By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026
The first battery demonstrations were parlour science. Jars, plates, a spark, a sceptical room. Nobody insured the jar, and nobody ever had to recall it. Your product lives in a harder world, one where a single cell can end a company and a single photograph of a burned scooter can define an entire chemistry. This guide reads the published record on battery prices, fires and recalls, then converts it into buying criteria for an agency. The short version is blunt: in batteries, credibility is a safety document long before it is a story.
115 dollars: average lithium ion battery pack price per kilowatt hour in 2024 (BloombergNEF 2024).
268: lithium ion battery fires recorded in New York City in 2023 (FDNY 2024).
2.5 times: commissioned global cell manufacturing capacity measured against annual demand (BloombergNEF 2024).
I Discrimen
A certified battery is not the same thing as a believed battery
Certification answers the regulator. Belief is what your buyer, your insurer and the local fire marshal are deciding.
Most battery companies present their communications problem as a visibility problem. They want launch coverage, a funding announcement, a bigger stand at the trade show. Look closer and the binding constraint is usually trust. Your customers have read about thermal runaway. Your insurers have priced it. The authority having jurisdiction over your next storage installation has a file of incident photographs thicker than your brochure.
An agency that treats your account as a publicity exercise will feed the visibility problem while the trust problem compounds. The right agency works the other way round: it builds a public record of test results, certifications and honest incident handling that a sceptical reader can verify without your help. Coverage follows that record.
Ask every candidate one question early: what have you published for a client that a hostile reader could check? The answer tells you which problem they think they are solving.
A test report is a fact. A reputation is what survives the fact being quoted back at you.
II Machina
Battery news travels through incident databases before it travels through inboxes
By the time your press release lands, the journalist has already searched the recall records.
Understand the information supply chain in this sector and agency selection gets easier. Trade reporters covering batteries work from a small set of primary sources: recall notices from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, fire service statistics, price surveys, and the interconnection queue data that shows what will actually get built. Your announcement is weighed against that record, not against your competitors' announcements.
This is why the shape of your public evidence matters more than the volume of it. A company whose test summaries, certification marks and safety documentation are easy to find gets quoted as a reference point. A company that publishes only milestones gets covered as a claimant. The industry PR resources collected for this sector show the same pattern across categories: the firms that engines and journalists cite are the ones whose claims can be traced to a document.
An agency earns its retainer by managing that traceability. Every claim in every pitch should resolve to a test, a filing or a dataset the reporter can open. If a candidate agency talks about relationships before it talks about evidence, it is describing the old machine, not this one.
Journalists do not distrust battery companies. They distrust battery claims that arrive without paperwork.
III Exemplum
General Motors published the bill, Samsung had to publish two recalls
Two famous failures teach opposite lessons about the same week.
When Chevrolet Bolt batteries were linked to fires, General Motors recalled every Bolt built, paused production and then did the one thing that shortened the story: it published the money. The recall cost approached two billion dollars, and GM stated openly that LG, its cell supplier, would reimburse most of it (Reuters 2021). The disclosure was humiliating and brief. The story had numbers, an owner and an end date, so it stopped growing.
Samsung's Galaxy Note7 crisis ran the other way. The first recall in 2016 was followed by replacement phones that also caught fire, forcing a second recall and the death of the product line, an episode Samsung costed at more than five billion dollars. The technical failure was comparable. The communications failure was sequencing: confidence announced ahead of diagnosis, twice.
Your agency will be judged on the worst week, and the worst week is a sequencing problem. Ask candidates to walk you through how they would handle the first 48 hours of a field failure: what is said before the root cause is known, who says it, and what is never promised. The good answers sound almost boring. Boring is what competence looks like in a battery crisis.
Notice what the stronger case had that the weaker one lacked: a named counterparty, a published figure and a fix that could be verified from outside the company. GM's disclosure worked because journalists could check the reimbursement against LG's own statements. Samsung's early statements failed because each one asked the public to trust a diagnosis the company had not finished making. The agency's craft in both situations is identical: slow the claim down to the speed of the evidence, and make every number checkable by a stranger.
In a recall, the second statement matters more than the first, because the first one is the one you may have to correct.
IV Damnum
The cost of weak communication in this sector is counted by fire departments
Reputation damage sounds abstract until you price the physical version.
FDNY officials told a congressional hearing that lithium ion batteries caused 268 fires in New York City in 2023, injuring 150 people and killing 18 (US House Homeland Security Subcommittee testimony 2024). Those fires were mostly micromobility devices, not grid installations or EV packs, and that distinction is precisely the communications problem. The public does not sort battery fires by form factor. Neither do city councils writing storage ordinances, or insurers setting premiums for your customers' warehouses.
Every unexplained incident anywhere in the category taxes every company in it. The firms that pay the least tax are the ones with a pre-built record: published safety testing, plain language charging guidance, visible cooperation with fire services. That record cannot be manufactured during the incident. It is either already standing when the photograph circulates, or it does not exist.
Price your agency decision accordingly. The retainer difference between a strong specialist and a cheap generalist is a rounding error against one mishandled incident or one lost siting vote.
