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The challenges of long-duration energy storage have inspired some creative solutions.
Imagine a battery. Maybe you envision popping one into a fading flashlight or a dead remote controller. Perhaps you consider the little icon on the top of your phone or laptop screen, precariously dipping into the red while you search for a charger. Or you might picture the powerful battery pack inside your electric vehicle, helping to make gas stations obsolete.
These minor to major electrochemical marvels are fine, but the opportunity space for energy storage is so, so much larger — and weirder. Water moving between two reservoirs is a classic un-classic battery, but compressed air stored in a cavern, raising and lowering heavy blocks, even freezing water or heating up rocks can also all be batteries. And these methods of energy storage have the potential to be enormously helpful where standard lithium-ion batteries fall short — namely for long-duration energy storage and large-scale heating and cooling applications.
Lithium-ion batteries still dominate the market, Kevin Shang, a senior research analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, told me. But “over the next 10 years, we do see more and more long-duration energy storage coming into play.” Typical lithium-ion batteries can provide only about four hours of continual power, occasionally reaching up to eight — though that’s an economic constraint rather than a technical one. Generally speaking, it’s too pricey for lithium-ion to meet longer-duration needs in today’s market. So as states and countries get real about their clean energy targets and install more wind and solar generation, they need some way to ensure their grids’ reliability when the weather’s not cooperating or demand is peaking.
“There’s a need for something that can substitute for natural gas,” Logan Goldie-Scot, director of market research at the sustainable infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital told me. Almost no one believes lithium-ion batteries will be a viable alternative. “And so then it is an open question of whether that role will be filled by long-duration energy storage, by green hydrogen, or by clean firm power” like nuclear or geothermal, he said.
There are some novel battery chemistries and configurations out there, from Form Energy’s iron-air batteries to flow batteries that store their electrolytes in separate tanks to zinc-based batteries. But there are also numerous more creative, non-chemical, not-what-you-might-consider-a-battery batteries vying for a role in the long-duration storage market.
Founded back in 2010, Toronto-based Hydrostor has been pursuing “advanced compressed air energy storage” for a while now. Essentially, the system uses off-peak, surplus, or renewable grid energy to compress air and pump it into a water-filled cavern, displacing that water to the surface. Then when energy is needed, it releases the water back into the cavern, pushing the air upward to mix with stored heat, which turns a turbine and produces electricity.
“Everybody has talked about long-duration storage for probably the past five years or so. The markets have not been there to pay for it at all. And that’s starting to change,” Jon Norman, Hydrostor’s president, told me.
Part of Hydrostor’s pitch is that its tech is a “proven pathway,” as it involves simply integrating and repurposing preexisting systems and technologies to produce energy. It’s also cheaper than lithium-ion storage, with no performance degradation over a project’s lifetime. Major investors are buying it — the company raised $250 million from Goldman Sachs in 2022, to be paid out in tranches tied to project milestones. At the time, it was one of the largest investments ever made in long-duration energy storage.
The company has operated a small 1.75 megawatt facility in Canada since 2019, but now with Goldman’s help it’s scaling significantly, developing a 500 megawatt grid-scale project in California in partnership with a community choice aggregator, as well as a 200 megawatt microgrid project in a remote town in New South Wales, Australia.
“Our bread and butter application is serving the needs of grids and utilities that are managing capacity and keeping the lights on all the time,” Norman told me. The company’s projects under development are designed to deliver eight hours of energy. “That’s what the market’s calling for right now,” Norman said, though theoretically Hydrostor could handle multi-day storage.
Standard lithium-ion batteries have shown that they can be economical in the eight-hour range too, though. Back in 2020, a coalition of community choice aggregators in California requested bids for long-duration storage projects with at least eight hours of capacity. While Hydrostor and numerous other startups threw their hats in the ring, the coalition ultimately selected a standard lithium-ion battery project for development.
While this could be viewed as a hit to more nascent technologies, Hydrostor said the process ultimately led to the company’s 25-year, 200 megawatt offtake contract with Central Coast Community Energy, which will purchase power from the company’s 500 megawatt project in California’s Central Valley, set to come online in 2030. But that long lead time could be one of the main reasons why Hydrostor didn’t win the coalition’s bid in the first place.
“When you consider the very pertinent needs for energy storage systems today in California and yesterday, a technology that is not due to come online for another six years – I don’t think you’re even yet at the cost comparison conversation,” Goldie-Scot told me, in reference to Hydrostor’s timeline. “It’s just, how soon can some of these companies deliver a project?” Generate recently acquired esVolta, a prominent developer of lithium-ion battery storage projects.
But ultimately, Norman says he doesn’t really view Hydrostor as in competition with lithium-ion. “We would even add [traditional] batteries to our system if we wanted to provide really fast response times,” he told me. He says the use cases are just different, and that he has faith that compressed air storage will eventually prove to be the superior option for grid-scale, long-duration applications.
Another company taking inspiration from pumped storage hydropower is Energy Vault. Founded in 2017, the Swiss company is pursuing a “gravity-based” system that can store up to 24 hours of energy. While the design of its system has shifted over the years, the basic concept has remained the same: Using excess grid energy to lift heavy blocks (initially via cranes, now via specialized elevators), and then lowering those blocks to spin a turbine when there’s energy demand.
The company raised $110 million from Softbank Vision Fund in 2019, but failed to find an immediate market for its tech. “When we founded the company, we started thinking long-duration was going to be required much more quickly, and hence the focus on gravity,” Rob Piconi, Energy Vault’s CEO, told me.
