Spotlight On Energy Storage For New York Climate Week
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The US Department of Energy no longer believes that energy storage is a thing, but everybody else does. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some key technology developments announced against the high-profile backdrop of New York City Climate Week 2025.
Energy Storage And The EV Battery Of The Future
EVs are beginning to flex their muscles as roving energy storage systems on wheels, which makes the latest news from the Massachusetts startup 24M Technologies all the more interesting. On September 24, the company announced that its forthcoming EV battery packing system can increase driving range by up to 50%.
The new system eliminates much of the metal-and-plastic architecture of the individual cells that make up conventional EV battery packs. “Called 24M ETOP™ (Electrode-to-Pack), the game-changing technology seals electrodes in thin polymer films that are then integrated directly into the pack to vastly improve packaging efficiencies,” 24M explains.
“In fact, 24M ETOP makes it possible for electrodes to comprise 80% of a pack’s volume, compared to the 30% to 60% of traditional battery packs,” the company adds. The new system applies to NMC, LFP, NCA, Sodium-ion, LTO, and LiS chemistries among others, providing automakers with new opportunities to deploy inexpensive battery formulas without losing range compared to conventional battery packs.
An MIT spinout, 24M hauled in $87 million in Series H Preferred Stock financing in September of 2024, bringing the total to more than $500 million. The Series H round featured Nuovo+ along with other strategic investors including Kyocera Corporation, ASAHI Kasei, Dai Nippon Printing Company, Lucas TVS, and Mitsui O.S.K. Lines.
Global Solar Council Muscles Into Energy Storage Territory
In his quest to cut thousands of working households out of job opportunities in the US wind and solar industries, US President Donald Trump seems to have forgotten that it’s a big world out there. It is, and global energy storage stakeholders are not waiting around for cooler heads to prevail when the president leaves office on January 20, 2o29.
On September 23, the Global Solar Council announced that it has upstyled its mission to include energy storage, billing itself as the “world’s first global trade association for battery storage.”
“Until today, the world’s fastest-growing energy storage technology had no unified global voice,” Sonia Dunlop, the CEO GSC, explained in a press statement.
GSC notes that, globally, about ⅓ of new battery storage systems installed in 2024 were paired with solar panels. “Solar and storage have evolved from complementary technologies to an integrated solution transforming how the world thinks about reliable, locally produced power,” Dunlop emphasized. “GSC is stepping up to lead this transformation because we need to move beyond traditional silos.”
Leveraging Climate Week alongside the annual United Nations General Assembly, on September 23, GSC also released its new Connecting the Sun roadmap for policymakers to kickstart the storage-and-renewables combo into high gear.
That’s sure to fall on deaf ears here in the US, but ears are perking up elsewhere around the globe. As part of its new energy storage mission, GSC is partnering with the Global Battery Alliance, the International Battery and Energy Storage Alliance (IBESA), and the Future Storage and Systems Integration Alliance.
Energy Storage Meets Thermal Energy
Activity is also stirring in the thermal energy storage field, including the somewhat exotic field of concentrating solar power. The US has not proved fertile ground for the CSP industry, but it has been catching on elsewhere around the world. Instead of using photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight to electricity, CSP technology focuses sunlight on a heat receptor, where it is shunted to molten salt or another transfer medium, thereby acting as an energy storage system (see more CSP background here).
The Danish firm Aalborg CSP has begun to apply its concentrating solar background to the broader field of heat transfer systems for a variety of thermal systems. In 2023, the company formed a joint venture with the Swedish heat transfer specialist Alfa Laval under the heading “Alfa Laval Aalborg Header-Coil A/S.” They announced the launch of their first product, a new header-and-coil heat exchanger, on September 24.
The new system is source-agnostic and can be put to use in any number of thermal storage systems, but it is particularly suited to the meet the demands of molten salt, which ebbs and flows with the availability of sunlight.
“Header-and-coil heat exchangers can function as economizers, evaporators, superheaters, and reheaters,” the partners explain. “Header-and-coil heat exchangers also handle high temperatures and pressures, making them ideally suited for thermal energy storage systems with intermittent operation – for example molten salt-based systems.”
“With the header-and-coil technology, we are introducing a solution that addresses the specific challenges of thermal energy storage,” emphasizes Alfa Laval’s Head of Energy Storage Alasdair MacIver. “The fluctuating nature of renewable energy sources like wind and solar often leads to fatigue issues in conventional heat exchangers.”
Follow The Money
The US president’s malevolent war on wind and solar workers has reached such heights of desperate ridiculousness that his Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, recently went on record denying that energy storage actually exists. No, he’s not stupid, he just knows that he was picked for the job on account of his willingness to say things that don’t make sense.
That goes double for Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who posted this pearl of wisdom on his agency’s official X (formerly Twitter) account on September 5: “Wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing.” Again, not the words of an idiot, just the words that support the president’s personal vendettas, writ large into federal energy policy.
Meanwhile, the smart money is banking on energy storage. To cite just one recent example, last week the US startup Fourth Power announced that it nailed down $20 million in Series A Plus funding to commercialize its new molten tin thermal energy storage system, featuring Munich Re Ventures in the lead with return investors DCVC and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Fourth Power is banking on the low cost of tin to help push the cost of its new system down.
Photo: Molten tin thermal energy storage system courtesy of Fourth Power via CleanTechnica archive.
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