Grid Infrastructure

Invinity Energy Systems has delivered 90 vanadium flow batteries to the Copwood VFB Energy Hub in East Sussex, forming Europe's largest such installation at 20.7 MWh, backed by UK government funding.

A team at the Institute of Metal Research engineered a new iron-complex electrolyte that ran 6,000 cycles at 80 mA per square centimeter with no capacity decay and a 99.4 percent average coulombic efficiency, opening a possible low-cost route to long-duration grid storage.

California batteries discharged 12,000+ MW in late March 2026, equal to 12 nuclear plants and over 40% of state demand, as installed capacity climbs past 16 GW.

Meta signed a reservation deal for up to 100 GWh of ultra-long-duration storage from Noon Energy, a startup whose reversible fuel cell borrows chemistry from NASA's MOXIE Mars experiment.

ERCOT's preliminary 2026-2032 load forecast filed April 15 projects peak demand reaching 367,790 MW, more than four times the current record, with data centers accounting for over 60% of the projected growth. CEO Pablo Vegas and the PUCT say the number is almost certainly too high.

MIT spinout Quaise Energy plans to extend its record-setting millimeter wave drilling from 118 meters to one kilometer this year, advancing a technology that could unlock superhot geothermal energy virtually anywhere on Earth.

Microsoft staff have informed carbon removal developers that the company is pausing new purchases, a move that rattles a market in which the tech giant accounted for 96 percent of 2025 credit purchases.

The startup's chemically tailored boron polymer membranes already achieve the U.S. Department of Energy's 2031 efficiency target of 77 percent for proton exchange membrane electrolysis, while partner tests show a 60 percent reduction in operating costs.

Data from the now-silent MethaneSAT satellite shows global oil and gas methane emissions far exceed inventories, prompting a U.S. Senate probe into Permian Basin operators.

Minnesota PUC approves Xcel Energy's $430 million Capacity*Connect program to deploy up to 200 MW of utility-owned batteries, sparking a national debate over who should control distributed energy storage.

MEPC 84 convenes April 27 in London for the first regular session since a US-Saudi coalition blocked adoption of the first global carbon pricing system for shipping in October 2025.

Invenergy's 800-mile high-voltage direct current transmission line across four Midwestern states is pressing ahead with private financing after the Trump administration cancelled a $4.9 billion DOE loan guarantee and the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the project's state permit.