But instead of waiting around for the long-duration market to boom, the company went public via SPAC in early 2022 and reinvented itself. Now it makes much of its revenue selling the sort of traditional lithium-ion energy storage systems that it once sought to replace, and has made moves into the green hydrogen space, too.
“The near term difficulty for many of these long-duration storage companies is that we’re still relatively early on in the scaling of lithium-ion,” Goldie-Scot, told me, noting that prices for Chinese-made batteries have plunged in the past year. Generate usually only invests in tech that’s well-proven and ready to scale up. So while lithium-ion alternatives will look more and more attractive as the world moves toward full decarbonization, in the interim, “there’s a gap between that longer term need and where the market is today.”
Piconi agrees. “If you look at storage deployments 95% to 98% of them are all this shorter duration type of storage right now, because that’s where the market is,” he said, though he added that he’s seeing demand pick up, especially in places like California that are investing heavily in storage.
All that’s to say the company hasn’t given up on its foundational concept — its first commercial-scale gravity energy storage system was recently connected to the grid in China, and the company has broken ground on a second facility in the country as well. These facilities provide four hours of energy storage duration, which lithium-ion batteries can also easily achieve — but the selling point, Piconi says, is that unlike lithium-ion, gravity storage systems don’t catch fire, rely on critical minerals, or degrade over time. And once the market demands it, Energy Vault can provide power for much longer.
Still, the upfront costs of Energy Vault’s system can be daunting for risk-averse utilities. So in an effort to lower prices, the company recently unveiled a series of new gravity storage prototypes that leverage either existing slopes or multi-purpose skyscrapers. They were designed in partnership with the architecture and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the company behind the world’s tallest building.
The market may not have been ready five years ago, Piconi told me. But “in 12 to 24 months, we’re going to start to see gravity pop up,” he projected.
But wait, there’s more. Perhaps one of the best use cases for lithium-ion alternatives is in onsite, direct heating and cooling applications. That’s what the Israeli company Nostromo Energy is focused on, aiming to provide cleaner, cheaper air conditioning for large buildings like offices, school campuses, hotels, and data centers.
The company uses off-peak or surplus renewable energy to freeze water, storing it for later use in modular cells. Then, as temperatures rise and air conditioning turns on, that frozen water will cool down the building without the need for energy-intensive chillers, which commercial buildings normally rely upon. The system can be configured to discharge energy for two-and-a-half all the way up to 10 hours.
“Because air conditioning is roughly half of the electricity consumption of a building, we can provide that half from stored energy. And that’s overall a huge relief on the grid,” Nostromo’s CEO Yoram Ashery told me.
While a lot of (my) attention has been focused on how thermal batteries can help decarbonize heat-intensive industrial processes, and much has been written about the benefits of electric heat pumps over gas-powered heating, cooling is sometimes overlooked. That’s at least partially because air conditioning is already electrified.
But as more of our vehicles, appliances, and systems go electric, strain on the grid is poised to increase, especially during times of peak energy demand in the late afternoon and evening as people return home from the office before the sun goes down. Nostromo’s system can help shift that load by charging either midday (when solar is abundant) or at night (when wind is peaking), and discharging as demand for AC ramps throughout the afternoon.
Goldie-Scot said thermal storage technologies like this “offer something that some of the other technologies that are purely power-focused cannot. But they are still competing against relatively cheap natural gas.”
The upfront cost of the system, $2 to $3 million, is also nothing to sneeze at. But Ashery says it will fully pay for itself after just five years, as building owners stand to see significant savings on their electricity bills by shifting their demand to off-peak hours.
While one could theoretically power a building’s AC system using large lithium-ion-batteries, “it’s a problem to put big lithium batteries inside buildings,” Ashery told me. That’s due to the fire risk, which could impact insurance premiums for businesses, as well as space issues — these batteries would need to be container-sized to run an HVAC system. “That’s why only 1% of energy storage currently goes into commercial/industrial buildings,” Ashery wrote in a follow up email.
Shang told me that he sees so-called “behind the meter” applications like this as promising early markets for long-duration storage tech, especially given that utilities are “pretty cautious to adopt these technologies on a large scale.” But ultimately, he believes that policy is what’s really going to jumpstart this market.
“For long-duration storage, it may look years ahead, but actually the future is now,” he said. Because some of these new systems take longer to design and build, Shang told me, “you have to invest now. For the policies, you have to be ready now to support the development of these [long-duration energy storage] technologies.”
The Biden administration is certainly trying. All energy storage tech — thermal, compressed air, gravity, and lithium-ion — stands to benefit from generous IRA tax credits, which will cover 30% of a project’s cost, assuming it meets certain labor standards. Additional savings can accrue if a project meets domestic content requirements or is sited in a qualifying “energy community,” such as a low-income area that derives significant revenue from fossil fuel production.
The Department of Energy’s ultimate goal is to reduce the cost of grid-scale long-duration energy storage by 90% this decade (with “long” defined as 10-plus hours). And last year, the DOE announced $325 million in funding for 15 long-duration demonstration projects.
So while the market might not be quite ripe yet for funky, alternative approaches to long-duration storage, support like this is going to be necessary to ensure that these technologies are proven, cost-effective and available as the grid decarbonizes and the need crystallizes.
“There is not currently a system-wide way of valuing long-duration energy storage while competing against gas, but there are customers and utilities that have shown a willingness, especially with federal and state support, to invest in these technologies,” Goldie-Scot said. “That I think is giving us the first real inkling of the role that the long-duration can play in this market.”
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.