Latest Posts
Why China Built the World’s Largest Air Battery
Lithium-ion batteries are great for about 4 hours of storage. After that, the price stops making sense. So China built an alternative out of thin air: the world's largest compressed air battery, a salt cavern energy storage system with no lithium and no fuel burned to get the power back out. The…
How My Home Battery Really Performed (2 Years Later)
My January electric bill came to $336, even with solar on the roof and 20 kWh of home battery storage on the garage wall. After 12 months of utility bills and circuit-level data, the solar battery math got weird. The panels saved money. The battery cost about $207 a year, thanks to net metering…
Why The US Sucks at Solar
About one in three Australian homes have rooftop solar. In America, it's less than one in ten, even though half the country sits under the same sun. The real story is the bill. The rooftop solar cost here runs up to seven times higher than in Australia, once tariffs, tax credits, and solar…
Why The Biggest Battery Company Is Betting On Lithium Air
CATL, the world's biggest battery maker, just named its bet for what comes after solid-state batteries: lithium air. Headlines claim this battery stores as much energy as gasoline. This lithium air battery breathes, pulling oxygen straight from the surrounding air instead of packing in heavy metal…
Why the US Government Buried This Battery
Every summer, your building dumps a mountain of heat into the air just to stay cool. Every winter, it burns fuel to make all that heat right back. Now, what if you could catch the heat you’re throwing away in July, park it underground until January, and do the same thing with winter’s cold to get…
The Magnet Breakthrough China Doesn’t Control
You're listening to me right now through speakers run by magnets. Your smartphone might have another 18 of them. They're in your earbuds, your car, the wind turbines feeding the grid. And most of us never think about them until the supply chain breaks. China throttled rare earth exports last year.…
