By Alex Stapleton, Chief Commercial Officer, Alexander Battery Technologies
When Spain and Portugal were hit by a peninsula-wide blackout in April 2025, a widescale crisis ensued. Trains stopped, airports and telecoms were disrupted and power took hours to restore. Later reports traced the event to conventional power plants failing to control voltage properly, which caused a cascade of over-voltage that knocked out more and more generators until the grid collapsed. Cross-border support from France and Morocco helped bring the system back online. What stood out was how much difference a well-placed backup system can make, even if it’s only powering the essentials while the grid comes back online.
It was a sharp reminder of how dependent we are on continuous power and how vulnerable we can become when the grid fails. For years, battery storage has been treated as a sustainability investment. Many businesses adopted it as part of their efforts to reduce emissions or improve energy efficiency. But that mindset is changing. Over the past 12 months, and particularly in the aftermath of events like the Spain blackout, we’ve seen a shift. Battery systems are now being viewed less as a green box to tick and more as a core part of business continuity planning.
It’s not that sustainability has disappeared from the agenda. It’s still there. But resilience is taking priority and it’s reshaping how organisations think about energy. That shift is something we’re seeing first-hand at Alexander Battery Technologies. We design and manufacture custom battery packs, and recently, more of our conversations have been focused on small, purpose-built systems that keep operations moving during a disruption. These are not grid-scale energy storage units designed to support entire buildings. They’re targeted solutions, built to perform one job reliably in a very specific scenario.
Take transport as an example. A stopped subway train doesn’t need enough power to complete a full journey – it just needs to move far enough to let passengers off safely. That might be half a mile, or even less. In an emergency, that short distance can make a big difference.
The same is true for lifts in commercial or residential buildings. During a power cut, getting people safely out of an elevator is a priority. You don’t need hours of backup power to do that. You need a battery pack that works instantly and lasts just long enough to complete the job.
Other sectors are exploring similar needs – logistics operators, for instance, are looking to keep warehouse automation and port equipment running during localised outages. We’ve also seen increased interest from telecoms providers seeking backup for towers and signal infrastructure, where even a brief disruption can have wide-reaching effects. These systems don’t demand large amounts of energy, but they do need reliability. A short disruption to a critical service can have lasting consequences – reputational, operational and sometimes financial.
This kind of planning used to be the domain of facilities managers or engineers. Now it’s as much a boardroom conversation as it is an engineering one – business leaders want to know what happens when the power fails. What’s the plan? Which systems are protected? How long can operations keep going?
What’s also changed is how organisations are approaching the design of these systems. Off-the-shelf systems rarely match the complexity of real-world operations. That’s why it’s often necessary to start from the ground up – understanding what failure would look like in a specific scenario, identifying the highest risk points and designing a backup system that delivers exactly what’s needed without unnecessary oversizing or cost.
For many organisations, this shift isn’t driven by fear. It’s driven by realism. Businesses have seen what happens when they’re not prepared whether that’s a cyberattack, a weather-related outage or a failure in the grid. The cost of doing nothing is too high.
And it’s not just the major players making these changes. Mid-sized companies, infrastructure operators, even public sector bodies are beginning to take a more proactive approach. For many, the question is no longer “should we invest in backup power?” but “how quickly can we get something in place?”
Battery-powered systems have always had multiple use cases from electric vehicles to medical devices to consumer tech. But this emerging demand for resilience-first backup is different. Keeping one specific function operational during disruption requires a design mindset that starts with the problem, not the product. In many cases, there’s no template or ready-made solution sitting on a shelf. That’s where our work becomes consultative, helping organisations define exactly what’s needed and how to deliver it reliably.
What ties all of this together is the broader recognition that resilience is now central to how businesses operate. It’s no longer acceptable to say, “we didn’t think it would happen.” Infrastructure failure is no longer a theoretical risk. We’ve seen enough high-profile examples to know what’s at stake. Battery packs may not make headlines but when the lights go out, they’re often the difference between a temporary inconvenience and a major disruption.
That’s why energy planning today is as much about resilience as it is about efficiency or sustainability. For the wide range of businesses and organisations we work with, it comes down to knowing that the systems which matter most will keep running, no matter what. That’s the role battery packs must play, whether it’s keeping people safe, services online and operations moving when the unexpected happens – and it’s the role our custom battery packs are designed to deliver.
