Can you spot which battery is NMC? The one that looks like a pillow is NMC. The one that looks like a Pop-Tart is not. How do we know this? Because the puffed up battery came from a video made of an NMC battery. It was placed in a bath … [continued]
Cheap working fluids do not make cheap electricity storage. Compression, thermal management, containment and expansion turn apparently simple gas storage into process infrastructure.
Two years ago I called compressed-gas electricity-storage claims mostly hot air. Since then the sector has produced exactly the sort of evidence that should force a reassessment rather than a repetition of the old argument. China has commissioned the 600 MW / 2.4 GWh Huai’an compressed-air demonstration, Hydrostor has pushed … [continued]
Last week, I wrote about the new Jackery EnergyGuard Max 100 kWh battery at IFA Berlin. This large capacity offers customers home energy storage to easily cover their needs as electrification evolves. Those with large, fully electrified homes, solar arrays and multiple EVs would still have capacity left to participate … [continued]
Farm electrification is several different operating problems sharing one electrical platform. Stationary loads, redesignable services and narrow-window seasonal work require different investment sequences.
Ask whether agriculture can electrify and the conversation usually arrives at the same machine within minutes: the tractor. More specifically, the large diesel tractor working hard through planting, harvest or another narrow seasonal window. It is a legitimate engineering challenge, but it is a poor organizing principle for farm electrification. … [continued]
A strategy for the future of batteries Batteries are the backbone of Europe’s future energy system, its industrial base and its defence readiness. Europe is embedding them across systems at record pace while producing almost none of the key inputs. All of that is supported by public money. This paper sets out the … [continued]
ARES has demonstrated roughly 340 tonnes of mass moving through about 36 metres of elevation. The result is only about 33 kWh of gross stored energy.
ARES North America has now operated enough of its GravityLine system at Gamebird Pit in Nevada to make clear its deep limitations to people who didn’t simply do the grade 7 math and science calculations. Sandia National Laboratories documents a pair of mass cars weighing roughly 340 tonnes climbing a … [continued]
Dense-fluid pumped hydro is squeezed from both sides: shorter durations strengthen battery competition, while true long-duration storage drives mineral demand upward and strengthens conventional pumped hydro.
RheEnergise deserves credit for something a lot of energy-storage startups never accomplish: it built the thing. At Cornwood in Devon, the company constructed upper and lower reservoirs, installed pumps, pipes and generating equipment, manufactured hundreds of cubic metres of its proprietary high-density fluid, pumped that fluid uphill and ran it … [continued]
BLUETTI* used IFA 2026 to stretch the idea of power stations in several directions. The BLUETTI IFA 2026 lineup covered balcony solar, home energy management, compact batteries, and a 5,000W jobsite E-Generator, with products for apartments, road trips, outages, and worksites. More interestingly, the company is trying to solve a … [continued]
There’s now enough solar power installed in the United States to power approximately one-third of the homes in the nation. There’s enough capacity installed to power around 50 million US homes. That’s according to the latest edition of the US Solar Market Insight report, which is produced by the Solar … [continued]
Jackery recently showed off the EnergyGuard Max whole home energy storagesystem at their booth at IFA Berlin. The system pairs the Energycore 100kWh battery module with the PowerVault 50 inverter in weather-resistant enclosures. Also at their booth, I had the opportunity to talk with their CEO and founder, Jack Sun. … [continued]
