battery passport compliance and lifetime performance forecasting become competitive differentiators across electrified sectors, Cellect positions UK-built tools at the forefront of the how the next generation of battery packs are designed, validated, and deployed.
About About:Energy
About:Energy is a London-based battery data and software company transforming how engineering teams design and deploy battery systems. By delivering a full-stack solution that spans cell testing, parameterisation, and model development, About:Energy replaces the need for costly in-house infrastructure and empowers customers to accelerate product development, reduce costs, and make faster, more informed decisions. With proprietary IP and industry-leading data, About:Energy enables engineering teams across the land, air, and marine sectors to solve complex electrification challenges, including cell selection, fast charging, and pack-level simulation and validation. About:Energy is also a member of the Battery Parameter eXchange (BPX) steering group.
About McMurtry Automotive
McMurtry Automotive is a British manufacturer celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2026, now preparing for production of its internationally acclaimed hyper track car, the McMurtry Spéirling PURE. Founded in 2016 by prolific inventor and businessman Sir David McMurtry, the company employs 80 people across two sites in the Cotswolds, UK. The Spéirling is best known for setting a new all-time hillclimb record at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and, in April 2025, beating the 21-year-old Top Gear Test Track outright record by more than three seconds. Alongside vehicle production, McMurtry has established McMurtry Technology, an innovation arm created to commercialise its intellectual property and offer performance-led engineering to other OEMs, with programmes spanning high-performance automotive, marine, UAV, and defence applications.
About Minviro
Minviro combines expert consultancy with its proprietary LCA platform, XYCLE, to enable companies to scale their sustainability efforts. With 75% of global battery material supply chains mapped using its LCA models, Minviro works with mining, metals, and low-carbon technology companies across the full battery value chain. XYCLE has been recognised in the Verdantix Smart Innovators: LCA Software 2025 report, with the independent evaluation highlighting its capabilities in supplier data collaboration, lifecycle modelling, and scenario analysis. Its solutions help businesses align with key standards including ISO 14040, ISO 14067, and the EU Battery Passport and Carbon Footprint declaration requirements.
Media Enquiries
