Emerging Battery Technologies Will Accelerate Off-Highway Electrification

­Off-highway machines across construction, agriculture, and mining are in the midst of a major push towards electrification, driven by the financial, operational, and environmental benefits they can provide. However, different machines vary widely in their size, runtime, duty cycle demands, and more, requiring diverse battery options to meet the needs of every machine.

While the battery technologies of today serve the off-highway market well, IDTechEx's newly updated "Batteries for Construction, Agriculture, & Mining Machines 2026-2036: Technologies, Players, Forecasts" report highlights the role that emerging battery technologies will play in this evolving landscape.

What battery technologies are used in machines today?

The early days of off-highway electrification, especially in construction, saw the use of lead-acid batteries in smaller compact machines. However, with the maturity of the global EV market and of battery technologies, machines now universally use Li-ion battery packs. Specifically, they mirror the automotive market by using both NMC and LFP packs.

These technologies provide a good balance between energy density, cycle life, charging speed, and cost to allow for broad application across many machine types. Critically, due to their use in the automotive market, they have existing supply chain infrastructure that can be leveraged to allow OEMs easier access to packs for machine development and manufacturing.

NMC and LFP technologies have served the off-highway market well and will continue to moving forward, especially as their development continues and as prices keep dropping. However, certain machines will require more from their batteries than conventional Li-ion designs can provide, such as requiring longer cycle life, greater energy density, or faster charging capabilities.

In these scenarios, OEMs may have to turn to emerging battery technologies to fill the performance gap. In particular, IDTechEx's new "Batteries for Construction, Agriculture, & Mining Machines 2026-2036: Technologies, Players, Forecasts" report highlights LTO anodes, silicon anodes, solid-state batteries, and Na-ion as key technology options for future machines.

What can emerging battery technologies provide?

LTO anodes

LTO anodes make use of a lithium-titanate-oxide active material which can be used in place of a typical graphite anode, often paired with an NMC cathode. The resulting cell has an energy density three to five times lower than that of a graphite anode cell, but critically the anode undergoes very small volume changes during cycling, leading to excellent cycle life of 20,000 to 60,000 cycles. It additionally allows for very fast charging at rates of 6-10C.

This unique combination of performance parameters makes LTO anodes very well-suited to use in mining machines. These machines often need to operate 24/7 for many years at a time, thus requiring both extended cycle life and fast charging to minimize downtime. Additionally, larger machines such as those in mining are more tolerant to lower energy densities and can accommodate the shortcomings of LTO anodes.

LTO technology is now becoming increasingly commercialized in mining. While the high lithium content of the anode leads to much higher costs, sometimes as high as US$1,000/kWh, this can still be more economical than requiring multiple replacements of NMC or LFP packs over a machine's lifetime.

Silicon anodes & solid-state batteries

Silicon anodes and solid-state batteries are both technologies that have seen extensive development and investigation for future use in the automotive market. Silicon anodes make use of greater percentages of silicon (10% or more) in graphite anodes, while solid-state batteries involve replacing the liquid electrolyte in a typical Li-ion cell with a solid electrolyte.

Both these technologies can provide higher energy densities than typical cells, but they also face considerable cycle life limitations that restrict their use to only around 1000 cycles. As a result, applications in off-highway will mostly be centered around smaller machines (where density is paramount) with lower utilization. This fits quite nicely with the operational profile of electric tractors in agriculture, which may work for less than 1000 hours in their lifetime, but which benefit from high density batteries in order to carry ploughs and tools over large areas of land.

Na-ion batteries

Na-ion batteries are emerging as a potentially lower cost alternative to Li-ion, using more abundant and lower cost material such as sodium and aluminium instead of lithium and copper respectively. Na-ion also offers LFP-like densities with the potential for enhanced power capabilities and cycle life - though these can vary widely between cell designs. The result is a cell that can broadly provide for applications across construction, agriculture, and mining machines, and is thus expected to see considerable uptake in the coming decade.

IDTechEx's market outlook

IDTechEx's "Batteries for Construction, Agriculture, & Mining Machines 2026-2036: Technologies, Players, Forecasts" report goes into further detail on all the above technologies and more, highlighting how the global market for off-highway batteries is set to grow to 45 GWh by 2036. The development of battery technologies that will allow the performance needs of machines to be met will be critical in achieving this forecasted growth of the overall market.

The IDTechEx report breaks down the state of electrification in each of construction, agriculture, and mining, providing analyses of the technical, economic, and performance requirements of machines, benchmarking of turnkey battery products currently on the market, and an in-depth overview of key battery technologies and their relevance to off-highway applications.

Granular 10-year forecasts are provided for global off-highway battery demand (in GWh) and battery revenue (in US$ billion) - segmented by off-highway segment (construction, agriculture, mining), machine type, region (US, China, Europe, Rest of the World), and battery technology (NMC, LFP, LTO, silicon anode, solid-state, and Na-ion).