You do not buy crisis communications during the crisis. You discover whether you bought it earlier.
V Genus
Chemistry is the variable, and your agency must be able to say it out loud
LFP or NMC is a communications decision before it is an engineering footnote.
BloombergNEF's 2024 price survey put the average pack at 115 dollars per kilowatt hour, down 20 percent in a year, the steepest fall since 2017, with packs in China averaging 94 dollars against prices 31 percent higher in the United States (BloombergNEF 2024). Behind those numbers sits a chemistry argument: cheaper lithium iron phosphate cells with stronger thermal stability against nickel rich chemistries with higher energy density. Every audience you have is really asking where you sit on that trade.
An agency that cannot explain thermal runaway, cycle life, UL 9540A testing and the difference between a cell, a pack and a system will flatten that argument into the word "safe", and "safe" is the one word this industry is not allowed to use loosely. Test candidates on vocabulary. Give them your datasheet and ask them to brief it back. The ones who reach for adjectives instead of mechanisms are telling you how your next incident will sound.
Falling prices make the trust argument sharper, not softer. When every competitor is cheaper next quarter, the documented safety record becomes the durable difference.
Price is a claim anyone can copy by Friday. A test record takes years to build and minutes to check.
VI Regio
An EV cell maker, a storage integrator and an e-bike brand are three different PR problems
Same chemistry, different courts of opinion.
Battery technology is not one audience. The EV supply chain answers to automotive procurement teams and safety regulators. Grid storage answers to local planning boards, fire officials and utility buyers, project by project, town by town. Consumer devices answer to retailers, product safety regulators and the evening news. An agency fluent in one court can be illiterate in another.
| Segment | Audience that decides | Evidence that persuades | Failure that ends you |
|---|---|---|---|
| EV cells and packs | Automaker procurement, NHTSA | PPAP discipline, recall handling record | A field fire with a slow disclosure |
| Grid scale storage | Fire marshals, planning boards, utilities | UL 9540A results, NFPA 855 compliance story | A siting vote lost to organised fear |
| Micromobility | Retailers, CPSC, city councils | Certification marks, charging guidance | A fatal apartment fire |
| Consumer electronics | Retail buyers, reviewers | Test data, transparent warranty behaviour | A replacement product that fails again |
Segment your shortlist before you interview. Ask each agency which of these courts it has actually appeared in, for whom, and what it published there. A storage specialist's relationships with energy trade press will not help your consumer recall, and a consumer agency's launch instincts can be dangerous in front of a planning board.
The word battery is a category. Your buyer's fears are a segment.
VII Occasio
The opening sits in storage, where the queue is long and most names are unknown
Famous brands are not the only voices available to a reporter on a deadline.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory counted about 2,600 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity sitting in US interconnection queues at the end of 2023, the overwhelming majority of it solar, wind and storage (Berkeley Lab 2024). Thousands of those projects belong to companies nobody can name. Developers, integrators and component suppliers in that queue compete for land, capital and utility attention in near total anonymity.
Anonymity is the opportunity. The trade press covering storage has more projects to explain than credible explainers available. A battery company that publishes clear material on degradation, augmentation, fire testing and project economics becomes a standing source, quoted in stories that are not about it. That is the cheapest authority in this sector, and it is mostly unclaimed because incumbents consider such publishing beneath them and startups consider it a distraction.
The same logic powers the renewable energy agency guide in this series: in buildout markets, the explainer wins.
Ask candidates what they would publish for you in the first ninety days that is useful to a reader who never buys from you. If the list is announcements, keep interviewing.
In a queue of 2,600 gigawatts, the remembered name is the one that explained the queue.
VIII Structura
Published test data is how a small maker out-publishes a giant
Structure beats scale when the reader is checking, and in this sector the reader is always checking.
The giants in batteries buy attention in bulk: sponsorships, keynote slots, agency teams in three time zones. None of that helps when a procurement engineer or a fire protection engineer searches a specific question at midnight. What answers that search is a document: a test summary with the standard named, a degradation curve with the conditions stated, a recall FAQ that says what is known and what is not.
Small and mid sized battery companies hold one structural advantage. They can publish primary material faster than a multinational's approval chain allows, and primary material is what journalists and AI engines extract. A two page summary of your UL 9540A results, written plainly, will be cited for years. A brand campaign will be cited never.
Judge agencies on this axis. The right one treats your engineering output as the content supply and itself as the editor and distributor, the model described on the public relations services page for this sector. The wrong one treats your engineers as an interruption to its creative process.
Data leaves a trail. Advertising leaves a receipt. Only one of them is still working in three years.
IX Consilium
Hire for the worst week of the year, then negotiate the other fifty one
The prescription follows from the evidence above.
