Advanced lithium-ion batteries may be all the rage for electric cars, but that doesn’t mean one no longer faces drain anxiety when sitting in the audience of an energy conference taking notes on a laptop while a speaker extols their virtues. Sadly, my battery (and at least one other reporter’s) went kaput while attending the [...]

Making aluminum requires a lot of electricity. That’s because the metal bonds tightly to oxygen and it takes a lot of energy to break that bond. In essence, the process of making aluminum is a giant battery with the silvery metal being reduced to purity at the cathode while oxygen bonds with the carbon anode [...]

The Santa Rita jail can’t afford to lose power. With the safety of thousands of inmates and facility staff at stake, the jail requires that large amounts of electricity be constantly available. This is why, over the past decade, the facility has teamed up with private and public organizations to successfully transform the 113-acre mega-jail [...]

A new public-private partnership was announced today between CalCEF and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The goal of this new partnership – dubbed CalCharge – is to create a regional ecosystem to spur innovation in energy storage (battery) technologies. This group will bring together private technology companies, academic institutions, and government [...]

Large-scale energy storage technologies are often hailed as a key to enabling increased use of intermittent renewable energy resources – like solar and wind – to supply the nation’s electricity demand. If one can balance out the generation dips (for example, when the wind dies down on a summer afternoon) using an energy storage technology, [...]