Oct 1, 2026 | Battery Technology, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
A 100-hour battery stores electricity for more than four days at a stretch and hands back only 35 to 50% of what you put in. That sounds broken. It is the entire point. The long-duration batteries now being built — Form Energy’s iron-air cells, Noon...
Sep 29, 2026 | Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
When South Australia’s grid began running on more than half wind and solar, it did not run short of power. It ran short of system strength — the grid’s ability to hold its voltage steady and, crucially, to push enough current into a fault that the...
Sep 26, 2026 | Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
When a power grid gets close to running short, Texas does not pay anyone to keep a plant on standby. It raises the price instead. The Operating Reserve Demand Curve — the ORDC — adds an automatic premium to real-time electricity as spare capacity shrinks, climbing...
Sep 26, 2026 | Battery Technology, Home Electrification, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
On 9 September 2026, Sunrun and Tesla dispatched 580 megawatts from roughly 140,000 home batteries into California’s grid during a heat wave — the largest residential virtual-power-plant event on record, and enough to match a mid-sized gas peaker. A month...
Sep 24, 2026 | Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
An energy-only market pays a power plant for one thing: the electricity it actually generates, priced moment to moment. A capacity market pays it twice — once for that energy, and again, years in advance, simply for promising to be available when demand peaks. That...
Sep 24, 2026 | Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
Curtailment is a power grid deliberately throwing away electricity it could have used — almost always wind or solar, almost always free at the point of generation. In the first half of 2026, China alone spilled an estimated 360 terawatt-hours of clean power, more than...
