Enhancing Transparency: Reporting data reliability in prospective assessments of emerging battery technologies

New battery technologies that enhance the technical performance of existing batteries are being developed at a rapid pace. This development should be accompanied by prospective assessment of associated costs and environmental impacts to optimize technology design at an early stage and avoid undesired trade-offs. However, the lack of data availability and its low quality for emerging battery technologies, such as solid-state-batteries, hinders the ability to quantify and interpret the impacts. As a result, environmental and cost assessments have large uncertainties and are difficult to compare. Furthermore a transparent result reporting is necessary to advance a reliable decision-support. Given that current frameworks for practitioners are predominantly focused on retrospective assessments, there is a need for a structured approach that addresses aforementioned challenges. This paper presents a reliability rating matrix to support practitioners in communicating prospective economic and environmental assessment results of emerging battery technologies. Serving as a practical tool, it provides a classification for data sources, emphasizing data availability, quality and uncertainty. In order to communicate these aspects transparently, a color coding is introduced for the visualization. The developed guidance was applied to a case study of the production of an innovative solid-state-battery component for two different material classes, thereby enabling the reporting of comparable results within the field of battery technology development.