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…
Bigger batteries take longer to charge. Right? Researchers in Australia just tested one that flips that rule completely. The larger they built it, the faster it charged. It runs on quantum effects, and the very first version charged with light from a laser, no cord required. Scientists call the…
How a Plug-In Home Battery Finally Works for Renters and Apartments. For most people right now, home batteries kind of suck. You spend ten to fifteen thousand dollars, wait on permits, and pay an electrician, and that is only if you own a house that can take one. A new plug-in home battery changes t
How a Saltwater Battery Desalinates Seawater and Captures Carbon. Drop your phone in the ocean and you learn fast that seawater destroys batteries. So a seawater battery that actually runs on the stuff sounds backwards. Yet researchers in Korea have spent over a decade building one. This single syst
Every year, some company claims they've cracked long-duration energy storage. And every year, we're still leaning on lithium-ion batteries that tap out after a few hours. You've heard the promises. You've seen the press releases. And you're probably as tired
How This Heat Pump Water Heater is Also a Battery. Go to https://ground.news/undecided for an innovative way to stay fully informed on tech, energy, the climate and more. Save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan with my link. Heat pump water heaters have been around for over a decad
Ever since Donut Lab announced their miracle solid-state battery, the internet has been absolutely certain about what it is. A capacitor. Vaporware. A scam. Except when you actually dig into those explanations, a lot of them start falling apart. Here's what Donut Lab is actually claiming: more energy
When Spain's power grid failed on April 28th, 2025, it quickly became a very serious issue. Not only for the economic impacts, but life-or-death serious due to multiple, indirect deaths associated to the blackout. Emergency services, transportation, communication and other vital services were halted during this power outage.
Your lights just flickered. Not for long. Just a split second. You probably didn't think much about it, but somewhere a battery may have just saved your city from a blackout. I’m not talking about keeping your phone charged or your EV running. These kinds of batteries
NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly associated the failure of Northvolt to their sodium ion battery production issues, but their challenges weren't chemistry specific. That section has been removed. I’ve got sodium batteries right here in my hands, but three sodium battery companies went bankrupt
What if your phone battery charged in seconds instead of hours? What if buildings could cut their carbon emissions in half? What if medical sensors could detect diseases years earlier than they do today? Graphene was supposed to deliver all of this and more. Since 2004, researchers called it a
If you've been following battery tech for the past decade, you've heard the solid state battery story before. Toyota promised them by 2025. Samsung said they were just around the corner. QuantumScape's stock soared on promises of revolutionary batteries. And yet here we are,