Build your shortlist from agencies with documented sector work, then score them against the situations you will actually face. Use a scorecard with weighted criteria: incident and recall experience, technical literacy, regulator and standards familiarity, trade press record in your segment, and community siting experience if you build projects. Weight the crisis criteria first. Launch coverage is a commodity you can buy later from almost anyone.
| Your situation | Agency type that fits | Agency type to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-revenue cell or pack startup | Technical boutique with test data fluency | Consumer launch agency |
| Grid storage developer facing siting votes | Energy infrastructure specialist with community work | National generalist with no local record |
| Consumer device brand | Product safety literate consumer firm | B2B only shop with no recall history |
| Post incident, under scrutiny | Crisis led firm, lawyers adjacent | Your existing launch agency learning on the job |
Run a paid trial before the retainer: one technical story, placed or not, with the working process exposed. You will learn more from how an agency handles your engineers' corrections than from any credential deck, including how this firm presents itself on its about page.
Write the crisis terms into the contract while everyone is friendly. You want a named senior person reachable out of hours, a pre agreed holding statement process that does not require three approvals, direct access between the agency and your safety engineers, and a clause that lets you publish test data fast when lawyers would prefer silence by default.
Choose the agency you would want answering the phone at 2 a.m. Retainers belong to office hours; recalls do not.
X Quaesita
Questions battery company buyers actually ask
How much crisis experience does a battery PR agency really need?
Enough to have run at least one product safety incident end to end: regulator notification, customer communication, media holding lines and the correction cycle. Ask for the sequence they followed, not the outcome they claim. Process is verifiable in conversation; outcomes are not.
Should our agency be a battery specialist or a broad energy firm?
Specialism matters most where vocabulary is load bearing: chemistry, standards and siting. A broad energy firm with a genuine storage or EV desk can work. A broad firm that assigns a generalist team cannot, whatever the pitch says.
What should we publish before we need credibility?
Your safety testing summaries, certification scope, charging and storage guidance, and one clear incident response statement. Publish them while nothing is burning. The same documents issued during an incident read as defence; issued before, they read as character.
How do we handle a competitor's battery fire?
Say nothing celebratory, ever. Publish your own safety record if asked, correct factual confusion about chemistry or form factor, and let the fire service lead. Agencies that propose exploiting a rival's incident disqualify themselves in that sentence.
What does the first ninety days with a good agency look like?
An evidence audit, a claims register where every public claim is tied to its document, two technical explainers placed with trade press, and a rehearsed incident protocol. If the first ninety days are mostly a logo and a launch release, you hired decoration.
Can PR help with storage permitting and siting?
Yes, and it may be the highest value work in this sector. Community meetings are won with early, documented engagement: fire service briefings, test data in plain language, and local voices briefed before opponents organise. Agencies with siting scars know the order of operations.
How should we measure whether it is working?
Count citations of your documents, inbound questions from the audiences in the segment table, and the accuracy of coverage when incidents occur anywhere in the category. Release counts and impression totals measure the agency's activity, not your position.
XI Methodus
How this guide was built, and where it is thin
This guide is a reading of the published record, not a study of agency performance. Its load bearing numbers come from BloombergNEF's 2024 battery price survey, FDNY figures given in 2024 congressional testimony, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up 2024 queue analysis, each cited in the text and listed below.
The caveats deserve the same attention as the conclusions. The FDNY figures describe one city's micromobility fleet, not the global battery industry. The BloombergNEF price is a survey average across chemistries and regions, and your segment's number will differ. No public dataset ranks PR agencies by client outcomes in this sector, so the selection criteria here are inferred from the failure record, not measured from agency results. Treat them as a buyer's framework, not a league table.
XII Incipe
Where Frontier Industries fits in this
Frontier Industries is the industry specialist practice behind this guide series, built on the argument you have just read: evidence first, publicity second, crisis competence before launch theatre. Its battery and energy work starts with a claims register and an incident protocol, because in this sector those are the assets everything else borrows from.
If you are choosing an agency for a battery company now, start with a working conversation about your worst week, not your next announcement: request an industry campaign consultation or call 401-219-4207.
Sources
1. BloombergNEF, Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey 2024, reported at https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/11/bnef-lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-drop-to-record-low-of-115-kwh/ 2. BloombergNEF survey coverage, Energy Storage News 2024, https://www.energy-storage.news/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-fall-20-in-2024-amidst-fight-for-market-share/ 3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up 2024 Edition, https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/Queued%20Up%202024%20Edition_1.pdf 4. FDNY testimony on lithium ion battery hazards, US House Homeland Security Subcommittee 2024, https://www.firerescue1.com/lithium-ion-battery-fires/fire-service-leaders-testify-before-congress-about-lithium-ion-battery-hazards 5. New York City DCWP, certified lithium ion battery requirements 2023, https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/news/044-23/city-reminds-retailers-consumers-only-purchase-certified-lithium-ion-batteries-mobility 6. International Energy Agency, Global EV Outlook 2024, https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024 7. International Energy Agency, grid scale storage analysis, https://www.iea.org/energy-system/electricity/grid-scale-storage 8. UL Solutions, energy and utilities industries and battery certification services, https://www.ul.com/industries/energy-and-utilities 9. National Fire Protection Association, research on energy storage and fire safety, https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research 10. BloombergNEF price survey coverage, pv magazine 2024, https://www.pv-magazine-india.com/2024/12/12/bnef-lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-drop-to-record-low-of-115-kwh/