Although we have the ability to produce massive amounts of clean energy today, the problem is that we can’t store all that energy, which means it’s not always reliable. Enter the Megapack, a container-sized battery designed by Tesla meant for "large-scale" storage that could help quickly deploy Read More...
As clean energy continues to rise in Germany, the country’s massive coal plants are becoming increasingly idle. But instead of letting those coal plants sit there and rot, Germany wants to refashion the plants as giant batteries for storing wind and solar power. Germany aims to phase out coal Read More...
The rise of cheap renewable energy is starting to upend the bottom lines of fossil-fuel companies all over the world. Initially, that was why so many of them instinctively fought the newfangled technologies. Increasingly, it’s why many of them are shifting strategy, hustling to try to profitably Read More...
Energy storage has long posed an efficiency problem for renewable energy transformation. But lately, new technologies have been emerging that could solve the matter. One of those technologies comes from Denmark and involves a giant facility that heats up stones to 600 degrees as a means of storing Read More...
You might only think about energy storage when your laptop or cellphone is running out of juice, but utilities can plug bigger versions into the electric grid. And thanks to rapidly declining lithium-ion battery prices, using energy storage to stretch electricity generation capacity is becoming Read More...
Scientists may have uncovered the solution to the problem of long-term energy storage by developing a device that uses a specialized fluid that can store solar power for more than 10 years. The renewable, carbon-free energy device is made up of a concave reflector with a pipe in the center, which Read More...
As more than two-thirds of us will be living in cities by 2050, scientists and tech firms are looking at new ways to harness renewable energy within the built environment. But at what cost? One day, your office windows will be harvesting energy from the sun, while the lamp-post down in the street Read More...
Brightly colored molecular models line two walls of Yet-Ming Chiang’s office at MIT. Chiang, a materials science professor and serial battery entrepreneur, has spent much of his career studying how slightly different arrangements of those sticks and spheres add up to radically different outcomes Read More...
Wind and solar energy has a main flaw: it is unpredictable. It is controlled by the sun and the wind—which have little consideration for the fluctuations of power demand based on predictable human activity. The promise of energy storage has been all the rage of late, including Tesla’s much Read More...